“I have thought of you 7 times every day, ever since the publication of your beautiful Idyll of Spring. You expected me to write; but I cannot do that even now. Everything that I think and much more everything that I think on paper, seems so flat and unworthy to be written. Other men seem content to write and say little, or little to the purpose. The fact is, Willie, there are few men who know the spring. They know a little about it, a few flowers, a few birds, a few showers, a few facts and phenomena--but I don’t know any artists, poets, or other men but you and John Burroughs that know it all. I don’t see how or when you [Illustration: _Springtime_ _From a Painting_] learned it all. I have never met a man that knew so much of the real life of Nature as I know myself--and how did you come to see and hear it all? I remember it now that you recall it to me--I even thought one night in my bed, that I had detected a slip in your chronology. I thought you had delayed the flower which you euphoniously denominate the ‘Swamp Cabbage’ till too late a day. I looked in the morning in the Magazine and there it was promptly ready in the wild days of March. I venture to say that no poet has before been so true to nature as you have been. I thought no man except John Burroughs had seen or heard so much in the woods as I am wont to see; but lo! one of my own boys has seen with keener eyes, has heard with more acute ears, and has had genius and taste to tell it all in words, and to paint it all with a magic brush. Other men don’t know which most to admire in you, the artist or the naturalist. Well I don’t; but who before has described spring without a blunder? They draw a nightingale where I heard a whippoorwill, or they set Venus to glow in the east on a summer evening. I have not detected a slip. And what an old fool I was to keep pencils away from you, when you were born with a whole magazine of them. I cannot write. I ought not to have begun. I think ‘Spring’ by far the richer article of the two--full of the nicest touches both with pencil and with pen--and you are a dear good fellow, and so is your wife. God bless you both. Go and see Abbie at 36 Garden Place. “Yours, “F. W. GUNN.” To this Gibson made speedy answer, giving full absolution and much more: “Do not chide yourself for keeping the pencils from me, for it is not true. You never did--you tried, but gave it up. When you were wont to say every few minutes in school ‘Gibson, what are you doing?’ I used to answer, withdrawing my eyes from the window ‘Nothing, sir.’ You never dreamed of the true amount of thinking that was going on within my cranium. Lazy as I seemed to be, I was never idle in my mind and I can see now the flickering light and shade among the leaves of the old school-house maples--see the squirming caterpillar dangling from his silken thread, swinging in the summer breeze.