My dear Calvin,

Your letter has just come and I was very glad to have the pleasure reading your sermon in part. I am quite sure it was a very fine one. We hear nothing like it here; our minister does not seem able to preach the Bible and we have the most superficial unsatisfying addresses, not sermons at all.

Ida and Aura [Sawyer] did not arrive on Wednesday morning as expected missed their connection and telephone was too late to save poor Tom from getting up and going down to the station for the 8 o'clock train, they came in the afternoon and were only able to stay till last night. We liked them so much and tried to make things pleasant for the short time. Gave them a drive and brought Adam and Hattie Hope down for afternoon tea. Ida has had a terrible shock and is very excitable, they were afraid of her losing her mind after the Colonel's death. You will scarcely believe it, but he had not treated her well for years and at his death she found he had cut her off with nothing. Left the home and money to keep it up for old men. We think he must have been out of his mind through disease and age, but Ida said she found she had been greatly deceived years ago. He was a German and treated her as they do their women, he had no education and he had told her he had no family, this was not true, for they turned up, common low people, I myself would not be surprised, if it turns out he has no money, he has just imagined it, that has happened. It is now in a lawyer's hands I wish Muscatine was not so far away, I would get Tom to go up and inquire into it; for Mr. Sawyer was not a rich man and what he left to each was really very small, when divided amongst so many.

Ida is such a fine looking woman and a good woman so unselfish. It seems such a shame that for fifteen years she was nothing but a slave to this old man to when he died, she could never leave him, never went any place, even to church. Aura is very frail and delicate, but such a good Christian girl, we are only sorry they are not nearer to us.

It is too bad about your garden, I would not trouble about it, it would not pay you. It is a strange season, as our furnace was let out first of June, I had to have fire in the drawing room to make our guests comfortable, instead of having five o'clock tea in the garden as we used to do in June.

Hilda wants to know the width of the dark blinds I can't just tell the day they are coming, I am afraid not before the end of month. Will take care of the sermon. Am sending a Times Mr. Murray sent me.

I was really sorry to hear you had that layman's banquet, wherever you go, that always seems to be your fate. Try and not work yourself to death over it. With much love from us all.

Your loving mother

M.B. McQuesten