The kodak films you were kind enough to send me are very interesting. The picture of the old Mill House³ (No. 5) looks almost exactly as it did when I was a child. It has either been very skillfully restored or very well kept up. I saw the house three years ago, when I went down to Virginia⁴ for a two weeks stay⁵ and did not make myself known to anybody. The mill itself was standing, a pitiful wreck, out in the middle of Back Creek where some freshet had carried it. The old part of the mill (and the most interesting, as I remember it) had been washed entirelyentirely washed away. I have had some correspondence with a professor in a western university whose remote ancestor was the miller there before the Revolutionary War.

Negative No. 748, I think, is a photograph of the house in which I was born⁶, but it was in a pitiably run-down condition when I wassaw it there three years ago. Negative No. 1 seems to show the rear of the house with hideous modern sleeping porches added. On the whole, negative No. 748 looks to me as that old house actually looked when I first remember it. I never lived there after I was a year old, I believe, and the first house I remember is the big brick house⁷ on the main road one or two or three miles to the east. It is a pitiable wreck now and is occupied by three or shiftless four families. The grounds were once quite beautiful, but all the great trees have been cut down and the lawn has disappeared entirely. I will be glad to have a print made of the Mill House and of No. 748, and then I will return all the negatives to you. It was very kind of you to send them on to me.