It is a beautiful summer morning, and I write under an awning on the high-perched corner balcony of the bedroom in which we live, of a corner house on the edge of the little town, with houses on the west of us and the fertile country spreading towards the east and south. A lovely region, though a climate terribly _flat_. I expect to take my last bath today, and to get my absolution from the terrible Schott; whereupon we shall leave tomorrow morning for Strassburg and the Vosges, for a week of touring up in higher air, and thence, _über_ Paris, as straight as may be for Rye. I keep in a state of subliminal excitement over our sailing on the 31st. It seems too good to be really possible. Yet the ratchet of time will work along its daily cogs, and doubtless bring it safe within our grasp. Last year I felt no distinctly beneficial effect from the baths. This year it is distinct. I have, in other words, continued pretty steadily getting better for four months past; so it is evident that I am in a genuinely ameliorative phase of my existence, of which the acquired momentum may carry me beyond any living man of my age. At any rate, I set no limits now! When we return I shall go straight up to Chocorua to the Salters'. What I _crave_ most is some wild American country. It is a curious organic-feeling need. One's social relations with European landscape are entirely different, everything being so fenced or planted that you can't lie down and sprawl. Kipling, alluding to the "bleeding raw" appearance of some of our outskirt settlements, says, "Americans don't mix much with their landscape as yet." But we mix a darned sight more than Europeans, so far as our individual organisms go, with our camping and general wild-animal personal relations. Thank Heaven that our Nature is so much less "redeemed"!... You see, Fanny, that we are in good spirits on the whole, although my poor dear Alice has long sick-headaches that consume a good many days--she is just emerging from a bad one. Happiness, I have lately discovered, is no positive feeling, but a negative condition of freedom from a number of restrictive sensations of which our organism usually seems to be the seat. When they are wiped out, the clearness and cleanness of the contrast is happiness. This is why anesthetics make us so happy. But don't you take to drink on that account! Love to your mother, Mary, and all. Write to us no more. How happy _that_ responsibility gone must make you! We both send warmest love, W. J. _To Henry James._ [Post-card] BAD-NAUHEIM, _July 11, [1901]_.