It is autumn now.  I wish you could see Arizona canyons in their gorgeous colors.  We have had frost right along and the mornings are great.  There’s a broad zigzag belt of gold halfway up the San Francisco peaks, and that is the aspen thickets taking on their fall coat.  Here in the canyon you’d think there was blazing fire everywhere.  The vines and the maples are red, scarlet, carmine, cerise, magenta, all the hues of flame.  The oak leaves are turning russet gold, and the sycamores are yellow green.  Up on the desert the other day I rode across a patch of asters, lilac and lavender, almost purple.  I had to get off and pluck a handful.  And then what do you think?  I dug up the whole bunch, roots and all, and planted them on the sunny side of my cabin.  I rather guess your love of flowers engendered this remarkable susceptibility in me.

I’m home early most every afternoon now, and I like the couple of hours loafing around.  Guess it’s bad for me, though.  You know I seldom hunt, and the trout in the pool here are so tame now they’ll almost eat out of my hand.  I haven’t the heart to fish for them.  The squirrels, too, have grown tame and friendly.  There’s a red squirrel that climbs up on my table.  And there’s a chipmunk who lives in my cabin and runs over my bed.  I’ve a new pet—­the little pig you christened Pinky.  After he had the wonderful good fortune to be caressed and named by you I couldn’t think of letting him grow up in an ordinary piglike manner.  So I fetched him home.  My dog, Moze, was jealous at first and did not like this intrusion, but now they are good friends and sleep together.  Flo has a kitten she’s going to give me, and then, as Hutter says, I’ll be “Jake.”

My occupation during these leisure hours perhaps would strike my old friends East as idle, silly, mawkish.  But I believe you will understand me.

I have the pleasure of doing nothing, and of catching now and then a glimpse of supreme joy in the strange state of thinking nothing.  Tennyson came close to this in his “Lotus Eaters.”  Only to see—­only to feel is enough!

Sprawled on the warm sweet pine needles, I breathe through them the breath of the earth and am somehow no longer lonely.  I cannot, of course, see the sunset, but I watch for its coming on the eastern wall of the canyon.  I see the shadow slowly creep up, driving the gold before it, until at last the canyon rim and pines are turned to golden fire.  I watch the sailing eagles as they streak across the gold, and swoop up into the blue, and pass out of sight.  I watch the golden flush fade to gray, and then, the canyon slowly fills with purple shadows.  This hour of twilight is the silent and melancholy one.  Seldom is there any sound save the soft rush of the water over the stones, and that seems to die away.  For a moment, perhaps, I am Hiawatha alone in his forest home, or a more primitive savage, feeling the great, silent pulse of nature, happy in unconsciousness,