With the help of my friend Sara, I was able to decipher most of the handwriting:

Luis Darforth gave me an agreeable surprise a few weeks ago by coming into the hotel one night, he told me that he was going to give up his Centennial trip for the sake of going to Pleasant Ridge with us.

We leave here for Paris tomorrow and we now expect to return to Boston next June. It will too late for Spring fishing but possibly we can take a little private  [illegible] later in the season.

Taylor is home again and writes me that they are going down fishing next Spring. If they go you will have a good time. I always feel so sorry when I think we can never see poor Collin's genial face there again, no better or larger heart ever been about our camp fire. I am sorry that they have so many boats and such cheap fare into the Ridge. I think it must be bad for the trout but still there will be fish there for a great many years.

Tell Bill to get a few down into the South Cove and have them well cared for until I come home and we will go up and take them out, perhaps if he should drink a bottle St Croix that they would hand around then.

Can Bill find [illegible] in September?

I do not think that I should like any Felkin's Motel, still you could go there for a night.

I was very glad to know that Uncle Ben suffered nothing by the fire. I was afraid that he had.

I am always so glad to hear from Anson. I never do only through you.

Em is much improved since I wrote you last. She now seems more as she used to. The children have been perfectly well this Summer until last week when Willie was taken with inflammation of the bowels, but he is all right now and Saturday morning we hope to be in Paris and in another week the children will all be in school, if well. They will remain there until we start for home, which it seems to me will be but a very short time.

This is one of the loveliest days in the year and I am writing on the piazza while the snow covered mountains seems so very near to us. Still you are glad to get into a shady place.

Remember us all to Uncle Ben and Aunt Lois to Uncle Columbus and Aunt Betty. Em sends much love to you all and so do I. Let me know what kind of a time you and Bill have. The snow that I can see from here would make an awful lot of punch.

I enclose a few Swiss stamps for Ben will send some more from Paris. I also enclose a little Italian money and a Swiss cent.

From your friend
MD Spaulding


Michael Popek sells rare and used books at a shop in central New York. He shares the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird items left in those old books at his blog Forgotten Bookmarks. (See his original post here.)

Photo credit: The former Hotel Thunerhof, reproduced with permission from Kunstmusum Thun