Woodrow Wilson to Richard Heath Dabney

Your welcome letter came close on the heels of one from Charley, and the double feast furnished proportionate enjoyment. I think of you fellows very often and very affectionately, and would give a great deal to be able occasionally to drop in on you. The more news of the University people and the University things you can manage to retail in your letters the surer will be the welcome of the same.

Time is treating me kindly, though I am still far from feeling complete confidence in my stomach's good behavior. I, having nothing harder or more disagreeable to do than read law according to my own devices, am much hapier, “I trow,” than you poor slaves who have the torments of measles and the irritations of special examinations, postponed to suit others' convenience, to undergo with what equanimity ye can simulate. I spend some portions of the leisure I make for myself, by close economy of time in the matter of study, in the company of fair damsels who, if they are not always good talkers or often skilled in entertaining, are at least uniformly good listeners and are generally well enough dispersed to submit themselves to be entertained by a well-meaning young man who exerts himself to sustain a much larger reputation for intelligence than he has any right to. I am prevented from bestowing too much attention upon any one of these interesting creatures whom I may find a trifle more charming than the rest by the wholesome fear of my young brother, whose soul is never more at ease, and whose spirits are never higher than when he has the opportunity, for which he is constantly and slily in wait, of discoursing of the exhibition of my supposed preferences.

But, while not neglecting the privileges of society—so to speak—I am the more while a slave to the seductions of literature As I wrote to Charley, I've lately sought a new introduction to Fox. I have just completed Trevelyan's “Early History of Charles James Fox” and have been more entirely captivated by it than by it than by anything I have read since Macaulay, his uncle. The book would be more properly entitled an history of the early portion of the reign of Geo. III; but still there runs through its wonderly vivid description of the men and the society and the politics of that dark period of Eng. history anda clear and complete enough narrative of the early life of Fox to furnish me, at least, with much new light concerning that remarkable man's career and to supply me with materials for an entirely new estimate of his character.—But I wont tire you with a recital of my crude opinions about a book you may not care to read. If you would follow my advice, however, you will not let another vacation pass without reading it every word. I know it would repay you.I've spent so much ink in trying to make you envy my good luck in being able to command leisure enough to do something besides breaking my mental neck in a head-long race over several thousands of pages of law, that I come to the end of the sheet and have only a short time left before the closing of the Northern mail. I'll hoard the rest of my empty items till next time. Write me letters full of gossip about yourself and the boys and the Jeff and everything else pertaining to our one-time walk and conversation.

With much love to the boys, yourself not excluded,