Transcribe Hornaday, W. T. Letter to Ward, Henry A. (1881-12-25)

of Argus pheasant or stuffable bird of paradise, and only </u one > Neptune's cup in all the time I was in the Straits Settlements. Bur it was just as well, better so in fact, for I never had money enough to spend much in buying costly specimens, even though ever so cheap, and had I found such a stock for sale as you have it would have broken me up </s and > up to have found myself unable to purchase. You see for my whole Straits & Borneo campaign I had </u less > than $1500 in cash. A great part of the time in the jungles I had far from enough to eat simply because I could not afford to buy it. And what would you think of starting out from Singapore to go to Australia , collect there profitably and get to San Francisco </u all on $450.? > This was the task set for me, and which I would have been foolish enough to have entered upon had I had enough money to have paid my fare to Brisbane! The Lord only knows what entanglements I would have got into!

    Well, I rejoice with you that you have done, and

done thoroughly the ^Far^ East, for to my mind there is no country like it elsewhere in all the world. It seems to me now like a dream of fairy land. But now I want you to go to </u India > next, and see still another world. Go the Neilghenies, the loveliest spot on the whole earth. - perhaps I cannot write even the names of those places without a quickening of the pulse.

  By-the-bye, the boxes from Theobald arrived about a

month ago in good order. The skins are very good. I sold one tiger skin to Webster for $50. good only for a rug, of course. There is in the lot one fine large skin which is fit to mount, having been prepared by Theobald. The entire skeleton accompanies it. Besides that there are 4 other tiger skins & 4 leopards.

     Well, the second annual Exhibition of the S. A. T.

is over & gone, & we returned from Boston yesterday morning. Financially it was not a success, In fact