I am about to break up my present establishment and don't know where my next will be. Better address me "Care N. Y. American and Journal Bureau, Washington, D. C." You see I'm still chained to the oar of yellow journalism, but it is a rather light servitude. [Address me at 1321 Yale Street, Washington, D. C., December 20, 1902.] DEAR STERLING, I fancy you must fear by this time that I did not get the poems, but I did. I'll get at them, doubtless, after awhile, though a good deal of manuscript--including a couple of novels!--is ahead of them; and one published book of bad poems awaits a particular condemnation. I'm a little embarrassed about the preface which I'm to write. I fear you must forego the preface or I the dedication. That kind of "cooperation" doesn't seem in very good taste: it smacks of "mutual admiration" in the bad sense, and the reviewers would probably call it "log-rolling." Of course it doesn't matter too much what the reviewers say, but it matters a lot what the intelligent readers think; and your book will have no others. I really shouldn't like to write the preface of a book dedicated to me, though I did not think of that at first. The difficulty could be easily removed by _not_ dedicating the book to me were it not that that would sacrifice the noble poem with my name atop of it. That poem is itself sufficiently dedicatory if printed by itself in the forepages of the book and labeled "Dedication--To Ambrose Bierce." I'm sure that vanity has nothing to do, or little to do, with my good opinion of the verses. And, after all, they _show_ that I have said _to you_ all that I could say to the reader in your praise and encouragement. What do you think? As to dedicating individual poems to other fellows, I have not the slightest hesitancy in advising you against it. The practice smacks of the amateur and is never, I think, pleasing to anybody but the person so honored. The custom has fallen into "innocuous desuetude" and there appears to be no call for its revival. Pay off your obligations (if such there be) otherwise. You may put it this way if you like: The whole book being dedicated to me, no part of it _can_ be dedicated to another. Or this way: Secure in my exalted position I don't purpose sharing the throne with rival (and inferior) claimants. They be gam doodled! Seriously--but I guess it is serious enough as it stands. It occurs to me that in saying: "no part of it _can_ be dedicated to another" I might be understood as meaning: "no part of it _must_ be," etc. No; I mean only that the dedication to another would contradict the dedication to me. The two things are (as a matter of fact) incompatible.