Publication InformationFlorence June 15'-67

Page 1

Dear Baird

I have thy letter of the and will comply with thy friend's request, though I doubt his sanity and think it would be truer charity to send him hellebore rather than stamps. Mrs Marsh has been spending three weeks at Gombo on the seashore near Pisa for hot salt-water bathing, which is useful to her. I have been with her a good deal, and for divertisement have watched the action of the sea in the formulation of banks and gathering incipient sand-stone -- I am pretty sure that what is called "rain drops" in sand-stone, many--I do not say all-- are due to other causes; some to the escape of air-bubbles as the sea retires, which, under different conditions of dryness and fineness of sand, rapidity of advance and retreat of wave and the like, produce orifices of very different forms; some to the holes of sand fleas, or to the indentations they make as they leap about on dry sand. On this beach a good many sea shells are thrown up. The most numerous are what are here called [line missing]

fish also come ashore, all alive, all alive, oh! or at least entire. There be also many others, some of which are in very good care, others so washed and water-worn as to be unrecognizable by the very mother that bore 'em.

Mrs Marsh is going to the baths of Lucca on Monday for several weeks, and I shall visit her now and then.

I have leave of absence for a month, & have hoped for some glacier work, but am so sorely pestered with sciatica that I fear I cannot do much. It is not good to be on the face of a rock at 70 with the horizon, a glacier 100 feet below, and one of your legs leading you in entire uncertainty whether it will obey you when you tell it to plant the foot on a ledge three inches wide and three feet in advance of you.

As to Russian America I, as at present advised, hold it a "sell". I never believed you told half the fibs about it they charged you with. The Russians certainly think they took the stranger in consumedly. We do send love to you all.

Yours trulyG. P. Marsh

Prof Baird

References in this letter:

The dried root or a powder or extract of any medicinal herb of the genus Helleborus used by ancient Greeks and Romans in treating mental and other disorders.

Russian founded the first permanent settlement in Alaska in 1784 and in 1799 granted a trade monopoly to the Russian American Company. The territory was sold to the United States in 1867 through the significant efforts of the Secretary of State, William H. Seward.