Your latest was dated Sept. 10. I got it while alone in the mountains, but since then I have been in New York City and at West Point and--here. New York is too strenuous for me; it gets on my nerves. * * * * * Please don't persuade me to come to California--I mean don't _try_ to, for I can't, and it hurts a little to say nay. There's a big bit of my heart there, but--O never mind the reasons; some of them would not look well on paper. One of them I don't mind telling; I would not live in a state under union labor rule. There is still one place where the honest American laboring man is not permitted to cut throats and strip bodies of women at his own sweet will. That is the District of Columbia. I am anxious to read Lilith; please complete it. I have another note of rejection for you. It is from * * *. Knowing that you will not bank on what he says about the Metropolitan, I enclose it. I've acted on his advising and sent the poem. It is about time for it to come back. Then I shall try the other magazines until the list is exhausted. Did I return your Jinks verses? I know I read them and meant to send them back, but my correspondence and my papers are in such hopeless disorder that I'm all at sea on these matters. For aught I know I may have elaborately "answered" the letter that I think myself to be answering now. I liked the verses very temperately, not madly. Of course you are right about the magazine editors not knowing poetry when they see it. But who does? I have not known more than a half-dozen persons in America that did, and none of them edited a magazine. * * * * * No, I did not write the "Urus-Agricola-Acetes stuff," though it was written _for_ me and, I believe, at my suggestion. The author was "Jimmy" Bowman, of whose death I wrote a sonnet which is in Black Beetles. He and I used to have a lot of fun devising literary mischiefs, fighting sham battles with each other and so forth. He was a clever chap and a good judge of whiskey. Yes, in The Cynic's Dictionary I did "jump from A to M." I had previously done the stuff in various papers as far as M, then lost the beginning. So in resuming I re-did that part (quite differently, of course) in order to have the thing complete if I should want to make a book of it. I guess the Examiner isn't running much of it, nor much of anything of mine. * * * * * I like your love of Keats and the early Coleridge. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [The N. Y. American Office, Washington, D. C., October 12, 1904.] MY DEAR DAVIS,