Friday, October eighteenth.
The night is beautiful beyond thought. All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself. The full moon is almost straight above us, and shining through the tree tops into our clearing makes the old stumps quite lovely with its quiet light. And the forest around is as black as the abyss. Although it is nearly ten o’clock Rockwell is still awake. It is his birthday—by our choice. His one present, a cheap child’s edition of Wood’s “Natural History,” illustrated, has filled his head with dreams of his beloved wild animals. I began to-night to teach him to sing. We tried Brahms’s “Wiegenlied,” with little success, and then “Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf,” which went better. These songs and many other German songs, all with English words, are in the song book I bought him. I hope I shall have the patience and the time to succeed with Rockwell in this.
Three men are now with Olson in his cabin, for the two who were gone to Seward returned to-day. They are younger men, one of them Emsweiler a well-known guide of this country. I spent an interesting hour with them this evening. Olson told me to-day that his age is seventy-one. The smell of fresh bread is in our cabin, for I baked to-day. Baking, wood-cutting, darning of socks, putting the cabin in order, and the building of a shelf, these, with the other usual chores, were the whole day’s work; a profitless day lies on my conscience. I shall draw a little and then go to bed.