Page:Percival Lowell - an afterglow.djvu/137

An Afterglow

In view of the "Titanic" disaster I cannot be sure that all my letters or other mail has reached America. In consequence it would be well to find out if Senator Crane received an answer to his last letter to me which I despatched to you in which he notified me that the Chief Forester had said I could use dead pine and cut live oaks for fencing the section west at Flagstaff and asked if that would be satisfactory. To which I replied that it would not; that I should not cut live oak willingly; that what I wished to cut were young pine, under eight inches in diameter and that I probably had a legal right so to do anyway. Of course if you got my letter he got mine too. Otherwise please find out.

Many pleasant dinners and lunches the past two weeks; a dinner at Flammarion's, one at Baillaud's, the director of the Paris Observatory; a lunch at M. Boutroux, the director of the Fondation Thiers (he was the French lecturer at Harvard a year or so ago), a talk before the Bureau des Longitudes, observation of the eclipse with de La Baume-Pluvinel at St. Germain, where I met among others Cowell of the British Nautical Almanac and Turner on the way out, who asked me to dine with him that evening but I regretted. Of the séance of the Astronomical Society I wrote you before. 103