Carrying Jean up & down in the car, on that red-hot 12-hour trip, has disabled me with lumbago; therefore, I’ll not try to write you a letter, lumbago being an enemy to literary exertion. I forced myself, within this hour, to finish my letter of complaint to President Watrous; & that matter being now off my mind, I’m going to lay this pen entirely aside for a week or more.

Jean is mighty fat & hearty, but she is forever asleep, up here in this strong brisk mountain air; consequently we don’t see a great deal of her. She bore that hard journey in the bravest way; didn’t break out into any hard cries, but only mourned & complained in a gentle & most pathetic way, while she boiled slowly to death in her own sooty & pasty perspiration. Susie & Bay uttered no complaints, of course—their mother taught them to endure patient endurance long ago. Poor Susie was so worn out that I couldn’t even entertain her by showing her how the ties ha◊d been torn & smashed by the broken axle. She was indifferent to that stirring spectacle. I tried to gaudify the t interest of my topic by explaining to her that we all came within less than three-quarters of a hair’s-breadth of going to smash & destruction, but she only responded, with indifference, “But as long as we didn’t, papa, what does it amount to?—let us go back get in the car again.”

It is perfectly paradise up here on the farm—& from it we waft the best of good wishes to the Whitmores.