P.S. You need not believe _all_ that these newspapers say of me and my purposes. I had to tell them _something_. [Laredo, Texas, November 6, 1913.] DEAR LORA, I wrote you yesterday at San Antonio, but dated the letter here and today, expecting to bring the letter and mail it here. That's because I did not know if I would have time to write it here. Unfortunately, I forgot and posted it, with other letters, where it was written. Thus does man's guile come to naught! Well, I'm here, anyhow, and have time to explain. Laredo was a Mexican city before it was an American. It is Mexican now, five to one. Nuevo Laredo, opposite, is held by the Huertistas and Americans don't go over there. In fact a guard on the bridge will not let them. So those that sneak across have to wade (which can be done almost anywhere) and go at night. I shall not be here long enough to hear from you, and don't know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn't matter much. Adios, AMBROSE. _Extracts from Letters_ You are right too--dead right about the poetry of Socialism; and you might have added the poetry of wailing about the woes of the poor generally. Only the second- and the third-raters write it--except "incidentally." You don't find the big fellows sniveling over that particular shadow-side of Nature. Yet not only are the poor always with us, they always _were_ with us, and their state was worse in the times of Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton and the others than in the days of Morris and Markham. But what's the use? I have long despaired of convincing poets and artists of anything, even that white is not black. I'm convinced that all you chaps ought to have a world to yourselves, where two and two make whatever you prefer that it _should_ make, and cause and effect are remoulded "more nearly to the heart's desire." And then I suppose I'd want to go and live there too. Did you ever know so poor satire to make so great a row as that of Watson? Compared with certain other verses against particular women--Byron's "Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred"; even my own skit entitled "Mad" (pardon my modesty) it is infantile. What an interesting book might be made of such "attacks" on women! But Watson is the only one of us, so far as I remember, who has had the caddishness to _name_ the victim. Have you seen Percival Pollard's "Their Day in Court"? It is amusing, clever--and more. He has a whole chapter on me, "a lot" about Gertrude Atherton, and much else that is interesting. And he skins alive certain popular gods and goddesses of the day, and is "monstrous naughty." As to * * *'s own character I do not see what that has to do with his criticism of London. If only the impeccable delivered judgment no judgment would ever be delivered. All men could do as they please, without reproof or dissent. I wish you would take your heart out of your head, old man. The best heart makes a bad head if housed there.