“I congratulate you from the very bottom of my heart on the magnificent article on ‘Pastoral Days’ in the Saturday Review, which, you will see by the papers I send, I have copied into the Transcript. Nothing could have been more gracefully done, and then, in the Saturday Review, one of the very hardest to please of all the British journals! Why, my dear fellow, they never said half so much before of any literary American, living or dead. And there isn’t an ‘if’ in the whole article! I feel as rejoiced about it as if I had some personal share in the glory. If you haven’t a right now to carry your chin high on Broadway then nobody in New York has. I tell you, it’s a great thing to be appreciated; to get praise where you feel that it rests wholly and altogether upon the merits of your work, and has in it no spark of flattery. I can imagine how long the way home seemed that night, and how happy you two were in reading over what the two-thousand-mile-away critic had written. It is worth a good many years’ hard pulling to have one such day.” One great and decisive reason why he moved on so steadily was his constant ambition to improve upon what he had done. One might easily be misled by the tone of his confidential letters to his mother and others into thinking him overconfident in himself, and a little puffed up by his quick and overwhelming success. But the thought would be absolutely unfair. He was not vain; he was never self-satisfied; he never rested in what he had achieved. After the rousing reception of “Pastoral Days,” he could write to Colonel Gibson in quiet Fryeburg: “I have just finished the last of my White Mountain illustrations--four months’ work--and am beginning a new series of original articles which shall ‘knock spots’ out of all past work. You ask in a previous letter, ‘Can you beat “Pastoral Days”’? Good gracious! The book is so full of shortcomings to me that I wonder at the astonishing appreciation of it. There are a few illustrations in it that I hardly expect to improve very much upon; but as to the average excellence I can ‘see it’ and ‘go a hundred better.’ Perhaps the result will not be as popular. Can’t tell. But I can do better work.” That was the key-note of his life. To do something better next time was the rule of his endeavor. To do something different each time, to turn some new page, follow some new trail, record some new traits of his favorite world, was another characteristic of his purposes. And it kept him from becoming repetitious and tiresome, as he repeatedly piqued curiosity with his novel enterprises in nature-study.