I'm concerned about your health, of which I get bad reports. Can't you go to the mesas of New Mexico and round up cattle for a year or two--or do anything that will permit, or compel, you to sleep out-of-doors under your favorite stars--something that will _not_ permit you to enter a house for even ten minutes? You say no. Well, some day you'll _have_ to--when it is too late--like Peterson, my friend Charley Kaufman and so many others, who might be living if they had gone into that country in time and been willing to make the sacrifice when it would have done good. You can go _now_ as well as _then_; and if now you'll come back well, if then, you'll not only sacrifice your salary, "prospects," and so forth, but lose your life as well. I _know_ that kind of life would cure you. I've talked with dozens of men whom it did cure. You'll die of consumption if you don't. Twenty-odd years ago I was writing articles on the out-of-doors treatment for consumption. Now--only just now--the physicians are doing the same, and establishing out-of-door sanitaria for consumption. You'll say you haven't consumption. I don't say that you have. But you will have if you listen to yourself saying: "I can't do it." * * * Pardon me, my friend, for this rough advice as to your personal affairs: I am greatly concerned about you. Your life is precious to me and to the world. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Washington, D. C., January 8, 1904.] MY DEAR GEORGE, Thank you so much for the books and the inscription--which (as do all other words of praise) affects me with a sad sense of my shortcomings as writer and man. Things of that kind from too partial friends point out to me with a disquieting significance what I ought to be; and the contrast with what I am hurts. Maybe you feel enough that way sometimes to understand. You are still young enough to profit by the pain; _my_ character is made--_my_ opportunities are gone. But it does not greatly matter--nothing does. I have some little testimony from you and Scheff and others that I have not lived altogether in vain, and I know that I have greater satisfaction in my slight connection with your and their work than in my own. Also a better claim to the attention and consideration of my fellow-men.