All the people that I know praise your descriptive power and now my dear Mrs. Summerhayes I suppose you will have a hard time wading through my scrawl but I know you will be generous and remember that I went to sea when a little over nine years of age and had my pen been half as often in my hand as a marlin spike, I would now be able to write a much clearer hand. I have a little bungalow on Coronado Beach, across the bay from San Diego, and if you ever come there, you or your husband, you are welcome; while I have a bean you can have half. I would like to see you and talk over old times. Yuma is quite a place now; no more adobes built; it is brick and concrete, cement sidewalks and flower gardens with electric light and a good water system. My home is within five minutes walk of the Pacific Ocean. I was born at Digby, Nova Scotia, and the first music I ever heard was the surf of the Bay of Fundy, and when I close my eyes forever I hope the surf of the Pacific will be the last sound that will greet my ears. I read Vanished Arizona last night until after midnight, and thought what we both had gone through since you first came up the Colorado with me. My acquaintance with the army was always pleasant, and like Tom Moore I often say: Let fate do her worst, there are relics of joy Bright dreams of the past which she cannot destroy! Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care And bring back the features that joy used to wear. Long, long be my heart with such memories filled! I suppose the Colonel goes down to the Ship Chandler's and gams with the old whaling captains. When I was a boy, there was a wealthy family of ship-owners in New Bedford by the name of Robinson. I saw one of their ships in Bombay, India, that was in 1854, her name was the Mary Robinson, and altho' there were over a hundred ships on the bay, she was the handsomest there. Well, good friend, I am afraid I will tire you out, so I will belay this, and with best wishes for you and yours, I am, yours truly, J. A. MELLON. P. S.--Fisher is long since called to his Long Home. ***** I had fancied, when Vanished Arizona was published, that it might possibly appeal to the sympathies of women, and that men would lay it aside as a sort-of a "woman's book"--but I have received more really sympathetic letters from men than I have from women, all telling me, in different words, that the human side of the story had appealed to them, and I suppose this comes from the fact that originally I wrote it for my children, and felt perfect freedom to put my whole self into it. And now that the book is entirely out of my hands, I am glad that I wrote it as I did, for if I had stopped to think that my dream people might be real people, and that the real people would read it, I might never have had the courage to write it at all. The many letters I have received of which there have been several hundred I am sure, have been so interesting that I reproduce a few more of them here: