Northfork. Feb 15/1911
Dear Madam,
I take the liberty of telling you that up here in Sierra Forest my wife, daughter & myself are greatly enjoying your "20 Years". In fact, we are reading some of it to the ranger people as they drop in.
The little book plate I send will show our home.
My own father, who died in his 90th year, was, like you, a Hicksite Quaker. He married my mother in Jacksonville, Illinois. The intimate fellowship of my boyhood home, with loving and thoughtful parents made your first chapters very dear to me.
Our pressing American problems -- (which your work so greatly helps to solve) -- which depends so completely upon endless battle, with and for the young, and the suffering, and the foolish and mistaken everywhere -- are problems, I think, which will be [page 2] solved by plain Lincoln sort of people, coming together, in a million ways, new and old, and shaping a new social order. . . .We shall call it by some new name, perhaps. Then we shall rub our eyes, and say: "We always had something of this; now that we love more, and work more wisely, and harder, we have more of it."
This really doesn't need any answer from so busy a world-helper -- but may you prosper in all growth of the spirit, & in all uplifting.
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