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Brattleboro, Vt. Oct. 26/32

Dear Mrs. Eckstorm,

Your letter does me a lot of good, more especially in the all-aloneness of working ones last years, as to Indian matters, nearly without a frog's peep of companionability in it. And at as good, or bad, as 75 one is not overrun by joyful contemporaries anyway. If I had been properly a scholar it might have done, but except for occasional pilgrimages alone I have always been rather fractional without some one to go over things with.

My books are packed to go away or I would enclose my abstract of trading words in 8 or 9 dialects. The Montagnais, I remember, is n.'atawan, I sell (or buy?), atawáyo, he sells (or buys?). I had not thought of Tarratine this way, but it seems perhaps the best guess. Another is that it brings in our familiar tawa -, tawan - [two underlined], to break down or through. The Tarrantines are mostly mentioned in our regional records for their breaking down our Indians'