DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--I got your penciled letter the day before leaving. The R.R. train seems to be a great stimulus to the acts of the higher epistolary activity and correspondential amicality in you--a fact for which I have (occasional) reason to be duly grateful. So here, in the cool darkness of my road-side "sitting-room," with no pen in the house, with the soft tap of the carpenter's hammer and the pensive scrape of the distant wood-saw stealing through the open wire-netting door, along with the fragrant air of the morning woods, I get stimulus responsive, and send you penciled return. Yes, the daylight that now seems shining through the Dreyfus case is glorious, and if the President only gets his back up a bit, and mows down the whole gang of Satan, or as much of it as can be touched, it will perhaps be a great day for the distracted France. I mean it may be one of those moral crises that become starting points and high-water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and new forces behind them. One thing is certain, that no other alternative form of government possible to France in this century could have stood the strain as this democracy seems to be standing it. Apropos of which, a word about Woodberry's book.[22] I didn't know him to be that kind of a creature at all. The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmediated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise--and therefore so ineffective. His paper on Democracy is very fine indeed, though somewhat too abstract. I haven't yet read the first and last essays in the book, which I shall buy and keep, and even send a word of gratulation to the author for it.