I can’t tell you anything new about myself.  I hope it is not a delusion that I am growing slowly better.  I cultivate that idea anyway. ...

It was a slaughter, the election, and properly did it come to us.  Now be wise and you can have this land for many years.  But foolish conceit will put you out in four. ...I wish you Republicans had carried all the South.  I am glad for Lenroot—­very! ...  But Phelan’s defeat has about broken my heart and for Henderson and Chamberlain and Thomas I am especially grieved.  Well, it will be a changed world in Washington, and I’m sorry I can’t be in it and of it.

Anne has gone to Washington to see Nancy who has not been well, so I am alone but not for long.  I get on all right.  God bless you, my dear old chap, and do rest awhile beneath your own fig tree.  My love to Alice.  Affectionately as always,

F. K. L.

 To George Otis Smith

Bethel, [November] 18, [1920]

Dear George Otis,—­I love this Maine of yours.  It is beautiful, and its people are good stuff—­strong, wholesome, intelligent young men.  I like them greatly.  I’d be content to sit right down here and wait for whatever is to come.  It is a place of serenity.  There is no rush, yet people live and the necessary things get done.  It doesn’t have any Ford factories, but I rather fancy it makes the men who go West and make the factories.

The autumn has been one long procession of gay banners on the hillsides, and now that the snow has come the pines are blue and the mountains purple; and mountains five thousand feet high are just as good, more companionable, than mountains fifteen thousand feet high.  What is more lovely, stately and of finer color than a line of these receding hills which walk away from you, as if they continued clear across the continent?

I must get out against my wish, to have a lot more testing done—­ for this doctor differs with the others—­and I rather think he is right.  But I hope to get back here and enjoy this air.  No wonder this stock was for prohibition, the air itself is an intoxicant, especially when the snow is on the ground and it comes to you gently; it is as bracing as a cocktail, not a sensuous wine like the Santa Barbara air—­tell Vogelsang this—­but I presume more like the High Sierras, where the fishing is good.

I shall read your speeches with the deepest interest.  Keep up the publicity.  It affects Congress and it justifies the good doctrine we have preached.  Cordially,

F. K. Lane

Have read the speeches and they are everything they should be.  Right theory, clear statement, conclusive facts.  A few too many figures perhaps, you should keep your prime figures in the air longer so they can be visualized.  This may be called juggling figures in the right sense.

Lane

 To George W. Wickersham

Bethel, Maine, 18 [November, 1920]