Please give my thanks to your mother for the kind invitation to put up at your house; but I fear that would be impossible. I shall have to be where people can call on me--and such a disreputable crowd as my friends are would ruin the Partingtonian reputation for respectability. In your new neighborhood you will all be very proper--which you could hardly be with a procession of pirates and vagrants pulling at your door-bell. So--if God is good--I shall call on you Saturday afternoon. In the meantime and always be thou happy--thou and thine. Your unworthy uncle, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Angwin, March 18, 1893.] MY DEAR BLANCHE, It is good to have your letters again. If you will not let me teach you my trade of writing stories it is right that you practice your own of writing letters. You are mistress of that. Byron's letters to Moore are dull in comparison with yours to me. Some allowance, doubtless, must be made for my greater need of your letters than of Byron's. For, truth to tell, I've been a trifle dispirited and noncontent. In that mood I peremptorily resigned from the _Examiner_, for one thing--and permitted myself to be coaxed back by Hearst, for another. My other follies I shall not tell you. * * * We had six inches of snow up here and it has rained steadily ever since--more than a week. And the fog is of superior opacity--quite peerless that way. It is still raining and fogging. Do you wonder that your unworthy uncle has come perilously and alarmingly near to loneliness? Yet I have the companionship, at meals, of one of your excellent sex, from San Francisco. * * * Truly, I should like to attend one of your at-homes, but I fear it must be a long time before I venture down there again. But when this brumous visitation is past I can _look_ down, and that assists the imagination to picture you all in your happy (I hope) home. But if that woolly wolf, Joaquin Miller, doesn't keep outside the fold I _shall_ come down and club him soundly. I quite agree with your mother that his flattery will spoil you. You said I would spoil Phyllis, and now, you bad girl, you wish to be spoiled yourself. Well, you can't eat four Millerine oranges.--My love to all your family. AMBROSE BIERCE. [Angwin, March 26, 1893.] MY DEAR PARTINGTON, I am very glad indeed to get the good account of Leigh that you give me. I've feared that he might be rather a bore to you, but you make me easy on that score. Also I am pleased that you think he has a sufficient "gift" to do something in the only direction in which he seems to care to go.