I am over here this morning warming up and making ready for dinner. Hud and his wife and your mother are coming over soon. We are to have a roast duck and other things and I shall do the roasting and baking here. I wish you were here too. It is a cloudy day, but still and mild. I keep pretty well and am working on my Alaska trip--have already written about ten thousand words. The _Century_ paid me $75 for two poems--three times as much as Milton got for "Paradise Lost." The third poem I shall weave into the prose sketch. The N. Y. _World_ sent a man up to see me a couple of weeks ago to get me to write six or seven hundred words for their Sunday edition. They wanted me to write on the Thanksgiving turkey! Offered me $50--they wanted it in two days. Of course I could not do it off-hand in that way. So I fished out of my drawer an old MS, that I had rejected and sent that. They used it and sent me $30. It was in the Sunday _World_ of Nov. 19. I have sold four lots here for $225. One house will be started this fall. Wallhead and Millard of P. If I don't look out I will make some money out of this place yet. Your mother begins to look more kindly upon it. A N. Y. sculptor has bought the rock beyond the spring for $75. Van and Allie are ditching and cleaning the swamp of the Italians below here. Photography is not an art in the sense that painting or music or sculpture is an art. It is nearer the mechanical arts. Nothing is an art that does not involve the imagination and the artistic perceptions. All the essentials of photography are mechanical--the judgment and the experience of the man are only secondary. A photograph can never be really a work of art. You can put those statements in the form of a syllogism. I hope you are better of your cold. Some building burned up in Hyde Park early last night. Robert Gill shot himself in N. Y. the other day--suicide. We shall be very glad to see you again. Your loving father, J. B. A long line of ducks just flew over going north. The last letter from Slabsides was on May 23, 1900: MY DEAR BOY, I am here surrounded by the peace and sweetness of Slabsides. I came here Saturday morning in the rain. It is a soft, hazy morning, the sun looking red through a thin layer of seamless clouds. Amasa is hoeing in the celery, which looks good, and the birds are singing and calling all about. I have got to go to N. Y. this afternoon to a dinner. I had much rather stay here, but I cannot well get out of going.... I begin to feel that I could get to writing again if I was left alone. I want to write a _Youth's Companion_ piece called "Babes in the Woods" about some young rabbits and young blue birds Teddy {Footnote: The son of President Roosevelt.} and I found.