Our friends, Dodd, Mead & Company, are becoming solicitous about announcing and issuing my book for the autumn trade. I fear your part in it has burdened the scant leisure you must have had since your return. More for your sake than mine, I have wished this greatest token of your always generous friendship were out of your way. It will, I am sure, be the best part of the book, whatever the proportion it bears to the small bulk of the volume. Personally, it would not be much of a disappointment if my part never came out. Somehow I have very little ambition for authorship of anything more permanent than current comment which may serve in scattering about some waymarks of progress.
Lea, Graham and I have just returned from a glorious week of camping in the real wild woods of Canada, within the sound of the wolf's cry. It is near the Lake Superior north shore, which is so dear to Graham's heart. The spell of its silence and solitude, beauty and wildness, quite charmed us.
Our happy family reunion here is breaking up. Katherine has gone to Vassar for her year's teaching in English literature, Helen leaves today, Graham is in the copper country, writing up the miners' strike, Lea, Mrs. Taylor and I return Thursday -- our fortieth wedding day -- to go to work.
Paul Kellogg urges me to come to New York for a Survey directors' meeting about September 22d, but I really cannot [page 2] break away just when all the year's work is starting up. On this account, I do not see how it is possible for me to attend the settlement conference in Pittsburgh. It will be the only one in these twenty years of our settlement residence that I have missed. Lea will represent the Commons. Paul asks how The Survey can best cover the occasion. I suggested that you could best do it in your editorial for the November magazine number. Perhaps a news-note, reciting the bare facts, prepared by you or some one else, might accompany your editorial in the same number. You will probably hear from Paul about it.
Address me at Chicago, as I will be at the Commons on and after next Thursday.
Hoping you will return as ready for the big jobs awaiting you, as you seemed to be when I saw you, I am, with greetings to Mrs. Bowen,
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