“You haven’t the least idea what that word ‘woods’ means,—in England there are just a few acres of carefully preserved trees and ‘no trespassers allowed’. Here you plunge into a vast forest, miles and miles every way,—lucky if you can find a path at all, else guiding yourself by sun and stream and taking hours and hours to get a mile or two,—yet all through so grand, so green, and so delicious! If you could just have been with us yesterday! Every few minutes we found some great tree fallen across our path, or some black bog of decayed cedar or pine,—oh, the scents of those!—perfectly delicious;—and then round we had to go, creeping, jumping or gliding round the obstruction. Then we would come to some little clearing, and catch such views of the mountains we were shut in with,—then on again and hardly see daylight through the dense trees. And such mosses, such ferns, such berries! Then over the river somehow from rock to rock, and such a scramble up among the cascades which came leaping down like liquid silver in the sunlight, and such pools we did so want to bathe in, and had to [refrain] for lack of time and towels! They called the distance 2½ or 3 miles, but we took just 3 hours to get there,—and then coming back pretty sharply in about half the time. The only grief to me was—what perhaps you will hardly sympathize in—that we didn’t come across any bear. There are a good many left in the woods and one hears every now and then of their being met, but they are getting few, and they are proportionately timid and modest, running off full speed if they see you. Wouldn’t it have been fun to see one?... I think hardly anything strikes an Englisher more than the no-value of wood here. Over the water it’s half high treason to hurt a tree;—here, if you want a napkin-ring, you strip the bark off the first birch you come to and make a lot; or, if you take it into your head, set fire to the woods anywhere and have a bonfire of a dozen trees, and no one says a word. We have seen woods on fire over and over again, and no one says more than,—‘Oh, somebody’s fired the wood’; and the odd thing is it doesn’t seem to spread as one would expect. One comes continually to clearings full of blackened stumps not yet grubbed up,—the beginning of a garden or house place perhaps. I want to see a great big forest fire some day,—and I only wish I might see a prairie on fire too; only that is said to be horribly dangerous. It is so funny to hear here, as when I was asking about a certain road (from St. Louis to California), ‘Yes, it’s the shortest, but the Indians are cross just now and have been scalping a lot of people there’! Well, darling, we had such a drive home by starlight last night, and all enjoyed our day hugely. When we got in I suppose I walked slightly lame or something, for my greeting was,—‘I guess you’re tired, an’t you? You’re kind o’ waggling’!”