I suppose you are at your new ranch, but I shall address this letter as usual. * * * * * If you hear of my drowning know that it is the natural (and desirable) result of the canoe habit. I've a dandy canoe and am tempting fate and alarming my friends by frequenting, not the margin of the upper river, but the broad reaches below town, where the wind has miles and miles of sweep and kicks up a most exhilarating combobbery. If I escape I'm going to send my boat up to Saybrook, Connecticut, and navigate Long Island Sound. Are you near enough to the sea to do a bit of boating now and then? When I visit you I shall want to bring my canoe. I've nearly given up my newspaper work, but shall do something each month for the Magazine. Have not done much yet--have not been in the mind. Death has been striking pretty close to me again, and you know how that upsets a fellow. Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE. [Washington, June 16, 1905.] DEAR GEORGE, I'm your debtor for two good long letters. You err in thinking your letters, of whatever length and frequency, can be otherwise than delightful to me. No, you had not before sent me Upton Sinclair's article explaining why American literature is "bourgeois." It is amusingly grotesque. The political and economical situation has about as much to do with it as have the direction of our rivers and the prevailing color of our hair. But it is of the nature of the faddist (and of all faddists the ultra socialist is the most untamed by sense) to see in everything his hobby, with its name writ large. He is the humorist of observers. When Sinclair transiently forgets his gospel of the impossible he can see well enough. I note what you say of * * * and know that he did not use to like me, though I doubt if he ever had any antipathy to you. Six or eight years ago I tackled him on a particularly mean fling that he had made at me while I was absent from California. (I think I had not met him before.) I told him, rather coarsely, what I thought of the matter. He candidly confessed himself in the wrong, expressed regret and has ever since, so far as I know, been just and even generous to me. I think him sincere now, and enclose a letter which seems to show it. You may return it if you will--I send it mainly because it concerns your poem. The trouble--our trouble--with * * * is that he has voluntarily entered into slavery to the traditions and theories of the magazine trade, which, like those of all trades, are the product of small men. The big man makes his success by ignoring them. Your estimate of * * * I'm not disposed to quarrel with, but do think him pretty square. * * * * *