Tuesday, March fourth.
A day of snow and rain spent by us indoors, Rockwell hard at work upon his chart of “Trobbeabl Island”—a wonderful imaginary land where his own strange species of wild animals live—and I washing and mending. My seaman’s bag, damaged on its way here in the hold of the steamer, is now quite professionally patched, and the knee of my blue overalls shines with a square patch of white canvas.
Olson was welcome and spent much of the day with us. He has reread Kathleen’s letter to him and is charmed with it. He feels authorized by it to keep me here longer and surely does his best to persuade me. He treasures the picture little Kathleen sent him. All these things, the letters and little trifles that we have given him will be stored away in his too empty box of treasures among a very few old letters and a photograph or two of pioneer ladies and gentlemen in the dress-up costumes of thirty years ago. These scant treasures, what a memorial of a very lonely life! He showed me to-day a photograph of Tom Crane, an old associate of his in Idaho, and two large, splendid looking women, Crane’s wife and his wife’s sister. The wife was frozen to death in the snow while on a short journey with her husband. He lost both feet. Olson led the rescue party bringing in with great difficulty the dead woman and then tending Crane through long, painful days until his crippled recovery.