Believe me, dear old J. C., with hearty affection and delight at your recovery--all these months I have been on the brink of writing to find out how you were--and with very best regards to your wife, whom some day I wish we may be permitted to know better. Yours very truly, Wm. James. Everyone dead! Hodgson, Shaler, James Peirce this winter--to go no further afield! _Resserrons les rangs!_ _To Henry James._ Cambridge, _Sept. 10, 1906_. DEAREST H.,--I got back from the Adirondacks, where I had spent a fortnight, the night before last, and in three or four hours Alice, Aleck and I will be spinning towards Chocorua, it being now five A.M. Elly [Temple] Hunter will join us, with Grenville, in a few days; but for the most part, thank Heaven, we shall be alone till the end of the month. I found two letters from you awaiting me, and two from Bill. They all breathed a spirit of happiness, and brought a waft of the beautiful European summer with them. It has been a beautiful summer here too; and now, sad to say, it is counting the last beads of its chaplet of hot days out--the hot days which are really the absolutely friendly ones to man--you wish they would get cooler when you have them, and when they are departed, you wish you could have their exquisite gentleness again. I have just been reading in the volume by Richard Jefferies called the "Life of the Fields" a wonderful rhapsody, "The Pageant of Summer." It needs to be read twice over and very attentively, being nothing but an enumeration of all the details visible in the corner of an old field with a hedge and ditch. But rightly taken in, it is probably the highest flight of human genius in the direction of nature-worship. I don't see why it should not count as an immortal thing. You missed it, when here, in not getting to Keene Valley, where I have just been, and of which the sylvan beauty, especially by moonlight, is probably unlike aught that Europe has to show. Imperishable freshness!... This is definitely my last year of lecturing, but I wish it were my first of non-lecturing. Simplification of the field of duties I find more and more to be the _summum bonum_ for me; and I live in apprehension lest the Avenger should cut me off before I get my message out. Not that the message is particularly needed by the human race, which can live along perfectly well without any one philosopher; but objectively I hate to leave the volumes I have already published without their logical complement. It is an esthetic tragedy to have a bridge begun, and stopped in the middle of an arch. But I hear Alice stirring upstairs, so I must go up and finish packing. I hope that you and W. J., Jr., will again form a harmonious combination. I hope also that he will stop painting for a time. He will do all the better, when he gets home, for having had a fallow interval. Good-bye! and my blessing upon both of you. Your ever loving, W. J. _To H. G. Wells._ CHOCORUA, _Sept. 11, 1906_.