The letter informing the writer’s father that he had just met with Secretary of State James G. Blaine who confirmed his appointment, decided by President Benjamin Harrison the previous day, as Assistant Counsel of the US delegation to the international Bering Sea Arbitration. It was uncertain whether he would be attending the Paris Arbitration meetings in January but he was to begin working on the briefs immediately. The Arbitration was a diplomatic solution to a long-simmering dispute between the US and England over the rights of seal-hunting on the Bering Sea islands off the coast of mainland Alaska. It is possible that the writer was Robert Lansing, one of the two associate counsels of the Arbitration delegation, later to become Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State during World War I, but then a young New York lawyer and son-in-law of General John Foster, Blaine’s successor, who is also named in the letter. Lansing’s customary florid and stylized handwriting does not at all resemble the holograph in this letter – perhaps, on rare occasions, he could also produce a more typical scrawl when writing in haste about his career advancement to a doting father.