Your account of the "movement" to free the oppressed and downtrodden river from the tyranny of the sand-bar tickled me in my lonesome rib. Surely no colony of reformers ever engaged in a more characteristic crusade against the Established Order and Intolerable Conditions. I can almost hear you patting yourselves on your aching backs as you contemplated your encouraging success in beating Nature and promoting the Cause. I believe that if I'd been there my cold heart and indurated mind would have caught the contagion of the Great Reform. Anyhow, I should have appreciated the sunset which (characteristically) intervened in the interest of Things as They Are. I feel sure that whenever you Socialers shall have found a way to make the earth stop "turning over and over like a man in bed" (as Joaquin might say) you will accomplish all the reforms that you have at heart. All that you need is plenty of time--a few kalpas, more or less, of uninterrupted daylight. Meantime I await your new book with impatience and expectation. I have photographs of my brother's shack in the redwoods and feel strongly drawn in that direction--since, as you fully infer, Carmel is barred. Probably, though, I shall continue in the complicated life of cities while I last. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Washington, D. C., January 9, 1909.] DEAR GEORGE, I've been reading your book--re-reading most of it--"every little while." I don't know that it is better than your first, but to say that it is as good is praise enough. You know what I like most in it, but there are some things that you _don't_ know I like. For an example, "Night in Heaven." It Kipples a bit, but it is great. But I'm not going to bore you with a catalogue of titles. The book is _all_ good. No, not (in my judgment) all, for it contains lines and words that I found objectionable in the manuscript, and time has not reconciled me to them. Your retention of them, shows, however, that you agree with me in thinking that you have passed your 'prentice period and need no further criticism. So I welcome them. I take it that the cover design is Scheff's--perhaps because it is so good, for the little cuss is clever that way. * * * * * I rather like your defence of Jack London--not that I think it valid, but because I like loyalty to a friend whom one does not believe to be bad. (The "thick-and-thin" loyalty never commended itself to me; it is too dog-like.) I fail, however, to catch the note of penitence in London's narratives of his underlife, and my charge of literary stealing was not based on his primeval man book, "Before Adam."