Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTERS FROM AN OREGON RANCH YOU write, my dear Nell, that you were amazed to hear we had sold our comfortable city homes, bundled our household possessions into a freight- car, and whirled off to Oregon with the foolish and pastoral notion of locating on ranches; and thereupon you had indignantly remarked, "The whole quartet must be as mad as March hares to do such a reckless thing at their time of life." The allusion to lunacy may be forgiven ; to age, never. We may not be so young as we used to be, but we are not yet quite in our dotage. Don't you know, my friend, that monotony is stagnation and death to the middle-aged ? They need change of scene, and the novelty and excitement that come with it. The tonic of fresh fields and pastures new is both stimulating and rejuvenating, and the Oregon air is an intoxicant like wine, — pure, fresh, and exhilarating. We drank it in with praise and thanksgiving. You ask if we have found our ranch. I answer, Yes. Do we like it ? We are delighted with it.How did we find it? It happened rather strangely. Last summer, in a purely accidental way, there drifted to us a little pamphlet from a real-estate agent, in which we learned more than we had ever known of the beauties and attractions of Oregon. We read of her glorious snow-capped mountains, of great dim forests, of sparkling trout-laden streams, of wooded hills and blossoming valleys, swiftly flowing rivers, and fern- shaded springs of delicious cold water gushing from rock and hillside. From that hour the madness was in our blood. We said, Let us act at once, and not stand shivering on the brink. And so the leap into the unknown was taken, landing us in a small town here in the height of the rainy season. ; Then, "under skies that were ashen and sober," in prosy fact as well as poetic...