Will you let me have a prompt reply, stating whether you will undertake this commission and see it through? Very truly yours, BEVERLEY SANDS. PHILLIPS & FAULDS TO BEVERLEY SANDS _Louisville, Ky., June 10, 1900._ DEAR SIR: Your valued letter with check for $25 received. We handle most of the ferns on the list, and know the others and can easily get them. You may rely upon your valued order receiving the best attention. Thanking you for the same, Yours very truly, PHILLIPS & FAULDS. BEVERLEY SANDS TO EDWARD BLACKTHORNE _Cathedral Heights, New York, June 15, 1910._ MY DEAR MR. BLACKTHORNE: Your second letter came into the port of my life like an argosy from a rich land. I think you must have sent it with some remembrance of your own youth, or out of your mature knowledge of youth itself; how too often it walks the shore of its rocky world, cutting its bare feet on sharp stones, as it strains its eyes toward things far beyond its horizon but not beyond its faith and hope. Some day its ship comes in and it sets sail toward the distant ideal. How much the opening of the door of your friendship, of your life, means to me! A new consecration envelops the world that I am to be the guest of a great man. If words do not say more, it is because words say so little. Delay has been unavoidable in any mere formal acknowledgment of your letter. You spoke in it of the hinges of a book. My silence has been due to the arrangement of hinges for the shipment of the ferns. I wished to insure their safe transoceanic passage and some inquiries had to be made in Kentucky. You may rely upon it that the matter will receive the best attention. In good time the ferns, having reached the end of their journey, will find themselves put down in your garden as helpless immigrants. From what outlook I can obtain upon the scene of their reception, they should lack only hands to reach confidingly to you and lack only feet to run with all their might away from Hodge. I acknowledge--with the utmost thanks--the unusual and beautiful courtesy of Mrs. Blackthorne's and your invitation to my wife, if I have one, and to me. It is the dilemma of my life, at the age of twenty-seven, to be obliged to say that such a being as Mrs. Sands exists, but that nevertheless there is no such person.