In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

^ 545 ••••••••• 271 • SBA to Ida Husted Harper Rochester, N.Y. April 24, 1905. My dear Mrs. Harper— I arrived home yesterday afternoon and found your note of the 21st. You did wisely with that syndicate letter. I shall laugh, though, if you get your price,but all right—stick your head up high.I am very sorry that Mrs. Fairbanks 1 lost her head in the last moments of her administration. I had heard that the new hall was inadequate, but then, maybe when it comes to be seated it will answer the purpose. When they get their D.A.R. basis of representation cut down to so many per hundred in each state they will not be such an unwieldy body. I wish you would come here and rest a while. Our house is as clean as a pink from garret to cellar and we are as quiet and still as may be. It is delightful weather here now—just cool enough to be pleasant. Yes, I remember telling you that Mrs. Stanford, when I was at her house at Palo Alto, in 1896, told me that at a meeting of the Trustees of the University , she had the box of bonds or certificates, that represented a certain number of millions of dollars (I don’t remember how many) unlocked and showed them the bonds, and proved to them that the money was no myth, and then she took the key and turned it in the lock, saying something to the effect that so long as her hand could turn the key she would cut off the coupons and present them to the trustees. 2 She told this to me with her own lips, together with many other incidents that she had met with since that immense property had fallen into her possession. The men seemed anxious to control things themselves, especially the Union-Pacific men. I joined nephew D. R. A., Jr. and wife in New York. We lunched at Cousin Lizzie’s, John’s wife. 3 Then I dined and spent the night with Cousin Louis Lapham, and cousin Carrie Vail Ladd came in and spent an hour with me. On Friday night we went up to Albany, and Saturday morning went over to Greenwich by train,—then took a two-horse rig and drove four miles to Battenville. It is the loveliest scenery I ever saw. We called on Mrs. Abigail Fitch McLean, 4 whose next birthday will be her 93rd. Then 24 april 1905 546 & we went into the new brick house, as I call it. It is now owned by a granddaughter of Elijah and Candice Hyatt, 5 who were our best friends in the old days.I was glad enough to find it in the possession of their grand-daughter. I took Dan and Bessie into it and showed them the old dining-room where we used to sit and study, and all the different bedrooms upstairs, and the old room over the wood-shed, where we went to Daniel Somebody’s school, 6 and where Sarah Anthony 7 and Mary Perkins taught, and then showed them at last into the bedroom off the parlor, and beyond Father and Mother’s bedroom, in the north-west corner of the brick house, the little room in which Grandfather and Grandmother Read spent their last days, Grandfather dying in 1838 and Grandmother in 1839, at the age of 84. The burying ground is across the kiln, and past where Judge McLean 8 used to live, and opposite the old district school-house, and there are buried Grandfather and Grandmother, with little Eliza Anthony, the only child of mothers that died in infancy, and Anthony McLean, 9 the son of Aaron and sister Guelma Anthony McLean, who died at one year. I am not sure yet where the monument will be placed, because the man did not come while we were there, so we left it a good deal uncertain, but it will probably be placed on the ground where the brick church stood. 10 It has all been taken into the graveyard, and the ground there is much higher and prettier, and the President of the Cemetery, the Hon. Mr. Hobbie, 11 wants the monument placed up there facing the road, so that the people who go by can see it, and we left it to his judgment. We did not see the monument because it was still crated in the freight yard, and would not...

Share