When John Muir was a student in the University of Wisconsin he was a
frequent caller at the house of Dr. Ezra S. Carr. The kindness shown him
there, and especially the sympathy which Mrs. Carr, as a botanist and
a lover of nature, felt in the young man’s interests and aims, led to
the formation of a lasting friendship. He regarded Mrs. Carr, indeed,
as his “spiritual mother,” and his letters to her in later years are the
outpourings of a sensitive spirit to one who he felt thoroughly understood
and sympathized with him. These letters are therefore peculiarly
revealing of their writer’s personality. Most of them were written from
the Yosemite Valley, and they give a good notion of the life Muir led
there, sheep-herding, guiding, and tending a sawmill at intervals to
earn his daily bread, but devoting his real self to an ardent scientific
study of glacial geology and a joyous and reverent communion with Nature.