Transcriber’s Note:

Inconsistencies in punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling—such as “Snelling” and “Snellings”, hardworking and hard-drinking—were left as printed in the original text. The inconsistent use of italics—as in “Linnæa” and “Linnæa”—was retained as printed in the original.

Letters to a Friend

Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr
1866—1879

By
John Muir

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1915

THIS EDITION CONSISTS OF 300 COPIES

Prefatory Note

When John Muir was a student in the University of Wisconsin he was a frequent caller at the house of Dr. Ezra S. Carr. The kindness shown him there, and especially the sympathy which Mrs. Carr, as a botanist and a lover of nature, felt in the young man’s interests and aims, led to the formation of a lasting friendship. He regarded Mrs. Carr, indeed, as his “spiritual mother,” and his letters to her in later years are the outpourings of a sensitive spirit to one who he felt thoroughly understood and sympathized with him. These letters are therefore peculiarly revealing of their writer’s personality. Most of them were written from the Yosemite Valley, and they give a good notion of the life Muir led there, sheep-herding, guiding, and tending a sawmill at intervals to earn his daily bread, but devoting his real self to an ardent scientific study of glacial geology and a joyous and reverent communion with Nature.