Dear Mr. Cahill,
I am more sorry than I can say to be unable to send you the copy of the Builder's Review that you kindly sent me. But before receiving your note I had, in my own interest, searched high and low for it, in vain. Somebody stole it from my table. I especially valued it after the catastrophe, but should have been doubly pleased to have it for you.
It was indeed a rough deal you San Franciscans got. I had always expected to go back to the good old town some day, but I have no desire to see the new town, if there is to be one. I fear the fire consumed even the ghosts that used to meet me at every street corner—ghosts of dear dead friends, oh, so many of them!
Please accept my sympathy for your losses. I too am a "sufferer," a whole edition of my latest book, plates and all, having gone up in smoke and many of my friends being now in the "dependent class." It hit us all pretty hard, I guess, wherever we happened to be.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
Washington, D. C,
August 11,
1906.
Dear George,
* * *
If your neighbor Carmelites are really "normal" and respectable I'm sorry for you. They will surely (remaining cold sober themselves) drive you to drink. Their sort affects me that way. God bless the crank and the curio!—what would life in this desert be without its mullahs and its dervishes? A matter of merchants and camel drivers—no one to laugh with and at.