18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ALBANY MEETING ' 



This must have been one of his last long letters : 



"Washington, D. C, February 11, 1916. 



"My Dear Mr. Dodge : I owe you an apology for not writing you before, and 

 I will explain rather than apologize. Just before Thanksgiving, when I was 

 settling down to work in a new home, for we had moved in October, Mrs. 

 Davis was taken seriously and very painfully sick with general neuritis and 

 has been in bed ever since, most of the time with a nurse. She was delirious 

 a good deal of the time for some weeks, and I have spent my evenings and 

 Sundays in relieving the nurse and in doing what I could to make Mrs. Davis 

 more comfortable, which at best was not very much. However, she is now 

 considerably better, is having much less pain, and tonight I am taking time to 

 write to you while she is asleep, the first time for a long time when she has 

 been able to sleep so early in the evening. This explains why I have not been 

 a better correspondent. 



"I want also to explain why I did not see you when I went to Michigan in 

 the fall. T was late in getting away on the trip West and only spent a week 

 in all away from Washington. My main object in going was to attend a meet- 

 ing of the American Peat Society in Detroit, and while there I stopped with 

 Bryant Walker, who told me that you were at that time on your trip in the 

 Upper Peninsula ; hence I did not go to Port Huron. If you had been at home 

 I should have spent Sunday at least with you and probably longer. 



"On your last trip to the Upper Peninsula you covered something of the 

 same ground I did in 1905 with Leverett. We walked from Newberry to the 

 mouth of the Two-hearted River, then along the shore to Grand Marais, taking 

 three days to make the trip. The first night we stopped at the Half-way 

 House, north of Newberry ; the next at the Two-hearted River L. S. S., and the 

 next at a fishing camp about half way between that and Grand Marais. It 

 was a long and interesting walk. It was along the lake shore west of the 

 Two-hearted River somewhere that I found Empctrum nigrum and a few 

 other Northern plants; but most of the way Pinus danlcsiana and Vaccinium 

 canadense were the striking plants, especially the latter, which that year bore 

 a great crop of berries, which were ripe and fine, for we made the trip in 

 September. 



"Regarding Quercus alba in the Upper Peninsula, I saw it along the valley 

 of the Menominee, running up the river some distance, but just how far I am 

 not sure now. Quercus coccinea grows over that way on the sand plains and 

 as far east as the sand-plains south of Marquette and Ishpeming, if I remem- 

 ber correctly. The forests of the western end of the Upper Peninsula, after 

 you get west of Marquette, in fact, are much heavier than those east of that 

 point, except on the rock uplifts, the Huron and Porcupine Mountains, where 

 the elevation and the shallow soils stunt the trees. But even on the shore of 

 Lake Superior at Bessemer, or north of that town, the heavy, hardwood forest 

 is strikingly different from the Jack and Norway pine forests on the great 

 sand plains of the eastern end of the peninsula. The trees are large and 

 thrifty and, except for the beech, are much the same as the forest you saw at 

 Grand Island. Hard maple, birch (yellow and white), white elm, basswood, 

 and some oaks, especially the red oak, are the common trees. The beech dis- 



