Our letters "crossed"--a thing that "happens" oftener than not in my correspondence, when neither person has written for a long time. I have drawn some interesting inferences from this fact, but have no time now to state them. Indeed, I have no time to do anything but send you the stuff on the battle of Shiloh concerning which you inquire. I should write it a little differently now, but it may entertain you as it is. * * * * * Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. * * * * * [Washington, February 21, 1907] MY DEAR GEORGE, If you desert Carmel I shall destroy my Jorgensen picture, build a bungalow in the Catskills and cut out California forever. (Those are the footprints of my damned canary, who will neither write himself nor let me write. Just now he is perched on my shoulder, awaiting the command to sing--then he will deafen me with a song without sense. O he's a poet all right.) I entirely approve your allegiance to Mammon. If I'd had brains enough to make a decision like that I could now, at 65, have the leisure to make a good book or two before I go to the waste-dump. * * * Get yourself a fat bank account--there's no such friend as a bank account, and the greatest book is a check-book; "You may lay to that!" as one of Stevenson's pirates puts it. * * * * * No, sir, your boss will not bring you East next June; or if he does you will not come to Washington. How do I know? I don't know how I know, but concerning all (and they are many) who were to come from California to see me I have never once failed in my forecast of their coming or not coming. Even in the case of * * *, although I wrote to you, and to her, as if I expected her, I _said_ to one of my friends: "She will not come." I don't think it's a gift of divination--it just happens, somehow. Yours is not a very good example, for you have not said you were coming, "sure." So your colony of high-brows is re-establishing itself at the old stand--Piedmont. * * * But Piedmont--it must be in the heart of Oakland. I could no longer shoot rabbits in the gulch back of it and sleep under a tree to shoot more in the morning. Nor could I traverse that long ridge with various girls. I dare say there's a boulevard running the length of it, "A palace and a prison on each hand." If I could stop you from reading that volume of old "Argonauts" I'd do so, but I suppose an injunction would not "lie." Yes, I was a slovenly writer in those days, though enough better than my neighbors to have attracted my own attention. My knowledge of English was imperfect "a whole lot." Indeed, my intellectual status (whatever it may be, and God knows it's enough to make me blush) was of slow growth--as was my moral. I mean, I had not literary sincerity.