The next letter begins by acknowledging one which had alluded to the death of a Cambridge gentleman who had been run over in the street, almost under William James's eyes. Henry James had closed his allusion by exclaiming, "What melancholy, what terrible duties _vous incombent_ when your neighbours are destroyed. And telling that poor man's wife!--Life _is_ heroic--however we 'fix' it! Even as I write these words the St. Louis horror bursts in upon me in the evening paper. Inconceivable--I can't try; and I _won't_. Strange how practically all one's sense of news from the U. S. here is huge Horrors and Catastrophes. It's a terrible country _not_ to live in." He would have exclaimed even more if he had witnessed the mescal experiment, that is briefly mentioned in the letter that follows. He might then have gone on to remark that the "fixing" of life seemed, in William's neighborhood, to be quite gratuitously heroic. William James and his wife and the youngest child were alone in the Chocorua cottage for a few days, picnicking by themselves without any servant. They had no horse; at that season of the year hours often went by without any one passing the house; there was no telephone, no neighbor within a mile, no good doctor within eighteen miles. It was quite characteristic of James that he should think such conditions ideal for testing an unknown drug on himself. There would be no interruptions. He had no fear. He was impatient to satisfy his curiosity about the promised hallucinations of color. But the effects of one dose were, for a while, much more alarming than his letter would give one to understand. _To Henry James._ CHOCORUA, _June 11, 1896_.