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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lady of the Decoration, by Frances Little
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Lady of the Decoration
+
+Author: Frances Little
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7523]
+This file was first posted on May 13, 2003
+Last Updated: May 9, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADY OF THE DECORATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LADY OF THE DECORATION
+
+By Frances Little
+
+
+To All Good Sisters, And To Mine In Particular
+
+
+
+
+THE LADY OF THE DECORATION
+
+
+
+
+SAN FRANCISCO, July 30, 1901.
+
+
+My dearest Mate:
+
+Behold a soldier on the eve of battle!  I am writing this in a stuffy
+little hotel room and I don't dare stop whistling for a minute. You
+could cover my courage with a postage stamp. In the morning I sail for
+the Flowery Kingdom, and if the roses are waiting to strew my path it
+is more than they have done here for the past few years.  When the
+train pulled out from home and I saw that crowd of loving, tearful
+faces fading away, I believe that for a few moments I realized the
+actual bitterness of death! I was leaving everything that was dear to
+me on earth, and going out into the dark unknown, alone.
+
+Of course it's for the best, the disagreeable always is. You are
+responsible, my beloved cousin, and the consequences be on your
+head. You thought my salvation lay in leaving Kentucky and seeking my
+fortune in strange lands. Your tender sensibilities shrank from having
+me exposed to the world as a young widow who is not sorry. So you
+"shipped me some-wheres East of Suez" and tied me up with a four
+years' contract.
+
+But, honor bright, Mate, I don't believe in your heart you can blame
+me for not being sorry! I stuck it out to the last,--faced neglect,
+humiliations, and days and nights of anguish, almost losing my
+self-respect in my effort to fulfil my duty. But when death suddenly
+put an end to it all, God alone knows what a relief it was!  And how
+curiously it has all turned out! First my taking the Kindergarten
+course just to please you, and to keep my mind off things that ought
+not to have been. Then my sudden release from bondage, and the
+dreadful manner of it, my awkward position, my dependence,--and in the
+midst of it all this sudden offer to go to Japan and teach in a
+Mission school!
+
+Isn't it ridiculous, Mate? Was there ever anything so absurd as my lot
+being cast with a band of missionaries?  I, who have never missed a
+Kentucky Derby since I was old enough to know a bay from a sorrel! I
+guess old Sister Fate doesn't want me to be a one part star. For
+eighteen years I played pure comedy, then tragedy for seven, and now I
+am cast for a character part.
+
+Nobody will ever know what it cost me to come! All of them were so
+terribly opposed to it, but it seems to me that I have spent my entire
+life going against the wishes of my family. Yet I would lay down my
+life for any one of them. How they have stood by me and loved me
+through all my blind blunders. I'd back my mistakes against anybody
+else's in the world!
+
+Then Mate there was Jack. You know how it has always been with
+Jack. When I was a little girl, on up to the time I was married, after
+that he never even looked it, but just stood by me and helped me like
+a brick. If it hadn't been for you and for him I should have put an
+end to myself long ago. But now that I am free, Jack has begun right
+where he left off seven years ago. It is all worse than useless; I am
+everlastingly through with love and sentiment. Of course we all know
+that Jack is the salt of the earth, and it nearly kills me to give him
+pain, but he will get over it, they always do, and I would rather for
+him to convalesce without me than with me.  I made him promise not to
+write me a line, and he just looked at me in that quiet, quizzical way
+and said: "All right, but you just remember that I'm waiting, until
+you are ready to begin life over again with me."
+
+Why it would be a death blow to all his hopes if he married me! My
+widow's mite consists of a wrecked life, a few debts, and a worldly
+notion that a brilliant young doctor like himself has no right to
+throw away all his chances in order to establish a small hospital for
+incurable children. Whenever I think of his giving up that
+long-cherished dream of studying in Germany, and buying ground for the
+hospital instead, I just gnash my teeth.
+
+Oh! I know that you think it is grand and noble and that I am horrid
+to feel as I do. Maybe I am. At any rate you will acknowledge that I
+have done the right thing for once in coming away. I seem to have been
+a general blot on the landscape, and with your help I have erased
+myself. In the meanwhile, I wish to Heaven my heart would ossify!
+
+The sole power that keeps me going now is your belief in me. You have
+always claimed that I was worth something, in spite of the fact that I
+have persistently proven that I was not.  Don't you shudder at the
+risk you are taking? Think of the responsibility of standing for me in
+a Board of Missions!  I'll stay bottled up as tight as I know how, but
+suppose the cork _should_ fly?
+
+Poor Mate, the Lord was unkind when he gave me to you for a cousin.
+
+Well it's done, and by the time you get this I will probably be well
+on my sea-sick way. I can't trust myself to send any messages to the
+family. I don't even dare send my love to you.  I am a soldier lady,
+and I salute my officer.
+
+
+
+
+ON SHIP-BOARD. August 8th, 1901.
+
+
+It's so windy that I can scarcely hold the paper down but I'll make
+the effort. The first night I came aboard, I had everything to
+myself. There were eighty cabin passengers and I was the only lady on
+deck. It was very rough but I stayed up as long as I could. The blue
+devils were swarming so thick around me that I didn't want to fight
+them in the close quarters of my state-room. But at last I had to go
+below, and the night that followed was a terror. Such a storm raged as
+I had never dreamed of, the ship rocked and groaned, and the water
+dashed against the port-holes; my bag played tag with my shoes, and my
+trunk ran around the room like a rat hunting for its hole. Overhead
+the shouts of the captain could be heard above the answering shouts of
+the sailors, and men and women hurried panic-stricken through the
+passage.
+
+Through it all I lay in the upper berth and recalled all the unhappy
+nights of the past seven years; disappointment, heartache,
+disillusionment, disgust; they followed each other in silent
+review. Every tender memory and early sentiment that might have
+lingered in my heart was ruthlessly murdered by some stronger memory
+of pain. The storm without was nothing to the storm within, I felt
+indifferent as to the fate of the vessel. If she floated or if she
+sank, it was one and the same to me.
+
+When morning came something had happened to me. I don't know what it
+was, but my past somehow seemed to belong to someone else. I had taken
+a last farewell of all the old burdens, and I was a new person in a
+new world.
+
+I put on my prettiest cap and my long coat and went up on deck. Oh, my
+dear, if you could only have seen the sight that greeted me! It was
+the limpest, sickest crowd I ever encountered!  They were pea-green
+with a dash of yellow, and a streak of black under their eyes, pale
+around the lips and weak in their knees. There was only one other
+woman besides myself who was not sick, and she was a missionary with
+short hair, and a big nose. She was going around with some tracts
+asking everybody if they were Christians. Just as I came up she
+tackled a big, dejected looking foreigner who was huddled in a corner.
+
+"Brother, are you a Christian?"
+
+"No, no," he muttered impatiently.  "I'm a Norwegian."
+
+Now what that man needed was a cocktail, but it was not for me to
+suggest it.
+
+At table I am in a corner with three nice old gentlemen and one young
+German. They are great on story-telling, and I've told all of mine,
+most of yours and some I invented. One of the old gentlemen is a
+missionary; when he found that I was distantly connected with the fold
+he immediately called me "Dear Sister". If I were at home I should
+call him "Dear Pa", but I am on my good behavior.
+
+The eating is fairly good, only sometimes it is so hot with curry and
+spice that it nearly takes my breath. My little Chinese waiter is
+entirely too solicitous for my comfort. No amount of argument will
+induce him to leave my plate until I have finished, after a few
+mouthfuls he whisks it away and brings me another relay. After
+pressing upon me dishes of every kind, he insists on my filling up all
+crevices with nuts and raisins, and after I have eaten, and eaten, he
+looks hurt, and says regretfully: "Missy sickee, no eatee."
+
+There is one other person, who is just as solicitous. The little
+German watches my every mouthful with round solemn eyes, and insists
+upon serving everything to me. He looks bewildered when anyone tells a
+funny story, and sometimes asks for an explanation.  He has been
+around the world twice, and is now going to China for three years for
+the Society of Scientific Research.  He seems to think I am the
+greatest curio he has yet encountered in his travels.
+
+The chief excitement of our trip so far has been the day in
+Honolulu. I wanted to sing for joy when we sighted land. The trees and
+grass never looked so beautiful as they did that morning in the
+brilliant sunshine. It took us hours to land on account of the red
+tape that had to be unwound, and then there was an extra delay of
+which I was the innocent cause. The quarantine doctor was inspecting
+the ship, and after I had watched him examine the emigrants, and had
+gotten my feelings wrought up over the poor miserable little children
+swarming below, I found a nice quiet nook on the shelter deck where I
+snuggled down and amused myself watching the native boys swim. The
+water on their bronze bodies made them shine in the sunlight, and they
+played about like a shoal of young porpoises. I must have stayed there
+an hour, for when I came down there was considerable stir on board.  A
+passenger was missing and we were being held while a search of the
+ship was made. I was getting most excited when the purser, who is the
+sternest and best looking man you ever saw, came up and pounced upon
+me.  "Have you been inspected?" he demanded, eyeing me from head to
+foot.  "Not any more than at present," I answered meekly. "Come with
+me," he said.
+
+I asked him if he was going to throw me overboard, but he was too full
+of importance to smile. He handed me over to the doctor saying: "Here
+is the young woman that caused the delay."  Young woman, indeed! but I
+was to be crushed yet further for the doctor looked over his glasses
+and said: "Now how did we miss that?"
+
+But on to Honolulu! I don't wonder people go wild over it. It is as if
+all the artists in all the world had spilled their colors over one
+spot, and Nature had sorted them out at her own sweet will. I kept
+wondering if I had died and gone to Heaven! Marvelous palms, and
+tropical plants, and all hanging in a softly dreaming silence that
+went to my head like wine.
+
+I started out to see the city, with two old ladies and a girl from
+South Dakota, but Dear Pa and Little Germany joined the party. Oh!
+Mate how I longed for you! I wanted to tie all those frousy old freaks
+up in a hard knot and pitch them into the sea! The girl from South
+Dakota is a little better than the rest, but she wears a jersey!
+
+There _are_ real tailor-made people on board, but I don't dare
+associate with them. They play bridge most of the time and if I
+hesitated near them I'd be lost. I'll play my part, never fear, but I
+hereby swear that I will not dress it!
+
+
+
+
+STILL ON BOARD. August 18th.
+
+
+Dear Mate:
+
+I am writing this in my berth with the curtains drawn. No I am not a
+bit sea-sick, just popular. One of the old ladies is teaching me to
+knit, the short-haired missionary reads aloud to me, the girl from
+South Dakota keeps my feet covered up, and Dear Pa and Little Germany
+assist me to eat.
+
+The captain has had a big bathing tank rigged up for the ladies, and I
+take a cold plunge every morning. It makes me think of our old days at
+the cottage up at the Cape. Didn't we have a royal time that summer
+and weren't we young and foolish? It was the last good time I had for
+many a long day--but there, none of that!
+
+Last night I had an adventure, at least it was next door to one. I was
+sitting up on deck when Dear Pa came by and asked me to walk with him.
+After several rounds we sat down on the pilot house steps. The moon
+was as big as a wagon wheel and the whole sea flooded with silver,
+while the flying fishes played hide and seek in the shadows.  I forgot
+all about Dear Pa and was doing a lot of thinking on my own account
+when he leaned over and said:
+
+"I hope you don't mind talking to me. I am very, very lonely." Now I
+thought I recognized a grave symptom, and when he began to tell me
+about his dear departed, I knew it was time to be going.
+
+"You have passed through it," he said. "You can sympathize."
+
+I crossed my fingers in the dark.  "We are both seeking a life work in
+a foreign field--" he began again, but just here the purser passed. He
+almost stumbled over us in the dark and when he saw me and my elderly
+friend, he actually smiled!
+
+Don't you dare tell Jack about this, I should never hear the last of
+it.
+
+Can you realize that I am three whole weeks from home? I do, every
+second of it. Sometimes when I stop to think what I am doing my heart
+almost bursts! But then I am so used to the heartache that I might be
+lonesome without it; who knows?
+
+If I can only do what is expected of me, if I can only pick up the
+pieces of this smashed-up life of mine and patch them into a decent
+whole that you will not be ashamed of, then I will be content.
+
+The first foreign word I have learned is "Alohaoe", I think it means
+"my dearest love to you." Any how I send it laden with the tenderest
+meaning.  God bless and keep you all, and bring me back to you a wiser
+and a gladder woman.
+
+
+
+
+KOBE. August 18th, 1901.
+
+
+Actually in Japan! I can scarcely believe it, even with all this
+strange life going on about me. This morning a launch came out to the
+steamer bringing Miss Lessing and Miss Dixon, the two missionaries in
+whose school I am to work. When I saw them, I must confess that my
+heart went down in my boots! Theirs must have done the same thing, for
+we stood looking at each other as awkwardly as if we belonged to
+different planets. The difference began with our heels and extended
+right on up to the crown of our hats. Even the language we spoke
+seemed different, and when I faced the prospect of living with such
+utter strangers, I wanted to jump overboard!
+
+My fellow passengers suddenly became very dear, I clung to everything
+about that old steamer as the last link that bound me to America.
+
+As we came down the gang plank, I was introduced to "Brother Mason"
+and "Brother White", and we all came ashore together. I felt for all
+the world like a convict sentenced to four years in the
+penitentiary. When we reached the Hotel, I fled to my room and flung
+myself on the bed. I knew I might as well have it out. I cried for two
+hours and thirty-five minutes, then I got up and washed my face and
+looked out of the window.
+
+It was all so strange and picturesque that I got interested before I
+knew it.  By and by Miss Lessing came in. Now that her hat was off I
+saw that she had a very sweet face with pretty dark hair and a funny
+little twinkle behind her eyes that made me think of you.  She told me
+how she had come out to Japan when she was a young girl, and how she
+had built up the school, and all she longed to do for it. Then she
+said, "Your coming seems like the direct answer to prayer. It has been
+one of my dearest dreams to have a Kindergarten for the little ones,
+it just seems too good to be true!" And she looked at me out of her
+nice shining eyes with such gratitude and enthusiasm that I was
+ashamed of what I had felt.
+
+After that Miss Dixon came up and they sat and watched me unpack my
+trunk. It took me about two minutes to find out that they were just
+like other women, fond of finery and pretty things and eager for news
+of the outside world. They examined all the dainty under clothes that
+sister had made for me, they marvelled over the high heeled slippers,
+and laughed at the big sleeves.
+
+"Where are you going to wear all these lovely things?" asked Miss
+Dixon. And again my heart sank, for even my simple wardrobe, planned
+for the exigencies of school life, seemed strangely extravagant and
+out of place.
+
+But I want to say right now, Mate, that if I stay here a thousand
+years I'll never come to jerseys and eight-year-old hats! I am going
+to subscribe to a good fashion paper, and at least keep within hailing
+distance of the styles.
+
+It is too warm to go down to the school yet so we are to spend a week
+in the mountains before we start in for the fall term.
+
+Dear Pa and Little Germany have been here twice in three hours but I
+saw them first.
+
+Home letters will not arrive until next week, and I can scarcely wait
+for the time to come. I keep thinking that I am away on a visit and
+that I will be going back soon. I find myself saving things to show
+you, and even starting to buy things to bring home. I have a good deal
+to learn, haven't I?
+
+
+
+
+HIEISAN. August 28th, 1901
+
+
+Fairy-land, real true fairy-land that we used to talk about up in the
+old cherry-tree at grandmother's! It's all so, Mate, only more
+bewitching than we ever dreamed.
+
+I have been in little villages that dropped right out of a picture
+book.  The streets are full of queer, small people who run about
+smiling, and bowing and saying pretty things to each other. It is a
+land where everybody seems to be happy, and where politeness is the
+first commandment.
+
+Yesterday we came up the mountains in jinrikishas. The road was
+narrow, but smooth, and for over three hours the men trotted along,
+never halting or changing their gait until we stopped for lunch.
+
+There is not much to a Japanese house but a roof and a lot of bamboo
+poles, but everything is beautifully clean. Before we had gotten down,
+several men and women came running out and bowing and calling "Ohayo,
+Ohayo" which means "good-morning."  They ran for cushions and we were
+glad enough to sit on the low benches and stretch ourselves. Then they
+brought us delicious tea, and gathered around to see us drink it. It
+seems that light hair is a great curiosity over here, and mine proved
+so interesting that they motioned for me to take off my hat, and then
+they stood around chattering and laughing at a great rate.  Miss
+Lessing said they wanted me to take my hair down, but would not ask it
+because of the beautiful arrangement. Shades of Blondes! I wish you
+could have seen it! But you _have_ seen it after a hard set of
+tennis.
+
+When we had rested an hour, and drunk tea, and bowed and smiled, we
+started out again, this time in a kind of Sedan chair, made of bamboo
+and carried on a long pole on the shoulders of two men. Now I have
+been up steep places but that trip beat anything I ever saw! I felt
+like a fly on a bald man's head! We climbed up, up, up, sometimes
+through woods that were so dense you could scarcely know it was
+day-time, and again through stretches of dazzling sunshine.
+
+Just as I was beginning to wonder what had become of our luggage, we
+passed four women laughing and singing.  Two of them had steamer
+trunks on their heads, and two carried huge kori. They did not seem to
+mind it in the least, and bowed and smiled us out of sight.
+
+Another two hours' climb brought us to this village of camps called
+Hieisan.  There are about forty Americans here, who are camping out
+for the summer, and I am the guest of a Dr. Waring and his wife from
+Alabama.
+
+My tent is high above everything, on a great overhanging rock, and
+before me is a view that would be a fit setting for Paradise. This
+mountain is sacred to Buddha, and the whole of it is thick with
+temples and shrines, some of them nobody knows how old.
+
+I have been trying to muster courage to get up at three o'clock in the
+morning to see the monkeys come out for breakfast. The mountains are
+full of them, but they are only to be seen at that hour.
+
+There are some very pleasant people here, and I have made a number of
+friends. I am something of a conundrum, and curiosity is rife as to
+_why_ I came. Mrs. Waring dresses me up and shows me off like a
+new doll, and the women consult me about making over their clothes.
+
+I don't know why I am not perfectly miserable. The truth is, Mate, I
+am having a good time! It's nice to be petted and treated like a
+child. It is good to be among plain, honest people, that live out
+doors, and have healthy bodies and minds.
+
+I want to forget all that I learned about the world in the past seven
+years.  I want to begin life again as a girl with a few illusions,
+even if they are borrowed ones. I know too much for my years and I'm
+determined to forget.
+
+The home letters were heavenly.  I've read them limber. I'll answer
+the rest to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA. Sept. 2nd, 1901.
+
+
+At last after my wanderings I am settled for the winter. The school is
+a big structure, open and airy, and I have a nice room facing the east
+where you dear ones are. On two sides tower the mountains, and between
+them lies the magical Inland Sea. This is a great naval and military
+station, and while I write I can hear the bugle calls from the parade
+grounds.
+
+I have a pretty little maid to wait on me and I wish you could see us
+talking to each other. She comes in, bows until her head touches the
+floor and hopes that my honorable ears and eyes and teeth are well. I
+tell her in plain English that I am feeling bully, then we both
+laugh. She is delighted with all my things, and touches them softly
+saying over and over: "It's mine to care for!"
+
+There are between four and five hundred girls in the school and, until
+I get more familiar with the language, I am to work with the older
+girls who understand some English. You would smile to see their
+curiosity concerning me.  They think my waist is very funny and they
+measure it with their hands and laugh aloud. One girl asked me in all
+seriousness why I had had pieces cut out of my sides, and another
+wanted to know if my hair used to be black.  You see in all this big
+city I am the only person with golden tresses, and a green carnation
+would not excite more comment.
+
+Yesterday we went shopping to get some curtains for my room. Such a
+crowd followed us that we could scarcely see what we were doing. When
+we went into the stores we sat on the floor and a little boy fanned us
+all the time we were making our selection.
+
+Monday, Miss Lessing asked me to begin a physical culture class with
+the larger girls who are being trained for teachers, so I decided that
+the first lesson would be on _skipping_. It is an unknown art in
+Japan and the lack of it makes the Kindergarten work very awkward.
+
+I took fourteen girls out on the porch and told them by signs and
+gestures to follow me. Then I picked up my skirts, and whistling a
+coon-song, started off. You never saw anything to equal their look of
+absolute astonishment!  They even got down on their hands and knees to
+watch my feet. But they were game, and in spite of their tight kimonos
+and sandalled feet they made a brave effort to follow. The first
+attempt was disastrous, some fell on their faces, some went down on
+their knees, and all stumbled. I didn't dare laugh for the Japanese
+can stand anything better than ridicule. I helped and encouraged and
+cheered them on to victory. The next day there was a slight
+improvement, and by the third day they were experts. I found that they
+had spent the whole afternoon in practice! Now what do you suppose the
+result is? An epidemic of skipping has swept over Hiroshima like the
+measles! Men women and children are trying to learn, and when we go
+out to walk I almost have convulsions at the elderly couples we pass
+earnestly trying to catch the step!
+
+I was so encouraged by this success that I taught the girls all sorts
+of steps and figures, even going so far as to teach them the
+_quadrille_! But my ambition led me a little too far. One day I
+came to class with a brand new step, which I had invented myself. It
+_was_ rather giddy, but a splendid exercise.  Well I headed the
+line and after the girls had followed me around the room twice I saw
+that they were convulsed with laughter! When I asked what was the
+matter, they explained between gasps that the step was the principal
+movement in the heathen dance given during festivals to the God of
+Beauty!  My saints! Wouldn't some of my dear brethren do a turn if
+they knew!
+
+Every afternoon I take about forty of the girls out for a walk. Our
+favorite stroll is along the moat that surrounds the old castle. It is
+almost always spilling over with lotus blossoms.  The maidens,
+trotting demurely along in their rain-bow kimonos and little clicking
+sandals make a pretty picture.  We have to pass the parade grounds of
+the barracks where 20,000 soldiers are stationed, and I do wish you
+could see them trying to be modest, and yet peeping out of the corners
+of their little almond eyes in a way which is not peculiar to any
+particular country.
+
+And the way they imitate me makes me afraid to breathe naturally. This
+thing of being a shining example is more than I bargained for. It is
+one of the few things in my checkered career that I have hitherto
+escaped.
+
+Never mind Mate, I couldn't be frivolous if I wanted to down
+here. Kobe would have proven fatal, for there are many foreigners
+there, and the temptation to have a good time would have been too much
+for me. I am rapidly developing into a hymn-singing sister, and the
+world and the flesh and the devil are shut up in the closet. Let us
+pray.
+
+
+
+
+October 2nd, 1901.
+
+
+At last, dear Mate, I am started at my own work with the babies and
+there aren't any words to tell you how cunning they are. There are
+eighty-five high class children in the pay kindergarten, and forty in
+the free. The latter are mostly of the very poor families, most of the
+mothers working in the fields or on the railroads. There are so many
+pitiful cases that one longs for a mint of money and a dozen hands to
+relieve them. One little girl of six comes every day with her blind
+baby brother strapped on her back. She is a tiny thing herself and yet
+that baby is never unstrapped from her back until night comes. When I
+first saw her old weazened face and her eagerness to play, I just took
+them both in my lap and cried!
+
+One funny thing I must tell you about. From the first week that I got
+here, the children have had a nickname for me. I noticed them laughing
+and nudging each other on the street and in the school, and whenever I
+passed they raised their right hands in salute, and gave a funny
+little clucking sound.  They seemed to pass the word from one to
+another until every youngster in the neighborhood followed the
+trick. My curiosity was aroused to such a pitch that I got an
+interpreter to investigate the matter. When he came to report, he
+smilingly touched my little enamelled watch, the one Jack gave me on
+my 16th birthday, and apologetically informed me that the children
+thought it was a decoration from the Emperor and they were saluting me
+in consequence! And they have named me "The Lady of the Decoration".
+Think of it, I have a title, and I am actually looked up to by these
+funny yellow babies as a superior being. They forget it some time
+though when we all get to playing together in the yard.  We can't talk
+to each other, but we can laugh and romp together, and sometimes the
+fun runs high.
+
+I am busy from morning until night.  The two kindergartens, a big
+training class in physical culture, two Japanese lessons a day and
+prayers about every three minutes, don't leave many spare hours for
+homesickness. But the longing is there all the same, and when I see
+the big steamers out in the harbor and realize that they are coaling
+for _home_, I just want to steal aboard and stay there.
+
+The language is something awful. I get my tongue in such knots that I
+have to use a corkscrew to pull it straight again. Just between you
+and me, I have decided to give it up and devote my time to teaching
+the girls to speak English instead. They are such responsive, eager
+little things, it will not be hard.
+
+As for the country, I wouldn't dare to attempt a
+description. Sometimes I just _ache_ with the beauty of it all!
+From my window I can see in one group banana, pomegranate, persimmon
+and fig trees all loaded with fruit.  The roses are still in full
+bloom, and color, color everywhere. Across the river, the banks are
+lined with picturesque houses that look out from a mass of green, and
+above them are tea-houses, and temples and shrines so old that even
+the moss is gray, and time has worn away the dates engraved upon the
+stones.
+
+We spent yesterday at the sacred Island of Miyajima, which is about
+one hour's ride from here. The dream of it is still upon me and I wish
+I could share it with you. We went over in a sampan, a rude open boat
+rowed by two men in undress uniform. For half an hour we literally
+danced across the sea; everything was fresh and sparkling, and I was
+so glad to be alive and free, that I just sang for joy. Miss Leasing
+joined in and the boatmen kept time, smiling and nodding their
+approval.
+
+The mountains were sky high, and at their base in a small
+crescent-shaped plain was the village with streets so clean and white
+you hated to walk on them. We stopped at the "House of the White
+Cloud" and three little maids took off our shoes and replaced them
+with pretty sandals. The whole house was of cedar and ebony and bamboo
+and it had been rubbed with oil until it shone like satin. On the
+floor was a stuffed matting with a heavy border of crimson silk, and
+in the corner of the room was a jar that came to my shoulder, full of
+wonderfully blended chrysanthemums. All the rooms opened upon a porch
+which hung directly above a roaring waterfall, and below us a dozen
+steps away stretched the sparkling sea, full of hundreds of sailing
+vessels and junks.
+
+In the afternoon, we wandered over the island, visiting the old, old
+temples, listening to the mysterious wailing of the wind bells,
+feeding the deer and crane, and drinking in the beauty of it all. I
+felt like a disembodied spirit, traveling back, back over the
+centuries, into dim forgotten ages. The dead seemed close about me,
+yet they brought no gloom, for I too was dead.  All afternoon I had
+the impression of trying to keep my consciousness from drifting into
+oblivion through the gate of this magical dream!
+
+How you would enjoy it all, and read its deeper meaning, which is
+hidden from me. But even if I can't philosophize like a certain
+blessed old Mate of mine, I can _feel_ until every nerve is a
+tingle with the thrill.
+
+Good bye for a little while; I've stolen the time to write you this,
+and now it behooves me to hustle.
+
+
+
+
+November 12th, 1901.
+
+
+It's been a long while between "drinks", but I have been waiting until
+I could write a letter minus the groans. The truth is I have hit
+bottom good and hard and it is only to-day that I have come to the
+surface. When the exhilaration of seeing all the new and strange
+sights wore off, I began to sink in a sea of homesickness that
+threatened to put an end to the kindergarten business for good and
+all.
+
+I worked like mad, and all the time I felt like one of these whizzing
+rockets that go rushing through the air and die out in a miserable
+little fizzle at the end.  I can stand it in the daytime, but at night
+I almost go crazy. And you have no idea how many women do lose their
+minds out here. Nearly every year some poor insane creature has to be
+shipped home. You needn't worry about that though, if I had mind
+enough to lose I'd have lost it long ago.  But to think of all my old
+ambitions and aspirations ending in the humble task of wiping Little
+Japan's nose!
+
+I suppose you think I am pulling for the shore but I am not. I am
+steering my little craft right out in the billows It may be dashed to
+smithereens, and it may come safely home again, but in any case, I'll
+have the consolation of the Texas cowboy that "I've done my durndest!"
+
+By the way, what has become of Jack? He needn't have taken me so
+literally as never to send me a message even! You mentioned his having
+been at the Cape while you were there.  Was he just as unsociable as
+ever? I can see him now lying flat on his back in the bottom of a boat
+reading poetry.  I hate poetry, and when he used to quote his favorite
+passages I made parodies on them. Now _you_ were always
+different.  You'd rhapsodize with him to his heart's content.
+
+Just here I had a lovely surprise.  I looked out of the window and saw
+a coolie pull a little wagon into the yard and begin to unload. I
+couldn't imagine what was taking place but pretty soon Miss Dixon came
+in with both arms full of papers, pictures, magazines and letters. It
+was all my mail! I just danced up and down for joy. I guess you will
+never know the meaning of letters until you are nine thousand miles
+from home.  And such dear loving encouraging letters as mine were! I
+am going to sit right down and read them all over again.
+
+
+
+
+November 24th, 1901.
+
+
+Clear sailing once more, Mate! In my last, I remember, I was blowing
+the fog horn pretty persistently.
+
+The letters from home set me straight again. If ever a human being was
+blessed with a good family and good friends it is my unworthy self!
+The past week has been unusually exciting. First we had a wedding on
+hand. The bride is a girl who has been educated in the school, so of
+course we were all interested. Some time ago, the middle-man, who does
+all the arranging, came to her father and said a young teacher in the
+Government school desired his daughter in marriage.  The father
+without consulting the girl investigated the suitor's standing, and
+finding it satisfactory, said yea. So little Otoya was told that she
+was going to be married, and the groom elect was invited to call.
+
+I was on tiptoe with curiosity to see what would happen, but the
+meeting took place behind closed doors.  Otoya told me afterwards that
+she had never seen the young man until he entered the room, but they
+both bowed three times, then she served tea while her mother and
+father talked to him.  "Didn't you talk to him at all?" I asked. She
+looked horrified. "No, that would have been most immodest!"  she
+said. "But you peeped at him," I insisted. She shook her head, "That
+would have been disgrace." Now that was three months ago and she
+hadn't seen him until Monday when they were married.
+
+At our suggestion they decided to have an American wedding and I was
+appointed mistress of ceremonies. It was great fun, for we had a best
+man, besides brides-maids and flower girls, and Miss Lessing played
+the Wedding March for them to enter. The arrangements were somewhat
+difficult owing to the fact that the Japanese consider it the height
+of vulgarity to discuss anything pertaining to the bride or the
+wedding. They excused me on the ground that I was a foreigner.
+
+The affair was really beautiful!  The little bride's outer garment was
+the finest black crepe, but under it, layer after layer, were slips of
+rainbow tinted cob-web silk that rippled into sight with every
+movement she made. And every inch of her trousseau was made from the
+cocoons of worms raised in her own house, and was spun into silk by
+her waiting maids.
+
+After the excitement of the wedding had subsided, we had a visitation
+from forty Chinese peers. They came in a cavalcade of kuramas,
+gorgeously arrayed, and presenting an imposing appearance.  I ran for
+the poker for I thought maybe they had come to finish "Us
+Missionaries." But, bless you, they had heard of our school and our
+kindergarten and had come for the Chinese Government to investigate
+ways and means. They made a tour of the school, ending up in, the
+kindergarten. The children were completely overpowered by these
+black-browed, fierce-looking gentlemen, but I put them through their
+paces. The visitors were so pleased that they stayed all morning and
+signified their unqualified approval. When they started to leave, I
+asked the interpreter if their gracious highnesses would permit my
+unworthy self to take their honorable pictures.  Would you believe it?
+Those old fellows puffed up like pouter pigeons, and giggled and
+primped like a lot of school girls! They stood in a row and beamed
+upon me while I snapped the kodak. If the picture is good, I'll send
+you one.
+
+This morning I had to teach Sunday School. I'll be praying in public
+next.  I see it coming. The lesson was "The Prodigal Son", a subject
+on which I ought to be qualified to speak. The Japanese youths
+understood about one word out of three, but they were giving me close
+attention. I was expounding with all the earnestness in me when
+suddenly I remembered a picture Jack used to have. It was of a lean
+little calf tearing down the road, while in the distance was coming a
+lazy looking tramp. Underneath was the legend:
+
+  "Run, bossy, run,
+  Here comes the Prodigal Son."
+
+That settled my sermon, so I told the boys a bear story instead.
+
+How I should love to drop in on you to-night and sit on the floor
+before the fire and pow-wow! I'll be an awful back number when I come
+home, but just think how entertaining I'll be!  I have enough good
+dinner stories to last through the rest of my life!
+
+For heaven's sake send me some hat pins, nice long ones with pretty
+heads.  And if you are in New York this winter please get me two
+bottles of that violet extract that I always use.
+
+My dearest love to all, and a hundred kisses to the blessed children
+at home Don't you _dare_ let them forget me.
+
+
+
+
+November 27th, 1901.
+
+
+I told you it would come! My prophetic soul foresaw it. I had to lead
+the prayer in chapel this morning.  And I play the organ in Sunday
+School and listen to two Japanese sermons on Sunday.
+
+I tell you, Mate, this part of the work goes sadly against the
+grain. They say you get used to hanging if you just hang long enough,
+so I suppose I'll become reconciled in time.  You ask me _why_ I
+do these things.  Well you see it's all just like a big work shop,
+where everybody is working hard and cheerfully and yet there is so
+much work waiting to be done, that you don't stop to ask whether you
+like it or not.
+
+I can't begin to tell you of the hopelessness of some of the lives out
+here.  Just think of it! Women working in the stone quarries, and in
+the sand pits and on the railroads, and always with babies tied on
+their backs, and the poor little tots crippled and deformed from the
+cramped position and often blind from the glare of the sun.
+
+What I am crazy to do now is to open another free kindergarten in one
+of the poorest parts of the city. It would cost only fifty dollars to
+run it a whole year, and I mean to do it if I have to sell one of my
+rings. It is just glorious to feel that you are actually helping
+somebody, even if that somebody is a small and dirty tribe of Japanese
+children.  I get so discouraged and blue sometimes that I don't know
+what to do, but when a little tot comes up and slips a very soiled
+hand into mine and pats it and lays it against his cheek and hugs it
+up to his breast and says, "Sensei, Sensei," I just long to take the
+whole lot of them to my heart and love them into an education!
+
+They don't know the word love but they know its meaning, and if I
+happen to stop to pat a little head, a dozen arms are around me in a
+minute, and I am almost suffocated with affection.  One little fellow
+always calls me "Nice boy" because that is what I called him.
+
+We are having glorious weather, cold in doors but warm outside. The
+chrysanthemums and roses are still blooming, and the trees are heavily
+laden with fruit. The persimmons grow bigger than a coffee cup and the
+oranges are tiny things, but both are delicious.  Chestnuts are twice
+as big as ours, and they cook them as a vegetable.
+
+You'll be having Thanksgiving soon, and you will all go up to
+Grandmother's, and have a jolly time together.  Have them fix a plate
+for me, Mate, and turn down an empty glass.  Nobody will miss me as
+much as I will miss my poor little self.
+
+What jolly Thanksgivings we have had together! The gathering of the
+clans, the big dinner, and the play at night. Not exactly a play, was
+it, Mate f More of a vaudeville performance with you as the stage
+manager, and I as the soubrette. Do you remember the last reunion
+before I was married? I mean the time I was Lady Macbeth and gave a
+skirt dance, and you did lovely stunts from Grand Opera. Have you
+forgotten Jack's famous parody on "My Country 'Tis of Thee?"
+
+  "My turkey, 'tis of thee,
+  Sweet bird of cranberry,
+  Of thee I sing!
+  I love thy neck and wings,
+  Legs, back and other things," etc, etc.
+
+There goes the bell, and here go I.  I can appreciate the feelings of
+a fire engine!
+
+
+
+
+Christmas Day, 1901.
+
+
+Had somebody told you last Christmas, as we trimmed the big tree and
+made ready for the family gathering, that this Christmas would find me
+in a foreign country teaching a band of little heathens, wouldn't you
+have thought somebody had wheels in his head?
+
+And yet it is true, and I have only to lift my eyes to realize fully
+that I am really in the flowery kingdom. The plum blossoms are in full
+bloom and the roses too, while a thick frost makes everything
+sparkling white in the sunshine.  The mountains have put on a thin
+blue veil trimmed in silver, and over all is a turquoise sky.
+
+And best of all, everybody--I speak figuratively--is happy. It may be
+that some poor little waif is hungry, having had only rice water for
+breakfast, it may be some sad hearts are beating under the gay
+kimonos, and it _may_ be, Mate dear, that somebody, a stranger in
+a strange land, can't keep the tears back, and is longing with all her
+mind and soul and body for home and her loved ones. But never you
+mind, nobody knows it but you and me and a bamboo tree!
+
+This afternoon we are going to have tea for the Mammas and Papas, and
+I am going to put on my prettiest clothes and do my yellow locks in
+their most fetching style.
+
+I shall lock up tight, way down deep, all heartaches and longings and
+put on my best smile for these dear little people who have given to
+me, a stranger, such full measure of their sympathy and friendship,
+who, in the big service last month, when giving thanks for all the
+great blessings of the past year, named the new Kindergarten teacher
+first.
+
+Do you wonder that I am happy and miserable and homesick and contented
+all at the same time?
+
+The box I sent home for Christmas was a paltry offering compared to
+what I wanted to send, but the things were bought with the first money
+I ever earned. They are packed in so tight with love that I doubt if
+you ever get them out.
+
+Our Christmas dinner was not exactly a success. We invited all the
+foreigners in Hiroshima, twelve in number, and everybody talked a
+great deal and laughed at everybody's stale jokes, and pretended to be
+terribly hilarious.  But there was a pathetic droop to every mouth,
+and not a soul referred to _home_. Each one seemed to realize
+that the mere mention of the word would break up the party.
+
+I tell you I am beginning to look with positive reverence on the
+heroism of some of these people! Tears and regrets have no place here;
+desire, ambition, love itself is laid aside, and only taken out for
+inspection perhaps in the dead hours of the night. If heart breaks
+come, as come they must, there is no crying out, no rebellion, just a
+stiffer lip and a firmer grip and the work goes on.
+
+I wish I was like that, but I'm not.  If Nature had put more time on
+my head and less on my heart, she would have turned out a better job.
+
+I put a pipe in the box for Jack. If you think I ought not to have
+done it, don't give it to him. As old Charity used to say, "I don't
+want to discomboberate nobody." Only I hope he won't think I am
+ungrateful and indifferent.
+
+
+
+
+NAGASAKI. January 14th, 1902.
+
+
+Now aren't you surprised at hearing from me in Nagasaki? I am
+certainly surprised at being here! One of the teachers at the school,
+Miss Dixon, Was taken sick and had to come here to see a doctor. I was
+lucky enough to be asked to come with her.
+
+I am so excited over being in touch with civilization again that I
+can't sleep at night! The transports and all the steamers stop here,
+and every type of humanity seems to be represented.  This morning when
+I went out to mail a letter, there were two Sikhs in uniform in front
+of me, at my side was a Russian, behind me two Chinamen and a
+Japanese, while a Frenchman stepped aside for me to pass, and an
+Irishman tried to sell me some vegetables!
+
+Miss Dixon had to go to the Hospital for a few days, though her
+trouble is nothing serious, and I accepted an invitation from
+Mrs. Ferris, the wife of the American Consul, to spend a few days with
+her.
+
+And oh! Mate, if you only _knew_ the time I have had! If I
+weren't a sort of missionary-in-law I would quote Jack and say it has
+been "perfectly damn gorgeously." If you want to really enjoy the
+flesh-pots just live away from them for six months and then try them!
+
+The night I came, the Ferrises gave me a beautiful dinner, and I wore
+evening dress for the first time in two years, and was as thrilled as
+a debutante at her first ball! It was so good to see cut glass and
+silver, and to hear dear silly worldly chatter that I grew terribly
+frivolous. Plates were laid for twenty, and who do you suppose was on
+my right? The severe young purser who was on the steamer I came over
+in!  His ship is coaling in the harbour and he is staying with the
+Ferrises, who are old friends of his. He is so solemn that he almost
+kills me. If he weren't so good looking I could let him alone, but as
+it is I can't help worrying the life out of him.
+
+The dinner was most elaborate. After the oysters, came a fish nearly
+three feet long all done up in sea-weed, then a big silver bowl was
+brought in covered with pie-crust. When the carver broke the crust
+there was a flutter of wings, and "four and twenty black birds" flew
+out. This it seems was done by the Japanese cook as a sample of his
+skill. All sorts of queer courses followed, served in the most unique
+manner possible.
+
+After dinner they begged me to sing, and though I protested violently,
+they got me down at the piano. I didn't get up any more until the
+party was over for they made me sing every song I knew and some I
+didn't. I sang some things so hoary with age that they were decrepit!
+The purser so far forgot himself as to ask me to sing "My Bonnie lies
+over the Ocean"! I did so with great expression while he looked
+pensively into the fire. Since then I have called him, "My Bonnie,"
+and he _hates_ me.
+
+The next day we went out to services on board the battleship "Victor."
+The ship had been on a long cruise and we were the first American
+women the officers had seen for many a long day.  They gave us a
+rousing welcome you may be sure. Through some mistake they thought I
+was a "Miss" instead of a "Mrs." and I shamelessly let it pass. During
+service I heard little that was said for the band was playing outside
+and flags were flying and I was feeling frivolous to the tip of my
+toe!  I guess I am still pretty young, for brass buttons are just as
+alluring as of old.
+
+When the Admiral heard I was from Kentucky, he invited us to take
+tiffin with him, and we exchanged darkey stories and the old gentleman
+nearly burst his buttons laughing. After tea, he showed us over the
+ship, making the sailors line up on deck for our benefit.  "Tell the
+band to play 'Old Kentucky Home'," he ordered.
+
+"You'll lose a passenger if you do!"  I cried, "for one note of that
+would send me overboard!"
+
+He was so attentive that I had little chance to talk to the young
+officers I met. But several of them have called since, and I have been
+out to a lot of teas and dinners and things with them.  The one I like
+best is a young fellow from Vermont. He is very clever and jolly and
+we have great fun together.  In fact, we are such chums that he showed
+me a picture of his fiancee. He is very much in love with her, but if
+I were in her place I would try to keep him within eye-shot.
+
+We will probably go home to-morrow as Miss Dixon is so much better.
+I am glad she is better, but I could have been reconciled to her being
+mildly indisposed for a few days longer.
+
+I forgot to thank you for the kodak book you sent Christmas; between
+the joy of seeing all the familiar faces, and the bitterness of the
+separation, and the absurdity of your jingles, I nearly had hysterics!
+I almost felt as if I had had a visit home! The old house, the cabin,
+the cherry tree, and all the family even down to old black Charity,
+the very sight of whom made me hungry for buckwheat cakes, all, all
+gave me such joy and pain that it was hard to tell which was
+uppermost.
+
+It's worth everything to be loved as you all love me, and I am willing
+to go through anything to be worthy of it. I have had more than my
+share of hard bumps in life, but, thank Heaven, there was always
+somebody waiting to kiss the place to make it well. There isn't a day
+that I haven't some evidence of this love; a letter, a paper, a book
+that reminds me that I'm not forgotten.
+
+A note has just come from his Solemn Highness, the purser, asking me
+to go walking with him! I am going to try to be nice to him but I know
+I won't! He is so young and so serious that I can't resist shocking
+him. He doesn't approve of giddy young widows that don't look sorry!
+Neither do I. In two days I return to the fold.  Until then "My
+Bonnie" beware!
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, February 19th, 1902.
+
+
+After a sleepless night I got up this morning with a splitting
+headache. I have been back in the traces for a month, and I am
+beginning to feel like a poor old horse in a tread mill, not that I
+don't love the work, but oh!  Mate, I am so lonesome, lonesome,
+lonesome.  I think I used up so much sand when I first came that the
+supply is running low.
+
+  "All day there is the watchful world to face
+   The sound of tears and laughter fill the air.
+   For memory there is but scanty space
+   Nor time for any transport of despair.
+   But, Love, the pulse beats slow, the lips turn white
+         Sometimes at night!"
+
+Perhaps when I am old and gray and wrinkled I'll be at peace. But
+think of the years in between! I have been cheated of the best that
+life holds for a woman, the love of a good husband, the love of her
+children, and the joys of a home.
+
+The old world shakes its finger and says "you did it yourself". But,
+Mate, I was only eighteen, and I didn't know the real from the
+false. I staked my all for the prize of love, and I lost. Heaven knows
+I've paid the penalty, but I'd do it over again if I thought I was
+right. The difference is that then I was a child and knew too little,
+and now I am a woman and know too much.
+
+Sometimes the hymn-singing and praying, and "Sistering" and
+"Brothering" get on my nerves, until I almost scream, but when I
+remember how heavenly good to me they are I'm all contrition. I have
+even been invited to write for the Mission papers, now isn't that
+sufficient glory for any sinner?
+
+Your letters are such comforts to me! I read them over and over and
+actually know parts of them by heart!  Since I was a little girl I
+have had a burning desire to win your approval.  I remember once when
+you said I was stronger than the little boy next door I sprained my
+back trying to prove, it.  And now when you write those lovely things
+about me and tell me how good and brave I am, why I'd sprain something
+worse than my back to be worthy of your approval!
+
+But my courage doesn't always ring true, Mate, sometimes it's a brass
+ring.  If you want to hear of true heroism, just listen to this
+story. There was a little American Missionary, who was going home to
+stay after twenty years of hard service. At the request of the board
+she stopped off at the Leper Colony in order to make a report.  Soon
+after she reached home, she discovered a small white spot on her hand,
+and on consulting a physician, found it was leprosy. Without breathing
+a word of it to anyone, she bade her family and friends a cheerful
+good-bye, and came straight back to that Leper Colony, where she took
+up her work among the outcasts. Never an outcry, never a groan, not
+even a plea for sympathy!  Now how is that for a soldier lady?
+
+It is quite cold to-day and I am indulging in the luxury of a roaring
+fire. You know the natives use little stoves that they carry around
+with them, and call "hibachi." But cold as it is, the yard is full of
+roses and the tea-plants are gorgeous. I don't wonder that the climate
+gets mixed, out here. Everything else is hind part before.
+
+What do you suppose I've been longing for all day? A good saddle
+horse? I feel that a brisk canter would set me straight in a short
+time. But the only horse in Hiroshima is a mule.  A knock-kneed,
+cross-eyed old mule that bitterly resents the insult of being hitched
+to something that is a cross between a wheelbarrow and a baby
+buggy. The driver stands up for the excellent reason that he has no
+place to sit down! We tried this coupe once for the fun and
+experience. We got the experience all right but I am not so sure about
+the fun. We jolted along through the narrow streets scraping first
+against one house, then against another, while our footman, oh yes we
+had a footman, ran beside the thoroughbred to help him up when he
+stumbled.
+
+To-morrow we are to have company.  A Salvation Army lassie comes down
+from Tokio with a brass band. It is the second time in the history of
+the town that the people have had a chance to hear a brass band, and
+they are greatly thrilled. I must say I am a bit excited myself; Miss
+Lessing says she is going to keep me in sight, for fear I will follow
+the drum away. She needn't worry. I am through following anything in
+this world but my own nose.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, March 25, 1902.
+
+
+I am absolutely walking on air today!  Just when I thought my
+cherished dream of a free kindergarten would have to be given up, the
+checks from home came! You were a trump to get them all interested,
+and it was beautiful the way they responded.  Only _why_ did you
+tell Jack? He oughtn't to have sent so much. I'd send it back if I
+weren't afraid of hurting him.
+
+My head is simply spinning with plans! We are going to open the school
+right away and there are hundreds of things to be done. In spite of my
+home-sickness, and loneliness and longing for you loved ones, I
+wouldn't come home now if I could! It is the feeling that I am needed
+here, that a big work will go undone, if I don't do it, that simply
+puts my little wants and desires right out of the question!
+
+Yesterday we had a mothers' meeting, and I have not stopped laughing
+over it yet! It seems that the mothers considered it proper to show
+their appreciation by absolute solemnity. After tea and cake were
+served they sat in funeral silence. Not a word nor a smile could we
+get out of them. When I couldn't stand it another minute, I told Miss
+Lessing I was going to break the ice if I went under in the effort.
+By means of an interpreter, I told the mothers that we were going to
+try an American amusement and would they lend their honorable
+assistance? Then I called in thirty of the school girls and told each
+one to ask a mother to skip. They were too polite to decline, so to
+the tune of "Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose," the procession started.
+Miss Dixon couldn't stay in the room for laughing. The old and the
+young, and the fat and the thin caught the spirit of it and went
+hopping and jumping around the circle in great glee. After that, old
+ladies and all played "Pussy Wants a Corner," and "Drop the
+Handkerchief," and they laughed and chattered like a lot of children.
+They stayed four hours, and we are still picking up hair ornaments!
+
+Up over my table I have the little picture you sent of the "Lane that
+turned at last". You always said my lane, would turn, and it
+_has_ turned into a broad road bordered by cherry-blossoms and
+wistaria. But, Mate, you needn't think there are no more mudholes, for
+there are. When I see them ahead, I climb the fence and walk around!
+
+I am getting quite thrilled these days over the prospect of war. The
+soldiers are drilling by the hundreds, and the bugles are blowing all
+day. It makes little thrills run up and down my back, but Miss Lessing
+says nothing will come of it, that Japan is always getting ready for a
+scrap. But the Trans-Siberian Railway has refused all freight because
+it is too busy bringing soldiers and supplies to Vladivostock.  Now
+speaking of Vladivostock reminds me of a plan that has been suggested
+for next summer. Miss Dixon, the teacher who was sick, is going to
+Russia and is crazy for me to go with her. It wouldn't be much more
+expensive than staying in Japan, and would be tremendously
+interesting.  Don't mention it to anybody at home, but write me if you
+approve.  I wish you could have peeped into my room last night. Four
+or five of the girls slipped in after the silence bell had rung, and
+we sat around the fire on the floor and drank tea while I showed them
+my photographs. They made such a pretty picture, with their gay gowns
+and red cheeks, and they were so thrilled over all my things.  The
+pictures from home interested them most of all, especially the one of
+you and Jack which I have framed together.  At first they thought you
+must be married, and when I said no, they decided that you were
+lovers, so I let it go.
+
+After they went to bed, I sat and looked at the two pictures in the
+double frame and wondered how it was after all that you and Jack
+_hadn't_ fallen in love with each other! You both live with your
+heads in the clouds; I should think you would have bumped into each
+other long before this. He told me once that you had fewer faults than
+any woman he had ever known. Telling me of other people's virtues was
+one of Jack's long suits.
+
+My last minute of grace is gone, so I must say good-night. I am
+getting up at five o'clock these mornings in order to get in all that
+I want to do.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, May 31, 1902.
+
+
+Under promise that I will not write a long letter, I am allowed to
+begin one to you this morning. Miss Lessing wrote you last week that I
+had been sick. The truth is I tried to do too much, and paid up for it
+by staying in bed two whole weeks. Perhaps I will acquire a little
+sense in the next world; I certainly haven't in this! Japan wasn't
+made for restless, energetic people. If you can't learn to be lazy,
+you can't last long.
+
+I can never tell you how good Miss Lessing has been, sleeping right by
+me, taking care of me and loving me like I was her own child. The
+girls too, have been so good sending me gifts almost every hour in the
+day. One little girl got up at prayers the other night, and, folding
+her hands, said: "Oh Lord, please make the Skipping Sensei well, and
+help me to keep my mouth shut so it will be quiet, for she has been
+good to us and we all do love her much."  Heaven knows the "Skipping
+Sensei" needs all the prayers of the congregation!
+
+Just as soon as school is over, Miss Dixon and I start for
+Russia. It's a good thing that vacation is near for I am tired of
+being a Missionary lady, and a school-marm, in fact I am tired of
+being good.
+
+Don't worry about me, for I am all right. I've just run down and need
+a little fun to wind me up for another year.
+
+
+
+
+KOBE, July 16, 1902.
+
+
+Does July 16th mean anything to you?  It does to me. Just one year ago
+today the gates of that old Union Depot shut between me and all that
+was dear to me, and I went out into the big world to fight my big
+fight alone. Well, I am still fighting, Mate, and probably will be to
+the end of the campaign.
+
+As you see I am in Kobe waiting for my pass-port to go to Russia. If
+there is anything you want to know about pass-ports just apply to
+me. With all confidence, I sailed down to the Consulate and was met by
+a pair of legs attached to a huge mustache and the funniest little
+button of a head you ever saw. I think the Lord must have laughed when
+he got through making that man! He was horribly bored with life in
+general, and me in particular.  He motioned me wearily to a chair
+beside a table, and, handing me a paper, managed to sigh: "Fill in."
+
+The questions were about like this: Who was your father? What are you
+doing out of your own country? Was anybody in your family ever hung?
+How many teeth have you?
+
+I wrote rapidly until I got to "When were you born?" Button-Head was
+standing by me, so I looked up at him helplessly and told him that was
+one thing I _never_ could remember. He said I would have to, and
+I said I couldn't.  He pranced around for fifteen minutes, and I
+pretended to be racking my brain.
+
+Then he handed me a Bible, and said in a stern voice: "Swear." I told
+him that I couldn't, that I never had sworn, that ladies didn't do it
+in America, wouldn't he please do it for me?
+
+About this time Miss Dixon spoiled the fun by laughing, so I had to
+behave.  After we had spent two hours and three dollars in that dingy
+old office, we departed, but our troubles were not over. No sooner had
+we reached the hotel than Button-Head appeared with more papers. "You
+failed to describe yourself," he mournfully announced, handing me
+another slip.
+
+I had not had my dinner and I was cross, but I seized a pen determined
+to make short work of it. How tall?  Easily told. Black or white? Very
+easy. Kind of chin? Round and rosy.  Shape of face? Depends on time
+and place. Hair? Pure gold. Eyes?  Now I knew they were green but that
+did not sound poetic enough so I appealed to Dixie. She thought for a
+while, then said, "Not gray nor brown, I have it, they are syrup
+colored!" So I put it down along with a lot of other nonsense.
+
+Now the papers have to be sent to Tokyo for approval, then back here
+again where I will have to do some more signing and swearing. Isn't
+this enough to discourage people from ever going anywhere?
+
+The news about the sailboat is great.  How many of you will be up at
+the Cape this summer? Is Jack going? When I think of the starlight
+nights out in the boat, and the long lazy mornings on the beach, I get
+absolutely faint with longing. Heretofore I haven't _dared_ to
+enjoy things, and now, when I might, I am an exile heading for
+Siberia!  Oh, well! perhaps there will be starlight nights in Siberia,
+who knows?
+
+
+
+
+VLADIVOSTOCK, SIBERIA, August 16, 1902.
+
+
+If I should write all I wanted to say this morning, my letter would
+reach across the Pacific! I didn't believe it was possible for me ever
+to have such a good time again.
+
+When we came, we brought a letter of introduction to a Mrs. Heath. She
+has a beautiful big house, and a beautiful big heart, and she took us
+right into both.
+
+The day after we arrived, I was standing on her piazza looking down
+the bay, when I saw a battle-ship come sailing in under a salute of
+seventeen guns from the fort. It turned out to be the "Victor," and
+you never knew such rejoicing. Mrs. Heath knows all the navy people
+and her house is a favorite rendezvous. Before night, we had met many
+old acquaintances, among them my Nagasaki friend, "Vermont."
+
+It has been tremendously jolly and I can't deny that I have been
+outrageously frivolous for a missionary! But to save my life I can't
+conjure up the ghost of a regret! And what is more, I have been
+contaminating Dixie! I have kept her in such a giddy whirl that she
+says I have paralysed her conscience!  I have dressed her up and
+trotted her along to lunches, teas and dinners, to concerts on sea and
+land, and once, Oh! awful confession, I bulldozed her into going to
+the theatre!  The consequence is that she has gotten entirely well and
+looks ten years younger. Her chief trouble was that she had surrounded
+herself with a regular picket fence of creed and dogma, and was afraid
+to lift her eyes for fear she would catch a glimpse through the
+cracks, of the beautiful world which God meant for us to enjoy. It
+gave me particular joy to pull a few palings off that picket fence!
+
+Most of my time is spent on the water with Vermont. I don't find it
+half bad out on the bewitching Uzzuri Bay when the moon is shining and
+the music floats over the water, to discuss love with a fascinating
+youth!
+
+What does it matter if he is talking about "the other one"? Don't you
+suppose that I am glad to know that somewhere in this wide world
+there's a man that can be loyal to his sweetheart even though she is
+ten thousand miles away?
+
+I ask occasional questions and don't listen to the answers, and he
+pours out his confessions and thinks I am lovely.  He really is one of
+the dearest fellows I ever met, and I am glad for that other girl with
+all my heart.
+
+I like several of the other men very much but they bother me with
+questions.  They refuse to believe that I am connected with a mission,
+and consider it all as a huge joke.
+
+I wish you could see this place. It is built in terraces up the
+greenest of mountains and forms a crescent around the bay. Everybody
+seems to be in uniform of some kind, and soldiers and sailors are at
+every turn. The streets are a glittering panorama of strange color and
+form. At night everything is ablaze, bands playing, uniforms
+glittering, and flags flying. It is all just one intense thrill of
+life and rhythm, and the cloven foot of my worldliness never fails to
+keep time.
+
+But when daylight comes and all the sordid ugliness is revealed,
+disgust takes the place of fascination. The streets are crowded with
+thousands of degraded Chinese and Koreans, who, even in their
+brutality, are not as bad as the ordinary Russians.
+
+Through this mass of poverty and degradation dash handsome carriages
+filled with richly clad people. The drivers wear long blue plush
+blouses with red sleeves and belt, and trousers tucked in high
+boots. On their heads they wear funny little hats that look as if they
+had been sat on. They generally stand up while driving and lash the
+poor horses into a dead run from start to finish. Many of them are
+ex-convicts and can never leave Siberia.  If their cruelty to horses
+is any criterion of their cruelty to their fellow men, I can't help
+thinking they deserve their punishment.
+
+I won't dare to mail this letter until I get out of Russia for they
+are so cranky about their blessed old country.  They would not even
+let me have a little flag to send to the boys at home!  I found out
+to-day that a policeman comes every day to see what we have been
+doing, what hours we keep, etc.  In fact every movement is watched,
+and one day when we returned to the hotel, we found that all our
+possessions had been searched, and the police had even left their old
+cigar stumps among our things! The more you see of Russia, the more
+deeply you fall in love with Uncle Sam!
+
+Several days ago Mrs. Heath gave us a tennis-tea and we had a jolly
+time.  The tea was served under the trees from a steaming samovar,
+around which gathered representatives of many nations. There were many
+unpronounceable gentlemen, and one real English Lord, who considered
+Americans, "frightfully amusing."
+
+I thought I had forgotten how to play tennis but I hadn't. That
+undercut that Jack taught us won me a reputation.
+
+It is only when I stop to think, that I realize how far I am from
+home!  When I wonder where you all are this minute, and what you are
+doing, I feel as if I were on a visit to the planet Mars, and had no
+communication whatever with the world.
+
+Think of me, Mate, in Siberia, eating fish with a spoon, and drinking
+coffee from a glass! Verily, when old Sister Fate found she could not
+down me, she must have decided to play pranks with me!
+
+My box of new clothes arrived just before I started, and I have had
+use for everything. When I get on the white coat suit and the white
+hat, I feel like a dream.
+
+The weather is simply glorious, like our best October days at
+home. Nothing could be more unlike than Russia and Japan! one is a
+great oil painting, tragic, majestic, grand, while the other is an
+exquisitely dainty water color full of sunshine and flowers.
+
+Callers have come so I must close.  Life is a very pretty game after
+all, especially when you get wise enough to look on.
+
+
+
+
+VLADIVOSTOCK, SIBERIA, September 1, 1902.
+
+
+Just a short letter to tell you that we leave Vladivostock to-night. I
+am all broken up; it has been the happiest summer that I have had for
+years and I can't bear to think of it being over.
+
+It has been so long since Peace and I have been acquainted that I
+hardly yet dare look her full in the face for fear she will take
+flight and leave me in utter darkness again. Even if she has not come
+to live with me, she is at least my next door neighbor, and I offer
+her incense that she may abide.
+
+Now I might as well confess that if it were not for Memory there is no
+telling what Peace might do! Poor old Memory! I'd like to throttle her
+sometime and bury her in a deep hole.  Yet she has served me many a
+good turn, and often laid a restraining hand on impulse and
+thought. But she is like a poor relation, always turning up at the
+wrong time!
+
+For instance, on a gorgeous moonlight night on the Uzzuri Bay when you
+are out in a sampan with a pigtail who neither sees nor hears, and
+your companion is clever enough to be fascinating and daring enough to
+say things he "hadn't oughter," and the music and the moonlight gets
+into your head, and you feel young and reckless and sentimental, then
+all of a sudden Memory recalls another moonlight night when the youth
+and the romance weren't merely make believe, and your mind travels
+wearily over the intervening years, and you sit up straight and look
+severe and put your hands behind you!
+
+Oh! I am clinging to my ideal, Mate, never fear. I've held on to her
+garments until they are tattered and torn.  You introduced me to her
+and I have never lost sight of her entirely.
+
+This afternoon the Victor sailed for the Philippines. As she passed
+Mrs.  Heath's cottage where we had all promised to be, she dipped her
+colors.  I felt pretty blue for I knew my good times were on board,
+and were sailing out of sight.
+
+I am now at the hotel, trunk and boxes packed, waiting to
+start. Cinderella is not going to wait for the stroke of twelve; she
+has donned her sober garments and is ready to be whisked back to the
+cinders on the hearth. I am glad hard work is ahead; a solid grind
+seems necessary for my soul's salvation.
+
+Farewell, vain earth! I love you not wisely but too well.
+
+Why can't people be nice to one without being too nice? And why can't
+you be horrid to people without being too horrid? Selah.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, October 10, 1902.
+
+
+Dear Old Mate:
+
+I am so dead tired to-night that I could not tell what part of me
+ached the most! But the spirit moves me to unburden my soul and I feel
+that I must write you. For this is one of my _dream_ nights, and
+I have so many in Japan, when my old shell is too exhausted to move,
+and so permits my soul to wander where it will, a dream night, when
+the moon is its silveriest and biggest and I want to hug it for I know
+that twelve hours before it looked down on my loved ones, and now it
+comes to make more beautiful this fairy land, hiding the scars and
+ugly places, touching the pine trees with silver points, and
+glorifying the old Temples, till one wonders if they _could_ have
+been made by hands. A night when the white robed priests are doing
+honor to some "heathen idol" and must needs call his wandering
+attention by the stroke of the deep toned bell, which sends its music
+far across sleeping Japan, out into the wonderful sea.
+
+I don't know what comes over me such nights as these. I don't seem to
+be me at all! I can lie most of the night, wide awake, yet unconscious
+of my surroundings, and dream dreams.  I live through all the joyful
+days of childhood, then through the sorrowful days of womanhood when I
+was learning how to live, through the years of heartache and
+heart-break,--and through it all, though I actually suffer, there, is
+such an unspeakable lightness and buoyancy, such a lifting up, that
+even pain is a pleasure. I can't explain it all, unless it is the
+influence of this mysterious country, lulling and soothing, but
+powerful and subtle as poison.
+
+My dear girl you say you feel too far away to help me! Now don't you
+worry about that! If you never wrote me another line, you would help
+me.  Just to know that you are around there, on the other side of the
+earth, believing in me, loving me, and _approving_ of me, means
+everything. You were right to make me come, and while it cost me my
+very heart's blood, yet I am learning my lesson as you said I would.
+
+My little ship may never again sail into the harbor of happiness, yet
+there are sunny seas where soft winds blow, and even if my ship is all
+by its lonesome, yet it's such a frisky craft, warranted never to
+sink, no matter what the weather, that it can sail over many seas,
+touch many lands, and grow rich in experience. And hid away in the
+locker where no eye save mine may see, are my treasures; your love is
+one, and nothing can rob me of it.
+
+What you write me of Jack makes me very unhappy. I am not worth his
+worrying over. Tell him so, Mate. If I could ever care for anybody
+again in this world, it would be for him, but if an occasional
+sentiment dares to spring up into my heart, I pull it up by the roots!
+I would give anything to write to him, but I know it would only bring
+pain to us both. Be good to him, Mate, I can't bear to think of him
+being miserable.
+
+I am so tired that I can scarcely keep the tears back. I must write no
+more.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, November 14, 1902.
+
+
+I have about fifteen minutes between classes, and I am going to spend
+them on you. Now who do you suppose has come to the surface again?
+Little Germany, who was on the steamer coming over. He wasted a great
+many stamps on me for the first few months after we landed but he got
+tired of playing solos. He was on his way to Thibet to enter a
+monastery to study some ancient language. Heaven knows why he wants to
+know anything more antique than the language he speaks! I don't
+believe there is any old dusty, forgotten corner of the world that he
+hasn't poked into.
+
+Well you know the fatal magnetism I exert over fossils! They always
+turn to me as naturally as needles turn to a loadstone. This
+particular mummy was no exception.
+
+I wrote him a formal stately answer, reminding him in gentle reproof
+that I was a widow (God save the Mark) and that my life was dedicated
+to my work. It was no use, he bombarded me with letters, with bigger
+and bigger words and longer and fiercer quotations.  In the last one
+he threatens to come to Hiroshima!
+
+If he does, I am going to shave my eye-brows and black my teeth! He
+speaks seven languages, and yet he doesn't know the meaning of the one
+word "no."
+
+Jack used to say that if a man was persistent enough he could win a
+woman in spite of the Devil. I would like to see him! I mean Jack, not
+Dutchy nor the Devil.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, Christmas Eve, 1902.
+
+
+I am in the very thickest of Christmas, and yet such a funny, unreal
+Christmas, that it does not seem natural at all. Hiroshima is busy
+decorating for the New Year, and everything is gay with brilliant
+lanterns, plum blossoms and crimson berries. The little insignificant
+streets are changed into bowers of sweet smelling ferns and spicy
+pines, and the bamboo leaves sway to every breeze, while the waxen
+plum blossoms send out a perfume sweet as violets.
+
+The shop-keepers and their families put on their gayest kimonos and
+their most enticing smiles and greet you with effusion.
+
+On entering a shop you are asked if your honorable eyes will deign to
+look upon most unworthy goods.  Please will you give this or that a
+little adoring look? The price? Ah! it's price is greatly enhanced
+since the august foreigner cast honorable eyes upon it. (Which is no
+joke!) Whether the article is bought or not, the smile, the bow, the
+compliment are the same.  All this time the crowd around the door of
+the shop has been steadily increasing until daylight is shut out, for
+everyone is interested in your purchase from the man who hauls the
+dray up to the highest lady in the land. The shop-keeper is very
+patient with the crowd until it shuts out the light, then he invites
+them to carry their useless bodies to the river and throw them in.
+
+Once outside you see another crowd and as curiosity is in the air, you
+crane your neck and try to get closer. The center of attraction is a
+man in spotless white cooking bean cake on a little hibachi. The air
+is cold and crisp, and the smell of the savory bean paste, piping hot,
+makes you hungry.
+
+Next comes the fish man with a big flat basket on each end of a pole,
+and offers you a choice lot; long slippery eels, beautiful shrimp, as
+pink as the sunset, and juicy oysters whose shells have been scrubbed
+until they are gleaming white. Around the baskets are garlands of
+paper roses to hide from view the ugly rough edges of the straw.
+
+The candy shops tempt you to the last sen, and the toy shops are a
+perfect joy. Funny fat Japanese dolls and stuffed rabbits and
+cross-eyed, tailless cats demand attention. Perhaps you will see a
+cheap American doll with blue eyes and yellow hair carefully exhibited
+under a glass case, and when you are wondering why they treasure this
+cheap toy, you happen to glance down and catch the worshipping gaze of
+a wistful, half starved child, and your point of view changes at once
+and you begin to understand the value of it, and to wish with all your
+heart that you could put an American dolly in the hands of every
+little Japanese girl on the Island!
+
+It is getting almost time to open my box and I am right childish over
+it. It has been here for two days, and I have slipped in a dozen times
+to look at it and touch it. Oh! Mate, the time has been so long, so
+cruelly long! I wake myself up in the night some time sobbing.  One
+year and a half behind me, and two and a half ahead! I remember mother
+telling about the day I started to school, how I came home and said
+triumphantly, "Just think I've only got ten more years to go to
+school!"
+
+Poor little duffer! She's still going to school!
+
+Last night I had another mother's meeting for the mothers of the Free
+Kindergarten. This time I gave a magic lantern show, and I was the
+showman. The poor, ignorant women sat there bewildered. They had never
+seen a piano, and many of them had never been close to a foreigner
+before.  I showed them about a hundred slides, explained through an
+interpreter until I was hoarse, gesticulated and orated to no
+purpose. They remained silent and stolid. By and by there was a stir,
+heads were raised, and necks craned. A sudden interest swept over the
+room. I followed their gaze and saw on the sheet the picture of Christ
+toiling up the mountain under the burden of the cross. The story was
+new and strange to them, but the fact was as old as life itself. At
+last they had found something that touched their own lives and brought
+the quick tears of sympathy to their eyes.
+
+I am going to have a meeting every month for them, no matter what else
+has to go undone.
+
+It is almost time to hang up our stockings. Miss Lessing and Dixie
+objected at first, but I told them I was either going to be very
+foolish or very blue, they could take their choice. I have to do
+something to scare away the ghosts of dead Christmases, so I put on my
+fool's cap and jingle my bells.  When I begin to weaken, I go to the
+piano and play "Come Ye Disconsolate" to rag time, and it cheers me up
+wonderfully.
+
+I guess it's just about daylight with you now. Pete is tiptoeing in to
+make the fires. I can hear him now saying: "Christmas Gif' Mister Sam,
+Chris'mus Gif' Miss Bettie!" and the children are flying around in
+their night clothes wild with excitement. Down in the sitting room the
+stockings make a circle around the room and underneath each is a pile
+of gifts. I can see the big log fire, and the sparkle of it in the old
+book-case, and in the long glass between the windows. And in a few
+minutes here you all come, you uncles and you cousins and you aunts,
+trooping in with the smallest first.  And such laughing, and shouting,
+and rejoicing! and maybe in the midst of the fun somebody speaks of
+me, and there's a little hush, and a little longing, then the fun goes
+on more furiously than ever.
+
+Well even if I am on the wrong side of the earth in body, I am not in
+spirit, and I reach my arms clear around the world and cry "God bless
+you, every one."
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, March, 1903.
+
+
+I have a strong conviction that I am going to swear before I get
+through this letter, for this pen is what I would call, to use
+unmissionary language, devilish. My! how familiar and wicked that word
+looks! I've heard so many hymns and so much brotherly and sisterly
+talk that it seems like meeting an old friend to see it written!
+
+Here it is nearly cherry-blossom time again, and the days and the
+weeks are slipping away into months before I know it. I am working at
+full speed and wonder sometimes how I keep up.  But I don't dare leave
+any leisure for heartaches, even when the body is quivering from
+weariness, and every nerve cries out for rest. I must keep on and on
+and on, for all too easily the dread memories come creeping back and
+enfold me until there is no light on any side. From morning until
+night it is a fight against the tide.
+
+Work is the only thing that keeps me from thinking, and I am
+determined not to think. I suppose I am as contented here as I could
+be anywhere.  My whole heart is in the kindergarten and the success of
+it, and maybe the day will come when my work will be all sufficient to
+satisfy my soul's craving.  But it hasn't come yet!
+
+I almost envy some of these good people who can stand in the middle of
+one of their prayers and touch all four sides. They know what they
+want and are satisfied when they get it, but I want the moon and the
+stars and the sun thrown in.
+
+When things seem closing in upon me and everything looks dark, I flee
+to the woods. I never knew what the trees and the wind and the sky
+really meant until I came out here and had to make friends of them. I
+think you have to be by yourself and a bit lonesome before Nature ever
+begins to whisper her secrets. Can you imagine Philistine Me going out
+on the hill top to see the sun-rise and going without my supper to see
+it set? I am even studying the little botany that Jack gave me, though
+my time and my intellect are equally limited.
+
+And speaking of Jack leads me to remark that there is no necessity for
+all of you to maintain such an oppressive silence concerning him!
+Three months ago you wrote me that he was not well, and that he was
+going south with you and sister. He must be pretty sick to stop work
+even for a week. I have pictured you sitting with a loaf of bread and
+a jug of wine beneath the bough quoting poetry at each other to your
+heart's content.
+
+You say when I come home I can rest on my laurels; no thank you, I
+want a Morris chair, a pitcher of lemonade, all the new books and a
+little darkey to fan me.
+
+Mrs. Heath has asked me to visit her in Vladivostock this summer and I
+am going if the cholera doesn't get worse.  We are so afraid of it
+that we almost boil the cow before we drink the milk!
+
+Among the delicacies of our menu out here are raw fish, pickled
+parsnips, sea-weed and bean-paste. As old Charity used to say I've
+gotten so "acclamitized" I think I could eat a gum shoe.
+
+When they send out my spring box from home, please tell them to put in
+some fluffy white dresses with elbow sleeves. Then I want lots of
+pretty ribbons, and a white belt. I saw in the paper that crushed
+leather was the proper thing. It sounds like something good to eat,
+but if it's to wear send it along.
+
+My disposition will be everlastingly ruined if I write another line
+with this pen. Good-bye.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, May, 1903.
+
+
+Well the catastrophe arrived and we were prisoners for nearly a
+week. It was not quite cholera but close enough to it to scare us all
+to death. Both Eve and the apple were young and green, and the
+combination worked disaster.  When the doctor arrived, he shipped Eve
+off to the inspection hospital, while we were locked up, guarded by
+five small policemen, and hardly allowed to open our mouths for fear
+we would swallow a germ. We were fumigated and par-boiled until we
+felt like steam puddings. Nobody was allowed to go in or out, our
+vegetables were handed to us in a basket on a bamboo pole over the
+wall. We tied notes to bricks and flung them to our neighbors on the
+outside.  Thank Heaven, the servants were locked in too. Every day a
+little man with lots of brass buttons and a big voice came and asked
+anxiously after our honorable insides.
+
+I used every inducement to get them to let me go out for exercise. I
+fixed a tray with my prettiest cups and sent a pot of steaming coffee
+and a plate of cake out to the lodge house. Word came back, "We are
+not permitted to drink or taste food in an infected house." Then I
+tried them on button-hole bouquets, and when that failed, I got
+desperate, and announced that I was subject to fits, unless I got
+regular outside exercise every day. That fetched them and they gave
+the foreign teachers permission to walk in the country for half an
+hour provided we did not speak to any one.
+
+Eve was up and having a good time before the school gates were opened.
+While a prisoner, I did all sorts of odd jobs, patched, mended,
+darned, wrote letters, and chopped down two trees. The latter was a
+little out of my line, but the trees were eaten up with caterpillars,
+and as I could not get anybody to cut them down, I sallied forth and
+did it myself. My chef stood by and admired the job, but he would not
+assist for fear he would unwittingly murder one of his ancestors!
+
+You would certainly laugh to see me keeping house with a cook book, a
+grocery book and a dictionary. The other day I gave directions for
+poached eggs, and the maid served them in a huge pan full of water.
+
+There are one hundred and twenty-five yellow kids waiting for me so I
+must hurry away.
+
+
+
+
+VLADIVOSTOCK, SIBERIA, July, 1903.
+
+
+I didn't mean that it should be so long a time before I wrote you, but
+the closing of school, the Commencement, and the getting ready to come
+up here about finished me. You remember the old darkey song, "Wisht I
+was in Heaben, settin' down"? Well that was my one ambition and I
+about realized it when I got up here to Mrs. Heath's and she put me in
+a hammock in a quiet corner of the porch and made me keep blissfully
+still for two whole days.
+
+The air is just as bracing, the hills are just as green, and the
+lights and shadows dance over the harbor just as of old. We have
+tennis, golf, picnics, sails, and constant jollification, but I don't
+seem to enjoy it all as I did last summer. It isn't altogether
+homesickness, though that is chronic, it is a constant longing for I
+don't know what.
+
+Viewed impersonally, the world is a rattling good show, but instead of
+smiling at it from the front row in the dress circle, I get to be one
+of the performers every time.
+
+We have been greatly interested in watching the Russians build a fort
+on one of their islands near here. They insist there will be no war
+and at the same time they are mining the harbor and building forts day
+and night. The minute it is dark the searchlights are kept busy
+sweeping the harbor in search of something not strictly Russian.  I
+hope I will get back as safely as I got here.
+
+Did I tell you that I stopped over two days in Korea? I had often
+heard of the Jumping Off Place, but I never expected to actually see
+it! The people live in the most awful little mud houses, and their
+poverty is appalling. No streets, no roads, no anything save a fog of
+melancholy that seems to envelop everything. The terrible helplessness
+of the people, their ignorance, and isolation are terrible.
+
+The box from home was more than satisfactory. I have thoroughly
+enjoyed wearing all the pretty things.  The hat sister sent was about
+the size of a turn-table; a strong hat pin and a slight breeze will be
+all I need to travel to No Man's Land. Sister says it's
+_moderate_, save the mark! but it really is becoming and when I
+get it on, my face looks like a pink moon emerging from a fleecy black
+cloud. I had to practice wearing it in private until I learned to
+balance it properly.
+
+I shall stay up here through July and then I am thinking of going to
+Shanghai with Mrs. Heath's sister, who lives there. I am very fond of
+her, and I know I would have a good time. I feel a little like a
+subscription list, being passed around this way, but I simply
+_have_ to keep going every minute when I am not at work.
+
+They are calling up to me from the tennis court so I must stop for the
+present.
+
+
+
+
+SHANGHAI, CHINA, August, 1903.
+
+
+The mail goes out this morning and I am determined to get this letter
+written if I break up a dozen parties.  As you see, I am in Shanghai,
+this wonderful big understudy for Chicago, which seems about as
+incongruous in its surroundings as a silk hat on a haystack!  There
+are beautiful boulevards, immense houses, splendid public gardens, all
+hedged in by a yellow mass of orientals.
+
+Every nationality is represented here, and people meet, mingle, and
+separate in an ever changing throng. At every corner stands a tall
+majestic Sikh, with head bound in yards of crimson cloth, directing
+the movements of the crowd. Down the street comes a regiment of
+English soldiers, so big and determined that one well understands
+their victories. The ubiquitous Russian makes himself known at every
+turn, silent and grave, but in his simplest dealings as merciless and
+greedy as the country he represents. Frenchmen and Germans, and best
+of all, the unquenchable American, join in the panorama, and the
+result is something that one does not see anywhere else on the
+globe. I guess if my dear brethren knew of the theatre parties,
+dinners and dances I was going to, they would think I was on a
+toboggan slide for the lower regions! I am mot though. I am simply
+getting a good swing to the pendulum so that I can go back to "the
+field," and the baby organs and the hymn-singing with better grace. It
+is very funny, but do you know that for a _steady diet_ I can
+stand the saints much better than I can the sinners!
+
+My friends the Carters live right on the Bund facing the water. They
+keep lots of horses and many servants, and live in a luxury that only
+the East can offer. Every morning before I am up a slippery Chinese,
+all done up in livery, comes to my room and solemnly announces: "Missy
+bath allee ready, nice morning, good-bye." From that time on I am
+scarcely allowed to carry my pocket handkerchief!
+
+The roads about here are perfect, and we drive for hours past big
+country houses, all built in English fashion.  There is one grewsome
+feature in the landscape, however, and that is the Chinese graves. In
+the fields, in the back and front yards, on the highways, any bare
+space that is large enough to set a box and cover it with a little
+earth, serves as a burying ground.
+
+I am interested in it all, and enjoying it in a way, but, Mate, there
+is no use fibbing to you, there is a restlessness in my heart that
+sometimes almost drives me crazy. There is nothing under God's sun
+that can repay a woman for the loss of love and home. It's all right
+to love humanity, but I was born a specialist. The past is torn out by
+the roots but the awful emptiness remains. I am not grieving over what
+has been, but what isn't. That last sentence sounds malarial, I am
+going right upstairs to take a quinine pill.
+
+
+
+
+SOOCHOW, August, 1903.
+
+
+Well, Mate, this is the first letter I have really written you from
+China.  Shanghai doesn't count. Soochow is the real article. The
+unspeakable quantity and quality of dirt surpasses anything I have
+ever imagined. Dirt and babies, there are millions of babies, under
+your feet, around your heels, every nook and corner full of babies.
+
+From Shanghai to Soochow is only a one night trip, and as I had an
+invitation to come up for over Sunday, I decided to take advantage of
+it. You would have to see the boat I came in to appreciate it. They
+call it a house-boat, but it is built on a pattern that is new to
+me. In the lower part are rooms, each of which is supplied with a
+board on which you are supposed to sleep. Each passenger carries his
+own bedding and food. In the upper part of the boat is a sort of loft
+just high enough for a man to sit up, and in it are crowded hundreds
+of the common people. A launch tows seven or eight of these
+house-boats at a time. I will not ask you to even imagine the
+condition of them; I had to stand it because I was there, but you are
+not.
+
+It was just at sunset when we left Shanghai, and I got as far away
+from the crowd as I could and tried to forget my unsavory
+surroundings. The sails of thousands of Chinese vessels loomed black
+and big against the red sky as they floated silently by without a
+ripple. In the dim light, I read on the prow of a bulky schooner,
+"'The Mary', Boston, U.S.A." Do you know how my heart leapt out to
+"The Mary, Boston, U.S.A."? It was the one thing in all that vast,
+unfamiliar world that spoke my tongue.
+
+When I went to my room, I found that a nice little Chinese girl in a
+long sack coat and shiny black trousers was to share it with me. I
+must confess that I was relieved for I was lonesome and a bit nervous,
+and when I discovered that she knew a little English I could have
+hugged her. We spread our cold supper on the top of my dress suit
+case, put our one candle in the center, and proceeded to feast. Little
+Miss Izy was not as shy as she looked, and what she lacked in
+vocabulary she made up in enthusiasm. We got into a gale of laughter
+over our efforts to understand each other, and she was as curious
+about my costume as I was about hers. She watched me undress with
+unfeigned amusement, following the lengthy process carefully, then she
+rose, untied a string, stepped out of her coat and trousers, stood for
+a moment in a white suit made exactly like her outer garments, then
+gaily kicked off her tiny slippers and rolled over in bed. I don't
+know if this is a universal custom in China, but at any rate, little
+Miss Izy will never be like the old lady, who committed suicide
+because she was so tired of buttoning and unbuttoning.
+
+The next morning we were in Soochow, at least outside of the city
+wall.  They say the wall is over two thousand years old and it
+certainly looks it, and the spaces on top left for the guns to point
+through make it look as if it had lost most of its teeth. Things are
+so old in this place, Mate, that I feel as if I had just been born! I
+have nearly ran my legs off sightseeing; big pagodas and little
+pagodas, Mamma Buddhas and Papa Buddhas, and baby Buddhas, all of whom
+look exactly like their first cousins in Japan.
+
+Soochow is just a collection of narrow alley-ways over which the house
+tops meet, and through which the people swarm by the millions, sellers
+crying their wares, merchants urging patronage, children screaming,
+beggars displaying their infirmities, and through it all coolies
+carrying sedan chairs scattering the crowd before them.
+
+In many of the temples, the priests hang wind bells to frighten the
+evil spirits away. I think it is a needless precaution, for it would
+only be a feeble-minded spirit that would ever want to return to China
+once it had gotten away!
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, October, 1903.
+
+
+In harness again and glad of it.  I've opened the third kindergarten
+with the money from home; it's only a little one, eighteen children in
+all, and there were seventy-five applicants, but it is a
+beginning. You ought to see the mothers crowding around, begging and
+pleading for their children to be taken in, and the little tots weep
+and wail when they have to go home. I feel to-day as if I would almost
+resort to highway robbery to get money enough to carry on this work!
+
+My training class is just as interesting as it can be. When the girls
+came to me two years ago they were in the Third Reader. With two
+exceptions, I have given them everything that was included in my own
+course at home, and taught them English besides.  They are very
+ambitious, and what do you suppose is their chief aim in life?  To
+study until they know as much as I do! Oh! Mate, it makes me want to
+hide my head in shame, when I think of all the opportunities I
+wasted. You know only too well what a miserable little rubbish pile of
+learning I possess, but what you _don't_ know is how I have
+studied and toiled and burned the midnight tallow in trying to work
+over those old odds and ends into something useful for my girls. If
+they have made such progress under a superficial, shallow-pated thing
+like me, what _would_ they have done under a woman with brains?
+
+I wish you could look in on me to-night sitting here surrounded by all
+my household goods. The room is bright and cozy, and just at present I
+have a room-mate. It is a little sick girl from the training class,
+whom I have taken care of since I came back.  She belongs to a very
+poor family down in the country, her mother is dead, and her home life
+is very unhappy. She nearly breaks her heart crying when we speak of
+sending her home, and begs me to help her get well so she can go on
+with her studies.
+
+Of course she is a great care, but I get up a little earlier and go to
+bed a little later, and so manage to get it all in.
+
+We are getting quite stirred up over the war clouds that are hanging
+over this little water-color country. Savage old Russia is doing a lot
+of bullying, and the Japanese are not going to stand much more. They
+are drilling and marching and soldiering now for all they are
+worth. From Kuri, the naval station, we can hear the thunder of the
+guns which are in constant practice.  Out on the parade grounds, in
+the barracks, on every country road preparation is going on. Officers
+high in rank and from the Emperor's guard are here reviewing the
+troops. Those who know say a crash is bound to come.  So if you hear
+of me in a red cross uniform at the front, you needn't be surprised.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, November, 1903.
+
+
+My dear old Mate:
+
+I am just tired enough to-night to fold my hands, and turn up my toes
+and say "Enough." If overcoming difficulties makes character, then I
+will have as many characters as the Chinese alphabet by the time I get
+through.  The bothers meet me when the girl makes the fire in the
+morning and puts the ashes in the grate instead of the coal, and they
+keep right along with me all day until I go to bed at night and find
+the sheet under the mattress and the pillows at the foot.
+
+It wouldn't be near so hard if I could charge around, and let off a
+little of my wrath, but no, I must be nice and sweet and polite and
+_never_ forget that I am an Example.
+
+Have you ever seen these dolls that have a weight in them, so that you
+can push them over and they stand right up again? Well I have a large
+one and her name is Susie Damn. When things reach the limit of
+endurance, I take it out on Susie Damn. I box her jaws and knock her
+over, and up she comes every time with such a pleasant smile that I
+get in a good humor again.
+
+What is the matter with you at home?  Why don't you write to me? I
+used to get ten and twelve letters every mail, and now if I get one I
+am ready to cry for joy. Because I am busy does not mean that I
+haven't time to be lonely. Why, Mate, you can never know what
+loneliness means until you are entirely away from everything you
+love. I have tried to be brave but I haven't always made a grand
+success of it. What I have suffered--well don't let me talk about
+it. As Little Germany says, to live is to love, and to love is to
+suffer. And yet it is for that love we are ready to suffer and die,
+and without it life is a blank, a sail without a wind, a frame without
+the picture!
+
+Now to-morrow I may get one of your big letters, and you will tell me
+how grand I am, and how my soul is developing, etc., and I'll get such
+a stiff upper lip that my front teeth will be in danger. It takes a
+stiff upper lip, and a stiff conscience, and a stiff everything else
+to keep going out here!
+
+From the foregoing outburst you probably think I am pale and dejected.
+"No, on the contrary," as the seasick Frenchman said when asked if he
+had dined. I am hale and hearty, and I never had as much color in my
+life.  The work is booming, and I have all sorts of things to be
+thankful for.
+
+Our little household has been very much upset this week by the death
+of our cook. The funeral took place last night at seven o'clock from
+the lodge house at the gate. The shadows made on the paper screens as
+they prepared him for burial, told an uncanny story.  The lack of
+delicacy, the coarseness, the total disregard for the dignity of death
+were all pictured on the doors.  I stood in the chapel and watched
+with a sick heart. After they had crowded the poor old body into a
+sitting position in a sort of square tub, they brought it out to the
+coolies who were to carry it to the temple, and afterward to the
+crematory. The lanterns flickered with an unsteady light, making
+grotesque figures that seemed to dance in fiendish glee on the
+grass. The men laughed and chattered, and at last shouldered their
+burden and trotted off as merrily as if they were going to a matsuri.
+I never before felt the cruelty of heathenism so keenly. No punishment
+in the next world can equal the things they miss in this life by a
+lack of belief in a personal God.
+
+It must be very beautiful at home about this time. The beech trees are
+all green and gold, and the maples are blazing. I am thinking too
+about the shadows on the old ice-house. I know every one of them by
+heart, and they often come to haunt me as do many other shadows of the
+sad, sad past.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, December, 1903.
+
+
+God bless you honey, I've got a holiday and I've sworn vengeance on
+anyone who comes to my door until I have written my Christmas
+letters. I wish I was a doctor and a trained nurse, and a scholar, a
+magician, a philosopher and a saint all combined. I need them in my
+business.
+
+I have spent this merry Christmas season, chasing from pillow to post
+with bandages, hot water bags, poultices and bottles. We have had a
+regular hospital. All the Christmas money I had saved to buy presents
+for home went in Cod Liver Oil, and Miss Lessing, bless her soul, is
+doing without a coat for the same purpose. When you see a girl
+struggling for what little education she can get, and know what
+sacrifices are being made for it, you just hate your frumpery old
+finery, and you want to convert everything you possess into cash to
+help her. All the teachers are doing without fires in their rooms this
+winter, and it is rather chillsome to go to bed cold and wake up next
+morning in the same condition.  When I get home to a furnace-heated
+house and have cream in my coffee, I shall feel too dissipated to be
+respectable!
+
+We have not been able to get a new cook since our old one died, and
+the fact must have gotten abroad, for all the floating brethren and
+sisters in Japan have been to see us! Y.M.C.A.'s, W.C.T.U.'s,
+A.W.B.M.'s and X.Y.Z.'s have sifted in, and we have to sit up and be
+Marthas and Marys all at the same time!
+
+Sometimes I want to get my hat and run and run until I get to another
+planet. But I am not made of the stuff that runs, and I have the
+satisfaction of knowing that I have stuck to my post. If sacrificing
+self, and knocking longings in the head, and smashing heart-aches
+right and left, do not pass me through the Golden Gate, then I'll sue
+Peter for damages.
+
+It's snowing to-day, but the old Earth is making about as poor a bluff
+at being Christmasy as I am. The leaves are all on the trees, many
+flowers are in bloom, and the scarlet geraniums are warm enough to
+melt the snow flakes.
+
+My big box has arrived and I am keeping it until to-morrow. I go out
+and sit on it every little while to keep cheered up. This is my third
+Christmas from home, one more and then--!
+
+There has been too much sickness to make much of the holiday, but I
+have rigged up a fish pond for the kindergarten children, and each
+kiddie will have a present that cost one-fourth of a cent! I wish I
+had a hundred dollars to spend on them!
+
+To-night when the lights are out, my little sick girl's stocking will
+hang on one bed post, and mine on the other.  I don't believe Santa
+Glaus will have the heart to pass us by, do you?
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, January, 1904.
+
+
+Here it is January and I am just thanking you dear ones for my
+beautiful Christmas box. As you probably guessed, Mate, our Christmas
+was not exactly hilarious. The winter has been a hard one, the
+prospect of war has sent the price of provisions out of sight, the
+sick girls in the school have needed medicine and fires, so altogether
+Miss Lessing, Miss Dixon and I have had to do considerable tugging at
+the ends to get them to meet. None of us have bought a stitch of new
+clothing this winter, so when our boxes came, we were positively dazed
+by all the grandeur.
+
+They arrived late at night and we got out of bed to open them. The
+first thing I struck was a very crumpled little paper doll, with baby
+Bess' name printed in topsy-turvy letters on the back. For the next
+five minutes I was kept busy swallowing the lumps that came in my
+throat, but Dixie had some peppermint candy out of her box, the first
+I had seen since I had left home, so I put on my lovely new beaver
+hat, which with my low-necked gown and red slippers was particularly
+chic, and I sat on the floor and ate candy. It--the hat and the candy
+too, went a long way towards restoring my equanimity, but I didn't
+dare look at that paper doll again that night!
+
+You ask if I mind wearing that beautiful crepe de chine which is not
+becoming to you? Well, Mate, I suppose there was a day when I would
+have scorned anybody's cast-off clothes, but I pledge you my word a
+queen in her coronation robes never felt half so grand as I feel in
+that dress! Somehow I seem to assume some of your personality, I look
+tall and graceful and dignified, and I try to imagine how it feels to
+be good and intellectual, and fascinating, and besides I have the
+satisfaction of knowing that I am rather becoming to the dress myself!
+It fits without a wrinkle and next summer with my big black hat,--!
+Well, if Little Germany sees me, there will be something doing!
+
+I must tell you an experience I had the other day. Miss Lessing and I
+were coming back on the train from Miyajima and sitting opposite to us
+was an old couple who very soon told us that they had never seen
+foreigners before. They were as guileless as children, and presently
+the old man came over and asked if he might look at my jacket. I had
+no objections, so he put his hands lightly on my shoulders and turned
+me around for inspection.  "But," he said to Miss Lessing in Japanese,
+"how does she get into it?" I took it off to show him and in so doing
+revealed fresh wonders. He returned to his wife, and after a long
+consultation, and many inquiring looks, he came back. He said he knew
+he was a great trouble, but I was most honorably kind, and would I
+tell him why I wore a piece of leather about my waist, and would I
+please remove my dress and show them how I put it on? He was
+distinctly disappointed when I declined, but he managed to get in one
+more question and that was if we slept in our hats. When he got off,
+he assured us that he had never seen anything so interesting in his
+life, and he would have great things to tell the people of his
+village.
+
+There isn't a place you go, or a thing you do out here that doesn't
+afford some kind of amusement.
+
+The first glamour of the country has gotten dimmed a bit, not that the
+interest has waned for a moment, but I have come to see that the
+beauty and picturesqueness are largely on the surface. If ever I have
+to distribute tracts in another world, I am going to wrap a piece of
+soap in every one, for I am more and more convinced that the surest
+way to heaven for the heathen is the Soapy Way.
+
+During the holidays I tried to study up a little and add a drop or two
+to that gray matter that is supposed to be floating around in my
+brain. But as a girl said of a child in Kindergarten, "my intelligence
+was not working."  Putting Psychology into easy terms, stopping to
+explain things I do not understand very well myself, struggling
+through the medium of a strange language, and trying to occidentalize
+the oriental mind has been a stiff proposition for one whose learning
+was never her long suit! When I come home I may be nothing but a
+giggly, childishly happy old lady, who doesn't care a rap whether her
+skin fits or not.
+
+The prospect of war is getting more and more serious. Out in the
+Inland Sea, the war ships are hastening here and there on all sorts of
+secret missions.  I hope with all my heart there will not be war, but
+if there is, I hope Japan will wipe Russia right off the map!
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, February, 1904.
+
+
+Dear old Mate:
+
+I am breathless! For three weeks I have had a chase up hill and down
+dale, to the top of pine clad mountains, into the misty shadows of the
+deep valleys, up and down the silvery river, to and fro on the frosty
+road.  For why! All because I had lost my "poise," that treasured
+possession which you said I was to hang on to as I do to my front
+teeth and my hair.  So when I found it was gone, I started in full
+pursuit. Never a sight of its coat tails did I catch until Sunday,
+when I gave up the race and sat me down to fight out the old fight of
+rebellion, and kicking against the pricks.
+
+It was a perfect day, the plum trees were white with blossom, the
+spice bushes heavy with fragrance, the river dancing for joy, and the
+whole earth springing into new, tender life. A saucy little bird sat
+on an old stone lantern, and sang straight at me. He told me I was a
+whiney young person, that it was lots more fun to catch worms and fly
+around in the sunshine than it was to sit in the house and mope. He
+actually laughed at me, and I seized my hat and lit out after him, and
+when I came home I found I had caught my "poise."
+
+To-day in class I asked my girls what "happiness" meant. One new girl
+looked up timidly and said, "Sensei, I sink him just mean _you_."
+I felt like a hypocrite, but it pleased me to know that on the outside
+at least I kept shiny.
+
+I tell you if I don't find my real self out here, if I don't see my
+own soul in all its bareness and weakness then I will never see it. At
+home hedged in by conventionality, custom, and the hundred little
+interests of our daily life, we have small chance to see ourselves as
+we really are, but in a foreign land stripped bare of everything in
+the world save _self_, in a loneliness as great sometimes as the
+grave, face to face with new conditions, new demands, we have ample
+chance to take our own measurement. I cannot say that the result
+obtained is calculated to make one conceited!
+
+I fit into this life out here, like a square peg in a round hole. I am
+not consecrated, I was never "_called_ to the foreign field," I
+love the world and the flesh even if I don't care especially for the
+devil, I don't believe the Lord makes the cook steal so I may be more
+patient, and I don't pray for wisdom in selecting a new pair of
+shoes. When my position becomes unbearable, I invariably face the
+matter frankly and remind myself that if it is hard on the peg, it is
+just as hard on the hole, and that if they can stand it I guess I can!
+
+You ask about my reading. Yes, I read every spare minute I can get,
+before breakfast, on my way to classes, and after I go to
+bed. Somebody at home sends me the magazines regularly and I keep them
+going for months.
+
+By the way I wish you would write and tell me just exactly how Jack
+is.  You said he was working too hard and that he looked all fagged
+out. Wasn't it exactly like him to back out of going South on account
+of his conscience? He would laugh at us for saying it was that, but it
+was. He may be unreligious, and scoff at churches and all that, but he
+has the most rigid, cast-iron, inelastic conscience that I ever came
+across. I wish he would take a rest.  You see out here, so far away
+from you all, I can't help worrying when any of you are the least bit
+sick. Jack has been on my mind for days. Don't tell him that I asked
+you to, but won't you get him to go away? He would curl his hair if
+you asked him to.
+
+Preparations for war are still in progress and it makes a fellow
+pretty shivery to see it coming closer and closer. Hiroshima will be
+the center of military movements and of course under military law. It
+will affect us only as to the restrictions put on our walks and places
+we can go. With the city so full of strange soldiers, I don't suppose
+we will want to go much. Two big war ships, which Japan has just
+bought from Chili are on their way from Shanghai. Regiment after
+regiment has poured into Hiroshima and embarked again for Corea. I am
+terribly thrilled over it all, and the Japanese watch my enthusiasm
+with their non-committal eyes and never say a word!
+
+My poor little sick girl grows weaker all the time. She is a constant
+care and anxiety, but she has no money and I cannot send her back to
+her wretched home. The teachers think I am very foolish to let the
+thing run on, and I suppose I am. She can never be any better, and she
+may live this way for months. But when she clings to me with her frail
+hands and declares she is better and will soon get well if I will only
+let her stay with me, my heart fails me. I have patched up an old
+steamer chair for her, and made a window garden, and tried to make the
+room as bright as possible. She has to stay by herself nearly all day,
+but she is so patient and gentle that I never hear a complaint. This
+morning she pressed my hand to her breast and said wistfully, "Sensei,
+it makes sorry to play all the time with the health."
+
+Miss Lessing tried to get her in the hospital but they will not take
+incurables.
+
+Somehow Jack's hospital scheme doesn't seem as foolish as it did. If
+there are other children in the world as friendless and dependent as
+this one, then making a permanent home for them would be worth all the
+great careers in the world.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, March, 1904.
+
+
+My Best Girl:
+
+Don't I wish you were here to share all these thrills with me! War is
+actually in progress, and if you could see me hanging out of the
+window at midnight yelling for a special, then chasing madly around to
+get someone to translate it for me, see me dancing in fiendish glee at
+every victory won by this brave little country, you would conclude
+that I am just as young as I used to be. I tell you I couldn't be
+prouder of my own country! Just think of plucky little old Japan
+winning three battles from those big, brutal, conceited Russians. Why
+I just want to run and hug the Emperor!  And the school girls! Why
+their placid faces are positively glorified by the fire of
+patriotism. Once a week a trained nurse comes to give talks on
+nursing, and if I go into any corner afterward, I find a group of
+girls practising all kinds of bandaging. Even the demurest little
+maiden cherishes the hope that some fate may send her to the
+battle-field, or that in some way she may be permitted to serve her
+country.
+
+I am afraid I am not very strict about talking in class these days,
+but, somehow, courage, nobility, and self-sacrifice seem just as
+worthy of attention as "motor ideas," and "apperceptions."
+
+A British guest who hates everything Japanese says my enthusiasm "is
+quite annoying, you know," but, dear me, I don't mind him. What could
+you expect of a person who eats pie with a spoon? Why my enthusiasm is
+just cutting its eye-teeth! The whole country is a-thrill, and even a
+wooden Indian would get excited.
+
+Every afternoon we walk down on the sea wall and watch the
+preparations going on for a long siege. Hundreds of big ships fill the
+harbor to say nothing of the small ones, and there are thousands of
+coolies working like mad.  I could tell you many interesting things,
+but I am afraid of the censor.  If he deciphers all my letters home,
+he will probably have nervous prostration by the time the war is over.
+
+Many of the war ships are coaled by women who carry heavy baskets on
+each end of a pole swung across the shoulder, and invariably a baby on
+their backs. It is something terrible the way the women work, often
+pulling loads that would require a horse at home. They go plodding
+past us on the road, dressed as men, mouth open, eyes straining, all
+intelligence and interest gone from their faces.
+
+One day as Miss Lessing and I were resting by the roadside, one of
+these women stopped for breath just in front of us. She was pushing a
+heavy cart and her poor old body was trembling from the strain. Her
+legs were bare, and her feet were cut by the stones.  There was
+absolute stolidity in her weather-beaten face, and the hands that
+lighted her pipe were gnarled and black. Miss Lessing has a perfect
+genius for getting at people, I think it is her good kind face through
+which her soul shines. She asked the old woman if she was very
+tired. The woman looked up, as if seeing us for the first time and
+nodded her head. Then a queer look came into her face and she asked
+Miss Lessing if we were the kind of people who had a new God. Miss
+Lessing told her we were Christians.  With a wistfulness that I have
+never seen except in the eyes of a dog, she said, "If I paid your God
+with offering and prayers, do you think he would make my work easier?
+I am so tired!"  Miss Lessing made her sit down by her on the grass,
+and talked to her in Japanese about the new God who did not take any
+pay for his help, and who could put something in her heart that would
+give her strength to bear any burden. I could not understand much of
+what they said but I had a little prayer-meeting all by myself.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, April, 1904.
+
+
+Yesterday the American mail came after a three weeks' delay. None of
+us were good for anything the rest of the day. Twenty letters and
+fifty-two papers for me! Do you wonder that I almost danced a hole in
+the parlor rug?
+
+The home news was all so bright and cheery, and your letter was such a
+bunch of comfort that I felt like a two year old. It was exactly like
+you to think out that little farm party and get Jack into it as a
+matter of accommodation to you. I followed everything you did, with
+the keenest interest, from the all-day tramps in the woods, to the
+cozy evenings around the log fire. I can see old Jack now, at first
+bored to death but resolved to die if need be on the altar of
+friendship, gradually warming up as he always does out of doors, and
+ending up by being the life of the party. He once told me that social
+success is the infinite capacity for being bored. I know the little
+outing did him a world of good, and you are all the trumps in the deck
+as usual.
+
+Who is the Dr. Leet that was in the party? I remember dancing a
+cotillon with a very good looking youth of that name in the
+prehistoric ages. He was a senior at Yale, very rich and very good
+looking. I wore his fraternity pin over my heart for a whole week
+afterward.
+
+We have been having great fun over the American accounts of the war.
+Through the newspapers we learn the most marvelous things about Japan
+and her people. Large cities are unblushingly moved from the coast to
+an island in the Inland Sea, troops are passported from places which
+have no harbor, and the people are credited with unheard of customs.
+
+We are still in the midst of stirring times. The city is overflowing
+with troops, and we are hemmed in on every side by soldiers. Of course
+foreign women are very curious to them, and they often follow us and
+make funny comments, but we have never yet had a single rudeness shown
+us. In all the thousands of soldiers stationed here, I have only seen
+two who were tipsy, and they were mildly hilarious from saki.  There
+is perfect order and discipline, and after nine o'clock at night the
+streets are as quiet as a mountain village.
+
+The other night, five of the soldiers, mere boys, donned citizens'
+dress and went out for a lark. At roll-call they were missing and a
+guard was sent to search for them. When found, they resisted arrest
+and three minutes after they all answered the roll-call in another
+world.
+
+And yet although the discipline is so severe, the men seem a contented
+and happy lot. They stroll along the roads when off duty hand in hand
+like school girls, and laugh and chatter as if life were a big
+holiday. But when the time comes to go to the front, they don their
+gay little uniforms, and march just as joyfully away to give the last
+drop of their blood for their Emperor.
+
+I tell you, Mate, I want to get out in the street and cheer every
+regiment that passes! No drum, no fife, no inspiring music to stir
+their blood and strengthen their courage, nothing but the unvarying
+monotony of the four note trumpets. They don't need music to make them
+go. They are perfect little machines whose motive power is a
+patriotism so absolute, so complete, that it makes death on the
+battle-field an honor worthy of deification.
+
+I look out into the play-ground, and every boy down to the smallest
+baby in the kindergarten is armed with a bamboo gun. Such drilling and
+marching, and attacking of forts you have never seen. That the enemy
+is nothing more than sticks stuck at all angles matters little. An
+enemy there must be, and the worst boy in Japan would die before he
+would even _play_ at being a Russian! If Kuropatkin could see
+just one of these awful onslaughts, he would run up the white flag and
+hie himself to safety. So you see we are well guarded and with quiet
+little soldiers on the outside, and very noisy and fierce little
+soldiers on the inside, we fear no invasion of our peaceful compound.
+
+On my walks around the barracks, I often pass the cook house, and
+watch the food being carried to the mess room. The rice buckets, about
+the size of our water buckets, are put on a pole in groups of six or
+eight and carried on the shoulders of two men. There is a line about a
+square long of these buckets, and then another long line follows with
+trays of soup bowls. Tea is not as a rule drunk with the meals, but
+after the last grain of rice has been chased from the slippery sides
+of the bowl, hot water is poured in and sipped with loud appreciation.
+Last Sunday afternoon we had to entertain ten officers of high rank,
+and it proved a regular lark. Their English and our Japanese got
+fatally twisted. One man took great pride in showing me how much too
+big his clothes were, giving him ample opportunity to put on several
+suits of underwear in cold weather; he said "Many cloth dese trusers
+hab, no fit like 'Merican."  They were delighted with all our foreign
+possessions, and inspected everything minutely. On leaving, one
+officer bowed low, and assured me that he would never see me on earth
+again, but he hoped he would see me in heaven _first_!
+
+The breezes from China waft an occasional despairing epistle from
+Little Germany, but they find me as cold as a snow bank on the north
+side of a mountain. The sun that melts my heart will have to rise in
+the west, and get up early at that.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, May, 1904.
+
+
+Well commencement is over and my first class is graduated. Now if you
+have ever heard of anything more ridiculous than that please cable me!
+If you could have seen me standing on the platform dealing out
+diplomas, you would have been highly edified.
+
+Last night I gave the class a dinner.  There were fourteen girls, only
+two of whom had ever been at a foreign table before. At first they
+were terribly embarrassed, but before long they warmed up to the
+occasion and got terribly tickled over their awkwardness.  I was
+afraid they would knock their teeth out with the knives and forks, and
+the feat of getting soup from the spoon to the mouth proved so
+difficult that I let them drink it from the bowl. Sitting in chairs
+was as hard for them as sitting on the floor for me, so between the
+courses we had a kind of cake walk.
+
+Next week school begins again, and I start three new kindergartens,
+making seven over which I have supervision.  I am so pleased over the
+progress of my work that I don't know what to do. Not that I don't
+realize my limitations, heaven knows I do.  Imagine my efforts at
+teaching the training class psychology! The other day we were
+struggling with the subject of reflex action, and one of the girls
+handed in this definition as she had understood it from me! "Reflex
+action is of a activity nervous. It is sometimes the don't understand
+of what it is doing and stops many messages to the brain and sends the
+motion to the legs." What little knowledge I start with gets
+cross-eyed before I get through.
+
+The Japanese can twist the English language into some of the strangest
+knots that you ever saw. There is a sign quite near here that reads
+"Cows milk and Retailed."
+
+Since writing you last, I have sent my little sick girl home. It
+almost broke us all up, but she couldn't stay here alone during the
+summer and there was nobody to take care of her.  I write to her every
+week and try to keep her cheered up, but for such as she there is only
+one release and that is death.
+
+If Jack's hospital ever materializes, I am going to offer my services
+as a nurse. This poor child's plight has taken such a hold upon me
+that I long to do something for all the sick waifs in creation.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, June, 1904.
+
+
+It is Sunday afternoon, and your Foreign Missionary Kindergarten
+Teacher, instead of trudging off to Sunday School with the other
+teachers, is recklessly sitting in dressing gown and slippers with her
+golden hair hanging down her hack, writing letters home. After
+teaching all week, and listening for two hours to a Japanese sermon
+Sunday morning, I cross my fingers on teaching Sunday School in the
+afternoon.
+
+This past week I have been trying to practice the simple life. It was
+a good time for we had spring cleaning, five guests, daily
+prayer-meetings, two new cooks, and an earthquake. I think by the time
+I get through, I'll be qualified to run a government on some small
+Pacific Isle.
+
+The whole city is in confusion, ninety thousand soldiers are here now,
+and eighty thousand more are expected this week. Every house-holder
+must take as many as he can accommodate, and the strain on the people
+is heavy.  We heard yesterday of the terrible disaster to the troops
+that left here on the 13th, three transports were sunk by the
+Russians. Five hundred of the wounded from South Hill battle have been
+brought here, and whenever I go out, I see long lines of stretchers
+and covered ambulances bringing in more men. It is intolerable to be
+near so much suffering and not to be able to relieve it. We are all so
+worked up with pity and indignation, and sympathy that we hardly dare
+talk about the war.
+
+Summer vacation will soon be here and I am planning a wild career of
+self indulgence. I am going to Karuizawa, where I can get cooled off
+and rested and invite my soul to my heart's content.
+
+For two mortal weeks the rain has poured in torrents. The rainy season
+out here isn't any of your nice polite little shower-a-day affairs, it
+is just one interminable downpour, until the old earth is spanked into
+submission.  I can't even remember how sunshine looks, and my spirits
+are mildewed and my courage is mouldy.
+
+To add to the discomfort, we are besieged by mosquitoes. They are the
+big ferocious kind that carry off a finger at a time. I heard of one
+missionary down in the country, who was so bothered one night that he
+hung his trousers to the ceiling, and put his head in one leg, and
+made his wife put her head in the other, while the rest of the garment
+served as a breathing tube!
+
+It has been nearly a year since I was out of Hiroshima, a year of such
+ups and downs that I feel as if I had been digging out my salvation
+with a pick-ax.
+
+Not that I do not enjoy the struggle; real life with all its knocks
+and bumps, its joys and sorrows, is vastly preferable to a passive
+existence of indolence.  Only occasionally I look forward to the time
+when I shall be an angel frivoling in the eternal blue! Just think of
+being reduced to a nice little curly head and a pair of wings! That's
+the kind of angel I am going to be. With no legs to ache, and no heart
+to break--but dear me it is more than likely that I will get
+rheumatism in my wings!
+
+If ever I do get to heaven, it will be on your ladder, Mate. You have
+coaxed me up with confidence and praise, you have steadied me with
+ethical culture books, and essays, and sermons. You have gotten me so
+far up (for me), that I am afraid to look down. I shrink with a mighty
+shrivel when I think of disappointing you in any way, and I expand
+almost to bursting when I think of justifying your belief in me.
+
+
+
+
+KARUIZAWA, July, 1904.
+
+
+Here I am comfortably established in the most curious sort of
+double-barreled house you ever saw. The front part is all Japanese and
+faces on one street, and the back part is foreign and faces on another
+street a square away.  The two are connected by a covered walk which
+passes over a mill race. In the floor of the walk just over the water
+is a trap door, and look out when I will I can see the Japanese
+stopping to take a bath in this little opening.
+
+I have a nice big room and so much service thrown in that it
+embarrasses me. When I come in, in the evening, three little maids
+escort me to my room, one fixes the mosquito bar, one gets my gown,
+and one helps to undress me.  When they have done all they can think
+of, they get in a row, all bow together, then pitter patter away.
+
+The clerk has to make out the menus and as his English is limited, he
+calls upon me very often to help him. Yesterday he came with only one
+entry and that was "Corns on the ear." In return for my assistance he
+always announces my bath, and escorts me to the bath room carrying my
+sponge and towels.
+
+As to Karuizawa, it has a summer population of about four hundred,
+three hundred and ninety-nine of whom are missionaries. Let us all
+unite in singing "Blest be the tie that binds."
+
+Everybody at our table is in the mission field. A long-nosed young
+preacher who sits opposite me looks as if he had spent all his life in
+some kind of a field. He has a terrible attack of religion; I never
+saw anybody take it any harder. He told me that he was engaged to be
+married and for three days he had been consulting the Lord about what
+kind of a ring he should buy!
+
+Sunday I went to church and heard my first English sermon in two
+years.  We met in a rough little shanty, built in a cluster of pines,
+and almost every nation was represented. A young English clergyman
+read the service, and afterward said a few words about sacrifice.  He
+was simple and sincere, and his deep voice trembled with earnestness
+as he declared that sacrifice was the only true road to happiness,
+sacrifice of ourselves, our wishes and desires, for the good and the
+progress of others. And suddenly all the feeling in me got on a
+rampage and I wanted to get up and say that it was true, that I knew
+it was true, that the most miserable, pitiful, smashed-up life, could
+blossom again if it would only blossom for others. I walked home in a
+sort of ecstasy and at dinner the long-nosed young preacher said: "'T
+was a pity we couldn't have regular preaching, there was such a peart
+lot at meeting." This is certainly a good place to study people's
+eccentricities, their foibles and follies, to hear them preach and see
+them not practice!
+
+One more year and I will be home.  Something almost stops in my heart
+as I write it! Of course I am glad you are going abroad in the spring,
+you have been living on the prospect of seeing Italy all your
+life. Only, Mate, I am selfish enough to want you back by the time I
+get home. It would take just one perfect hour of seeing you all
+together once more to banish the loneliness of all these years!
+
+I am glad Jack and Dr. Leet have struck up such a friendship. Jack
+uses about the same care in selecting a friend that most men do in
+selecting a wife. Tell Dr. Leet that I am glad he found me in a pigeon
+hole of his memory, but that I am a long way from being "the blue-eyed
+bunch of mischief" he describes. I wish you would tell him that I am
+slender, pale, and pensive with a glamour of romance and mystery
+hovering about me; that is the way I would like to be.
+
+I knew you could get Jack out of his rut if you tried. The Browning
+evenings must be highly diverting, I can imagine you reading a few
+lines for him to expound, then him reading a few for you to explain,
+then both gazing into space with "the infinite cry of finite hearts
+that yearn!"
+
+Dear loyal old Jack! How memories stab me as I think of him. It seems
+impossible to think of him as other than well and strong and self
+reliant.  What happy, happy days I have spent with him! They seem to
+stand out to-night in one great white spot of cheerfulness. When the
+days were the darkest and I couldn't see one inch ahead, Jack would
+happen along with a funny story or a joke, would pretend not to see
+what was going on, but do some little kindness that would brighten the
+way a bit. What a mixture he is of tenderness, and brusqueness, of
+common sense and poetry, of fun and seriousness! I think you and I are
+the only ones in the world who quite understand his heights and
+depths. He says even I don't.
+
+
+
+
+KARUIZAWA, July, 1904.
+
+
+Since writing you I have had the pleasure of looking six hundred feet
+down the throat of Asamayama, the great volcano. If the old lady had
+been impolite enough to stick out her tongue, I would at present be a
+cinder.
+
+We started at seven in the evening on horseback. Now as you know I
+have ridden pretty much everything from a broom stick to a camel, but
+for absolute novelty of motion commend me to a Japanese horse. There
+is a lurch to larboard, then a lurch to starboard, with a sort of
+"shiver-my-timbers" interlude. A coolie walks at the head of each
+horse, and reasons softly with him when he misbehaves. We rode for
+thirteen miles to the foot of the volcano, then at one o'clock we left
+the horses with one of the men and began to climb. Each climber was
+tied to a coolie whose duty it was to pull, and to carry the
+lantern. We made a weird procession, and the strange call of the
+coolies as they bent their bodies to the task, mingled with the
+laughter and exclamations of the party.
+
+For some miles the pine trees and undergrowth covered the mountain,
+then came a stretch of utter barren-ness and isolation. Miles above
+yet seemingly close enough to touch rose tongues of flame and crimson
+smoke.  Above was the majestic serenity of the summer night, below the
+peaceful valley, with the twinkling lights of far away villages. It
+was a queer sensation to be hanging thus between earth and sky, and to
+feel that the only thing between me and death was a small Japanese
+coolie, who was half dragging me up a mountain side that was so
+straight it was sway-back!
+
+When at last we reached the top, daylight was showing faintly in the
+east. Slowly and with a glory unspeakable the sun rose. The great
+flames and crimson smoke, which at night had appeared so dazzling,
+sank into insignificance.  If anyone has the temerity to doubt the
+existence of a gracious, mighty God, let him stand at sunrise on the
+top of Asamayama and behold the wonder of His works!
+
+I hardly dared to breathe for fear I would dispel the illusion, but a
+hearty lunch eaten with the edge of the crater for a table made things
+seem pretty real. The coming down was fearful for the ashes were very
+deep, and we often went in up to our knees.
+
+The next morning at eleven, I rolled into my bed more dead than
+alive. My face and hands were blistered from the heat and the ashes,
+and I was sore from head to foot, but I had a vision in, my soul that
+can never be effaced.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, September, 1904.
+
+
+Well here I am back in H. (I used to think it stood for that too but
+it doesn't!) Curiously enough I rather enjoy getting back into harness
+this year. Three kindergartens to attend in the morning, class work in
+the afternoon, four separate accounts to be kept, besides
+housekeeping, mothers' meetings, and prayer meetings, would have
+appalled me once.
+
+The only thing that phases me is the company. If only some nice
+accommodating cyclone would come along and gather up all the floating
+population, and deposit it in a neat pile in some distant fence
+corner, I would be everlastingly grateful. One loving brother wrote
+last week that he was coming with a wife and three children to board
+with us until his house was completed, and that he knew I would be
+glad to have them. Delighted I am sure! All I need to complete my
+checkered career is to keep a boarding-house! I smacked Susie Damn
+clear down the steps and sang "A consecrated cross-eyed bear," then I
+wrote him to come, It is against the principles of the school to
+refuse anyone its hospitality, consequently everybody who is out of a
+job comes to see us.
+
+The waves of my wrath break upon Miss Lessing for allowing herself to
+be imposed upon, but she is as calm and serene as the Great Buddha of
+Kamakura.
+
+My special grievance this morning is cooked tomatoes and baby organs.
+Our cook has just discovered cooked tomatoes, and they seem to fill
+some longfelt want in his soul. In spite of protest, he serves them to
+us for breakfast, tiffin and dinner, and the household sits with
+injured countenance, and silently holds me responsible. As for the
+nine and one wind bags that begin their wheezing and squeaking before
+breakfast, my thoughts are unfit for publication! This morning I was
+awakened by the strains "Shall we meet beyond the River?" Well if we
+do, the keys will fly that's all there is about it! Once in a while
+they side-track it to "Oh! to be nothing, nothing!"  That is where I
+fully agree and if they would only give me a chance I would grant
+their desire in less time than it takes to write it. I am sure my
+Hades will be a hard seat in a lonesome corner where I must listen to
+baby organs all day and live on a perpetual diet of cooked tomatoes.
+
+To-day they are bringing in the wounded soldiers from Liaoyang, and I
+try to keep away from the windows so I will not see them. Those bright
+strong boys that left here such a little while ago, are coming back on
+stretchers, crippled and disfigured for life.
+
+Yesterday while taking a walk, I saw about two hundred men, right off
+the transport, waiting for the doctors and nurses to come. Men whose
+clothes had not been changed for weeks, ragged, bloody and soiled
+beyond conception. Wounded, tired, sick, with almost every trace of
+the human gone out of their faces, they sat or lay on the ground
+waiting to be cared for.  Most of the wounds had not been touched
+since they were hastily tied up on the battlefield. I thought I had
+some idea of what war meant, but I hadn't the faintest conception of
+the real horror of it.
+
+Miss Lessing is trying to get permission for us to do regular visiting
+at the hospitals, but the officials are very cautious about allowing
+any foreigner behind the scenes.
+
+Just here I hung my head out of the window to ask the cook what time
+it was. He called back, "Me no know!  clock him gone to sleep. He no
+talk some more."
+
+I think I shall follow the example of the clock.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, October, 1904.
+
+
+Dearest Mate:
+
+I have been to the hospital at last and I can think of nothing, see
+nothing, and talk of nothing but those poor battered up men. Yesterday
+the authorities sent word that if the foreign teachers would come and
+make a little music for the sick men it would be appreciated. We had
+no musical instrument except the organ, so Miss Lessing and I bundled
+one up on a jinrikisha and trudged along beside it through the
+street. I got almost hysterical over our absurd appearance, and
+pretended that Miss Lessing was the organ grinder, and I the
+monkey. But oh! Mate when we got to the hospital all the silliness was
+knocked out of me. Thousands of mutilated and dying men, literally
+shot to pieces by the Russian bullets. I can't talk about it! It was
+too horrible to describe.
+
+We wheeled the organ into one of the wards and two of the teachers
+sang while I played. It was pitiful to see how eager the men were to
+hear. The room was so big that those in the back begged to be moved
+closer, so the little nurses carried the convalescent ones forward on
+their backs.
+
+For one hour I pumped away on that wheezy little old instrument, with
+the tears running down my cheeks most of the time. So long as I live
+I'll never make fun of a baby organ again. The joy that one gave that
+afternoon justified its being.
+
+And then--prepare for the worst,--we distributed tracts. Oh! yes I did
+it too, in spite of all the fun I have made, and would you believe it?
+those men who were able to walk, crowded around and _begged_ for
+them, and the others in the beds held out their hands or followed us
+wistfully with their eyes. They were so crazy for something to read
+that they were even willing to read about the foreign God.
+
+It was late when we got back and I went straight to bed and indulged
+in a chill. All the horror of war had come home to me for the first
+time, and my very soul rebelled against it. They say you get hardened
+to the sights after a few visits to the hospital, but I hope I shall
+never get to the point of believing that it's right for strong useful
+men to be killed or crippled for life in order to settle a
+controversy.
+
+Before we went into the wards the physician in charge took us all over
+the buildings, showed us where the old bandages were being washed and
+cleaned, where the instruments were sharpened and repaired, where the
+stretchers and crutches, and "first aid to the injured" satchels were
+kept. We were taken through the postoffice, where all the mail comes
+and goes from the front. It was touching to see the number of letters
+that had been sent home unopened.
+
+Twenty thousand sick soldiers are cared for in Hiroshima, and such
+system, such cleanliness and order you have never seen. I have wished
+for Jack a thousand times; it would delight his soul to see the skill
+and ability of these wonderful little doctors and nurses.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, November, 1904.
+
+
+To-morrow it will be four weeks since I have had any kind of mail from
+America. It seems to me that everything has stopped running across the
+ocean, even the waves.
+
+I know little these days outside of the kindergarten and the
+hospital. The former grows cuter and dearer all the time. It is a
+constant inspiration to see the daily development of these cunning
+babies. As for the visits to the hospital, they are a self-appointed
+task that grows no easier through repetition.  You know how I shrink
+from seeing pain, and how all my life I have tried to get away from
+the disagreeable?  Well it is like torture to go day after day into
+the midst of the most terrible suffering. But in view of the bigger
+things of life, the tremendous struggle going on so near, the agony of
+the sick and wounded, the suffering of the women and children, my own
+little qualms get lost in the shuffle, and my one consuming desire is
+to help in any way I can.
+
+Last week we took in addition to the "wind bag" two big baskets of
+flowers to give to the sickest ones. Oh! If I could only make you know
+what flowers mean to them! Men too sick to raise their heads and often
+dying, will stretch out their hands for a flower, and be perfectly
+content to hold it in their fingers. One soldier with both arms gone
+asked me for a flower just as I had emptied my basket. I would have
+given my month's salary for one rose, but all I had was a withered
+little pansy. He motioned for me to give him that and asked me to put
+it in a broken bottle hanging on the wall, so he could see it.
+
+If I didn't get away from it all once in a while, I don't believe I
+could stand it. Yesterday was the Emperor's birthday and we had a
+holiday. I took several of the girls and went for a long ramble in the
+country. The fields were a brilliant yellow, rich and heavy with the
+unharvested grain. The mountains were deeply purple, and the sky so
+tenderly blue, that the whole world just seemed a place to be glad and
+happy in. Fall in Japan does not suggest death and decay, but rather
+the drifting into a beautiful rest, where dreams can be dreamed and
+the world forgot. Such a spirit of peace enveloped the whole scene,
+that it was hard to realize that the long line of black objects on the
+distant road were stretchers bearing the sick and wounded from the
+transports to the hospitals.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, December, 1904.
+
+
+Last Saturday I had to go across the bay to visit one of our branch
+kindergartens.  Many Russian prisoners are stationed on the island and
+I was tremendously interested in the good time they were having. The
+Japanese officials are entertaining them violently with concerts,
+picnics, etc. Imagine a lot of these big muscular men being sent on an
+all-day excursion with two little Japanese guards. Of course, it is
+practically impossible for the men to escape from the island but I
+don't believe they want to. A cook has actually been brought from
+Vladivostock so that they may have Russian food, and the best things
+in the markets are sent to them. The prisoners I saw seemed in high
+spirits, and were having as much fun as a lot of school boys out on a
+lark. I don't wonder! It is lots more comfortable being a prisoner in
+Japan than a soldier in Manchuria.
+
+I only had a few minutes to visit the hospital, but I was glad I
+went. As the doctor took me through one of the wards where the sickest
+men lay, I saw one big rough looking Russian with such a scowl on his
+face that I hardly dared offer him my small posy. But I hated to pass
+him by so I ventured to lay it on the foot of the cot. What was my
+consternation when, after one glance, he clasped both hands over his
+face and sobbed like a sick child. "Are you in pain?" asked the
+doctor.  "No," he said shortly, "I'm homesick." Oh! Mate, that
+finished me!  Didn't I know better than anybody in the world how he
+felt? I just sat down on the side of the cot and patted him, and tried
+to tell him how sorry I was though he could hardly understand a word.
+
+This morning I could have done a song and dance when I heard that he
+had been operated on and was to be sent home.
+
+Almost every day we are having grand military funerals, and they are
+most impressive I can tell you. Yesterday twenty-two officers were
+buried at the same time, and the school stood on the street for over
+an hour to do them honor. The procession was very interesting, with
+the Buddhist priests, in their gorgeous robes, and the mourners in
+white or light blue.  First came the square box with the cremated
+remains, then the officer's horse, then coolies carrying small trees
+which were to be planted on the grave.  Next came a large picture of
+the deceased, and perhaps his coat or sword, next the shaven priests
+in magnificent raiment and last the mourners carrying small trays with
+rice cakes, to be placed upon the grave. The wives and mothers and
+daughters rode in jinrikishas, hand folded meekly in hand, and eyes
+downcast. Such calm resigned faces I have never seen, many white and
+wasted with sorrow, but under absolute control. Of the entire number
+only one gave vent to her grief; a bent old woman with thin grey hair
+cut close to her head, rode with both hands over her face. She had
+lost two sons in one battle, and the cry of her human heart was
+stronger than any precept of her religion.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, December, 1904.
+
+
+You remember the Irishman's saying that we could be pretty comfortable
+in life if it wasn't for our pleasures?  Well I could get along rather
+well in Japan were it not for the Merry Christmases. Such a terrible
+longing seizes me for my loved ones and for God's country that I feel
+like a needle near a magnet. But next Christmas!  I just go right up
+in the air when I think about it.
+
+This school of life is a difficult one at best, but when a weak sister
+like myself is put about three grades higher than she belongs, it is
+more than hard. I don't care a rap for the struggle and the heart
+aches, if I have only made good. When I came out there were two
+kindergartens, now there are nine besides a big training
+class. Anybody else could have done as much for the work but one thing
+is certain, the work couldn't have done for anyone else what it has
+done for me. Outwardly I am the same feather-weight as of old, but
+there is a big change inside, Mate, you'll have to take my word for
+it. I am coming to take the slaps of Fate very much as I used to take
+the curling of my hair with a hot iron, it pulled and sometimes
+burned, but I didn't care so long as it was going to improve my looks.
+So now I use my crosses as sort of curling irons for my character.
+
+Your sudden decision to give up your trip to Europe this spring set me
+guessing! I can't imagine, after all your planning and your dreams,
+what could have changed your mind so completely.  You don't seem to
+care a rap about going. Now look here, Mate, I want a full report. You
+have turned all the pockets of my confidence inside out. What about
+yours? Have you been getting an "aim" in life, are you going to be an
+operatic singer, or a temperance lecturer, or anything like that? You
+are so horribly high minded that I am prepared for the worst.
+
+I wish it would stop raining. The mountains are hid by a heavy gray
+mist, and the drip, drip of the rain from roof and trees is not a
+cheering sound. I am doing my best to keep things bright within, I
+have built a big fire in my grate, and in my heart I have lighted all
+the lamps at my little shrines, and I am burning incense to the loves
+that were and are.
+
+Just after tiffin the rain stopped for a little while and I rushed out
+for a walk. I had been reading the "Christmas Carol" all morning, and
+it brought so many memories of home that I was feeling rather
+wobbly. My walk set me up immensely. A baldheaded, toothless old man
+stopped me and asked me where I was "coming."  When I told him he said
+that was wonderful and he hoped I would have a good time. A woman with
+a child on her back ran out and stopped me to ask if I would please
+let the baby see my hair. Half a dozen children and two dogs followed
+me all the way, and an old man and woman leaned against a wall and
+laughed aloud because a foreigner was so funny to look at.
+
+If anyone thinks that he can indulge in a nice private case of the
+blues while taking a walk in Japan, he deceives himself. I started out
+feeling like Napoleon at St. Helena, and I came home cheerful and
+ravenously hungry.
+
+I have been trying to read poetry this winter, but I don't make much
+progress. The truth is I have gained five pounds, and I am afraid I am
+getting too fat. I never knew but one fat person to appreciate poetry
+and he crocheted tidies.
+
+By the way I have learned to knit!!  You see there are so many times
+when I have to play the gracious hostess when I feel like a volcano
+within, that I decided to get something on which I could vent my
+restlessness. It is astonishing how much bad temper one can knit into
+a garment. I don't know yet what mine is going to be, probably an
+opera bonnet for Susie Damn.
+
+
+
+
+KYOTO, December, 1904.
+
+
+You are not any more surprised to hear from me in Kyoto than I am to
+be here. One of the teachers here, a great big-hearted splendid woman,
+knowing that I was interested in the sick soldiers, asked me to come
+up for a week and help the Red Cross nurses.  For six days we have met
+all the trains, and given hot tea, and books to both the men who were
+going to the front and to those who were being brought home. We work
+side by side with Buddhist priests, ladies of rank, and coolies,
+serving from one to four hundred men in fifteen minutes! You never saw
+such a scrimmage, everybody works like mad while the train stops, and
+the wild "Banzais" that greet us as the men catch sight of the hot
+tea, show us how welcome it is.
+
+But the sights, Mate dear, are enough to break one's heart. I have
+seen good-byes, and partings until I haven't an emotion left! One man
+I talked with was going back for the fourth time having been wounded
+and sent home again and again; his wife never took her eyes from his
+face until the train pulled out, and the smile with which she sent him
+away was more heart rending than any tears I ever saw.
+
+Then I have been touched by an old man and his wife who for four days
+have met every train to tell their only son good-bye. They are so
+feeble that they have to be helped up and down the steps and as each
+train comes and goes and their boy is not on board, they totter hand
+in hand back to the street corner to wait more long hours.
+
+Going one way the trains carry the soldiers to the front, boys for the
+most part wild with enthusiasm, high spirits, and courage, and coming
+the other way in vastly greater numbers are the silent trains bearing
+the sick and wounded and dead.
+
+We meet five trains during the day and one at two in the night. I have
+gotten so that I can sleep sitting upright on a hard bench between
+trains. Think of the plucky little Japanese women who have done this
+ever since the beginning of the war!
+
+Out of my experience at the station came another very charming one
+yesterday.  It seems that the president of the Red Cross Society is a
+royal princess, first cousin indeed to the Emperor.  She had heard of
+me through her secretary and of the small services I had rendered here
+and at Hiroshima, so she requested an interview that she might thank
+me in person.
+
+It seemed very ridiculous that I should receive formal recognition for
+pouring tea and handing out posies, but I was crazy to see the
+Princess, so early yesterday morning, I donned my best raiment and
+sallied forth with an interpreter.
+
+The house was a regular Chinese puzzle and I was passed on from one
+person to another until I got positively dizzy. At last we came to a
+long beautiful room, at the end of which, in a robe of purple and
+gold, all covered with white chrysanthemums, sat the royal lady. I was
+preparing to make my lowest bow, when, to my astonishment, she came
+forward with extended hand and spoke to me in English!  Then she
+bowled me right over in the first round by asking me about
+Kindergarten. I forgot that she was a lady of royalty and numerous
+decorations, and that etiquette forbade me speaking except when spoken
+to. She was so responsive and so interested, that I found myself
+talking in a blue streak.  Then she told me a bit of her story, and I
+longed to hear more. It seems that certain women of the royal line are
+not permitted to marry, and she, being restless and ambitious, became
+a Buddhist Priestess, having her own temple, priestesses, etc. The
+priestesses are all young girls, and I wish you could have seen them
+examining my clothes, my hair and my rings. The Princess herself is a
+woman of brilliant attainments, and fine executive ability.
+
+Of course we had tea, and sat on the floor and chattered and laughed
+like a lot of school girls. When I left I was told that the Princess
+desired my photograph at once, and that I should sit for it the next
+day. I suppose I am in for it.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, December, 1904.
+
+
+My dearest Mate:
+
+The American mail is in and the secret is out, or at least half-way
+out and I am wild with curiosity and interest.  You say you can't give
+me any of the particulars and you would rather I wouldn't even
+guess. All that you want me to know is that you have "a new interest
+in life that is the deepest and most beautiful experience you have
+ever known." I will do as you request, not ask any questions, or make
+any surmises but you will let me say this, that no fame, no glory, no
+wealth can ever give one thousandth part of the real heart's content
+that one hour of love can give. Without it work of any kind is against
+the full tide, and accomplishment is emptier than vanity.  The heart
+still cries out for its own, for what is its birthright and heritage.
+
+I am glad with all my soul for your happiness, Mate, the tenderest
+blessing that lips could frame would not express half that is in my
+heart. There is nothing so sure in life as that love is best of
+all. You think you know it after a few weeks of loving, I know I know
+after years of grief and suffering and despair.
+
+From the time when you used to stand between me and childish
+punishments, through all the happy days of girlhood, the sorrowful
+days of womanhood, on up to the bitter-sweet present, you have never
+failed me.
+
+I want to give you a whole heart full of gladness and rejoicing, I
+want to crowd out my own little wail of bereavement, but Oh! Mate, I
+never felt so alone in my life before! I am not asking you to tell me
+who the man is.  I am trying not to _guess_. Tell me what you
+like and when you like, and rest assured that whatever comes, my heart
+is with you--and with him.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, January, 1905.
+
+
+It has been longer than usual since I wrote but somehow things have
+been going wrong with me of late and I didn't want to bother you. But
+oh!  Mate, I haven't anybody else in the world to come to, and you'll
+have to forgive me for bringing a cloud across your happiness.
+
+The whole truth is I'm worsted!  The fight has been too much. Days,
+weeks, months of homesickness have piled up on top of me until all my
+courage and my control, all my _will_ seem paralysed.
+
+Night after night I lie awake and stare out into the dark, and staring
+back at me is the one word "_alone_".  In the daytime, I try to
+keep somebody with me all the time, I have gotten afraid of myself. My
+face in the mirror does not seem to belong to me, it is a curious
+unfamiliar face that I do not know. Every once in a while I want to
+beat the air and scream, but I don't do it. I clench my fists and set
+my teeth and teach, teach, teach.
+
+But I can't go on like this forever!  Flesh and spirit rebel against a
+lifetime of it! Haven't I paid my penalty?  Aren't the lightness and
+brightness and beauty ever coming back?
+
+On my desk is a contract waiting to be signed for another four years
+at the school. Beside it is a letter from Brother, begging me to drop
+everything and come home at once. Can you guess what the temptation
+is? On the one hand ceaseless work, uncongenial surroundings and
+exile, on the other luxury, loved ones,--and dependence.  I must give
+my answer to-morrow and Heaven only knows what it will be.  One thing
+is certain I am tired of doing hard things, I am tired of being brave.
+
+It is storming fearfully but I am going out to mail this letter. If I
+cable that I am coming you must be the first one to know why. I have
+tried to grow into something higher and better, God knows I have, but
+I am afraid I am a house built on the sands after all.  Don't be hard
+on me, Mate, whatever comes remember I have tried.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, 3 hours later.
+
+
+If you open this letter first, don't read the one that comes in the
+same mail. I wrote it this afternoon, and I would give everything I
+possess to get it back again. When I went out to mail it, I was
+feeling so utterly desperate that I didn't care a rap for the storm or
+anything else. I went on and on until I came to the sea-wall that
+makes a big curve out into the sea.  When I had gone as far as I
+dared, I climbed up on an old stone lantern, and let the spray and the
+rain beat on my face. The wind was whipping the waves into a perfect
+fury, and pounding them against the wall at my feet.  The thunder
+rolled and roared, and great flashes of lightning ripped gashes in the
+green and purple water. It was the most glorious sight I ever saw! I
+felt that the wind, the waves, and the storm were all my friends and
+that they were doing all my beating and screaming for me.
+
+I clung to the lantern, with my clothes dripping and my hair streaming
+about my face until the storm was over. And I don't think I was ever
+so near to God in my life as when the sun came out suddenly from the
+clouds and lit up that tempest-tossed sea into a perfect glory of
+light and color I And the peace had come into my heart, Mate, and I
+knew that I was going to take up my cross again and bear it bravely. I
+was so glad, so thankful that I could scarcely keep my feet on the
+ground. I struck out at full speed along the sea wall and ran every
+step of the way home.
+
+And now after a hot bath and dry clothes, with my little kettle
+singing by my side, I want to tell you that I have decided to stay,
+perhaps for five months, perhaps for five years.
+
+Out of the wreckage of my old life I've managed to build a fairly
+respectable craft. It has taken me just four years to realize that it
+is not a pleasure boat. To-night I realize once for all that it is a
+very modest little tug, and wherever it can tow anything or anybody
+into harbor there it belongs, and there it stays.
+
+Tell them all that I am quite well again, Mate, and as for you, please
+don't even bother your blessed head about me again. I have meekly
+taken my place in the middle of the sea-saw and I shall probably never
+go very high or very low again. I am sleepy for the first time in two
+weeks, so good-bye comrade mine and God bless you.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, February, 1905.
+
+
+My dearest Mate:
+
+I can't feel quite right until I tell you that I have guessed your
+secret, that I have known from the first it was Jack. I always knew
+you were made for each other, both so splendid and noble and true. It
+isn't any particular credit to you two that you are good, there was no
+alternative--you couldn't be bad.
+
+How perfectly you will fit into all his plans and ambitions! A
+beautiful new life is opening up for you, a life so full of promise,
+of tremendous possibilities for good not only for you but for others
+that it seems like a bit of heaven.
+
+Tell him how I feel, Mate. It is hard for me to write letters these
+days, but I want him to know that I am glad because he is happy.
+
+I have been living in the past to-day going over the old days in the
+Mountains up at the lake, and the reunions on the farm. How many have
+gone down into the great silence since then!  Somehow I seem nearer to
+them than I do to you who are alive. While I am still on the crowded
+highway of life, yet I am surrounded by strange, unloving faces that
+have no connection with the joys or the sorrows of the past.
+
+How the view changes as we pass along the great road. At first only
+the hilltops are visible, rosy and radiant under the enthusiasm of
+youth, then the level plains come into sight flooded with the bright
+light of mid-day, then slowly we slip into the valleys where the long
+shadows fall like memories across our hearts.
+
+Oh! well, with all the struggles, all the heartaches, I am glad, Mate,
+very glad that I have lived--and laughed.  For I am laughing again, in
+spite of the fact that my courage got fuddled and took the wrong road.
+
+I heard of a man the other day who had received a sentence of fifteen
+years for some criminal act. He was in love with the freedom of life,
+he was young and strong, so he made a dash down a long iron staircase,
+dropped into a river, swam a mile and gained his freedom. All search
+failed to find him, but two days later he walked into the police
+station and gave himself up to serve his time. I made my dash for
+liberty, but I have come back to serve my time.
+
+I don't have to tell you, Mate, that I am ashamed of having shown the
+white feather. You will write me a beautiful letter and explain it all
+away, but I know in my soul you are disappointed in me, and to even
+think about it is like going down in a swift elevator.  Being able to
+go under gracefully is my highest ambition at present, but try as I
+will, I kick a few kicks before I disappear.
+
+Please, please, Mate, don't worry about me. I promise that if I reach
+the real limit I will cable for a special steamer to be sent for
+me. But I don't intend to reach it, or at least I am going to get on
+the other side of it, so there will be no further danger.
+
+Two long months will pass before I get an answer to this. It will come
+in April with the cherry blossoms and the spring.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, March, 1905.
+
+
+You must forgive me if the letters have been few and far between
+lately.  After my little "wobble" I plunged into work with might and
+main, and I am still at it for all I am worth.  First I house-cleaned,
+and the old place must certainly be surprised at its transformation.
+Fresh curtains, new paper, cozy window seats, and bright cushions have
+made a vast difference.  Then I tackled the kindergarten, and the
+result is about the prettiest thing in Japan. The room is painted
+white with buff walls and soft muslin curtains, the only decoration
+being a hundred blessed babies, in gay little kimonas, who look like
+big bunches of flowers placed in a wreath upon the floor.
+
+As for my training class, I have no words to express my
+gratification. I can scarcely believe that the fine, capable, earnest
+young women that are going out to all parts of Japan to start new
+Kindergartens, are the timid, giggling, dependent little creatures
+that came to me four years ago.
+
+Goodness knows I was as immature in my way as they were in theirs, but
+in my desperate need, I builded better than I knew. I recklessly
+followed your advice and hitched my little go-cart to a star, and the
+star turned into a meteor and is now whizzing through space getting
+bigger and stronger all the time, and I am tied on to the end of it
+unable to stop it or myself.
+
+If I only had more sense and more ability, think what I might have
+done!
+
+The work at the hospital is still very heavy. The wards are bare and
+repellant and the days are long and dreary for the sick men. We do all
+we can to cheer them up, have phonograph concerts, magic lantern
+shows, with the magic missing, and baby organ recitals. The results
+are often ludicrous, but the appreciation of the men for our slightest
+effort is so hearty that it more than repays us.
+
+I saw one man yesterday who had gone crazy on the battlefield. He
+looked like a terror stricken animal afraid of everybody, and hiding
+under the sheet at the slightest approach.  When I came in he cowered
+back against the wall shaking from head to foot. I put a big bunch of
+flowers on the bed, and in a flash his hands were stretched out for
+them, and a smile came to his lips. After that whenever I passed the
+door, he would shout out, "Arigato! Arigato!" which the nurse said was
+the first sign of sanity he had shown.
+
+In the next room was a man who had fallen from a mast on one of the
+flag ships. He had landed full on his face and the result was too
+fearful to describe.  The nurse said he could not live through the
+night so I laid my flowers on his bed and was slipping out when he
+called to me. His whole head was covered with bandages except his
+mouth and one eye, and I had to lean down very close to understand
+what he said. What do you suppose he wanted?  To look at my hat!! He
+had never seen one before and he was just like a child in his
+curiosity.
+
+Of course, as foreigners, we always excite comment, and are gazed at,
+examined and talked about continually.  I sometimes feel like a wild
+animal in a cage straight from the heart of Africa!
+
+Our unfailing point of contact is the flowers. You cannot imagine how
+they love them. I have seen men holding them tenderly in their fingers
+and talking to them as they would to children.  Imagine retreating
+soldiers after a hard day's fight, stopping to put a flower in a dead
+comrade's hand!
+
+Oh! Mate, the most comical things and the most tragic, the most
+horrible and the most beautiful are all mixed up together. Every time
+I go to the hospital I am faced with my wasted years of
+opportunities. It takes so little to bring sunshine and cheer, and yet
+millions of us go chasing our own little desires through life, and
+never stop to think of the ones who are down.
+
+No, I am not going to turn Missionary nor Salvation Army lassie, but
+with God's help I shall serve somewhere and "good cheer for the
+lonely" shall be my watch-word.
+
+I am lots better than I was, though I am still tussling with
+insomnia. My crazy nerves play me all sorts of tricks, but praise be I
+have stopped worrying. I have come at last to see that God has found
+even a small broken instrument like myself worth working through, and
+I just lift up my heart to Him every day, battered and bruised as it
+is, in deep unspeakable thankfulness.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, April, 1905.
+
+
+My dearest Mate:
+
+Your letter is here and I haven't a grain of sense, nor dignity, nor
+anything else except a wild desire to hug everything in sight! I am
+having as many thrills as a surcharged electric battery, and I am so
+hysterically happy that I don't care what I do or say.
+
+Why didn't you tell me at first it was Dr. Leet? My mind was so full
+of Jack that I forgot that other men inhabited the earth. It is no use
+bluffing any longer, Mate, there has never been a minute since the
+train pulled out of the home station that every instinct in me hasn't
+cried out for Jack.  Pride kept me silent at first, and then the
+miserable thought got hold of me that he was beginning to care for
+you.  Oh! the agony I have suffered, trying to be loyal to you, to be
+generous to him, and to put myself out of the question!  And now your
+blessed letter comes, and laughs at my fears and says "Jack chooses
+his wife as he does his friends, for eternity."
+
+I have no words to fit the occasion, all I can say is now that
+happiness has shown me the back of her head I am scared to death to
+look her in the face.  But I "shore do" like the arrangement of her
+back hair.
+
+Don't breathe a word of what I have written, but as you love me find
+out absolutely and beyond all possibility of doubt if Jack feels
+exactly as he did four years ago. If you give me your word of honor
+that he does, then--I will write.
+
+I have signed a contract for another year, and I must stay it out, but
+I would spend a year in Hades if Heaven was at the end of it.
+
+All you say about Dr. Leet fills me with joy. He does not need any
+higher commendation in this world nor the next than that you are
+willing to marry him! Isn't it dandy that he is going to back the
+hospital scheme?
+
+When I think of the way Jack has worked for ten years without a
+vacation, putting all his magnificent ability, his strength, his
+youth, his health even into that project, I don't wonder that men like
+Dr. Leet are eager to put their money and services at his disposal.
+You say Dr. Leet does it upon the condition that Jack takes a rest.
+Make him stick to it, Mate, he will kill himself if he isn't stopped.
+
+I have read your letters over and over and traced your love affair
+every inch of the way. Why are you such an old clam! To think that I
+am the only one that knows your secret, and that up to to-day I have
+been barking up the wrong tree! Never mind, I forgive you, I forgive
+everybody, I am drunk with happiness and generous in consequence.
+
+My little old lane is glorified, even the barbed wire fence on either
+side scintillates. The house is too small, I am going out on the River
+Road, and see the cherry blossoms on the hill sides and the sunlight
+on the water, and feel the road under my feet. I feel like a
+prospector who has struck gold. Whatever comes of it all, for this one
+day I am going to give full rein to my fancy and be gloriously happy
+once more.
+
+
+
+
+HIROSHIMA, May, 1905.
+
+
+There is a big yellow bee, doing the buzzing act in the sunshine on my
+window, and I am just wondering who is doing the most buzzing, he or
+I? His nose is yellow with pollen from some flower he has robbed, his
+body is fat and lazy, all in all he is about the happiest bee I ever
+beheld. But I can go him one better, while it is only his wings that
+are beating with happiness, it is my heart that is going to the tune
+of rag-time jigs and triumphal alleluias all at the same time.
+
+My chef, four feet two, remarked this morning "Sensei happy all same
+like chicken!" He meant bird, but any old fowl will do.
+
+Oh! Mate, it is good to be alive these days. For weeks we have had
+nothing but glorious sunrises, gorgeous sunsets, and perfect
+noondays. The wistaria has come before the cherry blossoms have quite
+gone, and the earth is a glow of purple and pink with the blue sky
+above as tender as love.
+
+Each morning I open my windows to the east to see the marvel of a new
+day coming fresh from the hands of its Maker, and each evening I stand
+at the opposite window and watch the same day drop over the mountains
+to eternity. In the flaming sky where so often hangs the silver
+crescent is always the promise of another day, another chance to begin
+anew.
+
+Just one more year and I will be turning the gladdest face homeward
+that ever a lonely pilgrim faced the West with. There will be many a
+pang at leaving Japan, I have learned life's deepest lesson here, and
+the loneliness and isolation that have been so hard to bear have
+revealed inner depths of which I never dreamed before. What strange
+things human beings are! Our very crosses get dear after we have
+carried them awhile!
+
+I have had three offers to sign fresh contracts, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and
+here, but I am leaving things to shape themselves for the
+future. Whatever happens I am coming home first. If happiness is
+waiting for me, I'll meet it with out-stretched arms, if not I am
+coming back to my post. Thank God I am sure of myself at last!
+
+The work at the hospital this month is much lighter, and the patients
+are leaving for home daily. The talk of peace is in the air, and we
+are praying with all our hearts that it may come. Nobody but those who
+have seen with their own eyes can know the unspeakable horrors of this
+war. It is not only those who are fighting at the front who have known
+the full tragedy, it is those also who are fighting at home the
+relentless foe of poverty, sickness, and desolation. If victory comes
+to Japan, half the glory must be for those silent heroic little women,
+who gave their all, then took up the man's burden and cheerfully bore
+it to the end.
+
+I was very much interested in your account of the young missionary who
+is coming through Japan on her way to China. I know just how she will
+feel when she steps off the steamer and finds no friendly face to
+welcome her.  I talked over your little scheme with Miss Lessing and
+she says I can go up to Yokohama in July to meet her and bring her
+right down here. Tell her to tie her handkerchief around her arm so I
+will know her, and not to worry the least bit, that I will take care
+of her and treat her like one of my own family.
+
+Can you guess how eagerly I am waiting for your answer to my April
+letter? It cannot come before the last of June, and happy as I am, the
+time seems very long. Yet I would rather live to the last of my days
+like this, travelling ever toward the pot of gold at the end of the
+rainbow, than ever to arrive and find the gold not there!
+
+You say that at last you know I am the "captain of my soul." Well,
+Mate, I believe I am, but I just want to say that it's a hard worked
+captain that I am, and if anybody wants the job--very much--I think he
+can get it.
+
+
+
+
+YOKOHAMA, July 5, 1905.
+
+
+Do you suppose, if people could, they would write letters as soon as
+they got to Heaven! I don't know where to begin nor what to say. The
+only thing about me that is on earth is this pen point, the rest is
+floating around in a diamond-studded, rose-colored mist!
+
+I will try to be sensible and give you some idea of what has been
+happening, but how I am to get it on paper I don't know. I got here
+yesterday, the 4th of July, on the early train, and rushed down to the
+hatoba to meet the launch when it came in from the steamer. I had had
+no breakfast and was as nervous as a witch. Your letter had not come,
+and my fears were increasing every moment.
+
+Well I took my place on the steps as the launch landed and waited,
+with very little interest I must confess, for your young missionary to
+appear. By and by I saw a handkerchief tied to a sleeve, but it was a
+man's sleeve.  I gave one more look, and my heart seemed to
+stop. "Jack!" I cried, and then everything went black before me, and I
+didn't know anything more. It was the first time I ever fainted;
+sorrow and grief never knocked me out, but joy like that was enough to
+kill me!
+
+When I came to, I was at the hotel and I didn't dare open my eyes--I
+knew it was all a dream, and I did not want to come back to reality. I
+lay there holding on to the vision, until I heard a man's voice close
+by say, "She will be all right now, I will take care of her." Then I
+opened my eyes, and with three Japanese maids and four Japanese men
+and two ladies off the steamer looking on, I flung my arms about
+Jack's neck and cried down his collar!
+
+He made me stay quiet all morning, and just before tiffin he calmly
+informed me that he had made all the arrangements for us to be married
+at three o'clock. I declared I couldn't, that I had signed a contract
+for another year at Hiroshima, that Miss Lessing would think I was
+crazy, that I must make some plans. But you know Jack! He met every
+objection that I could offer, said he would see Miss Lessing and make
+it all right about the contract, that I was too nervous to teach any
+more, and last that I owed him a little consideration after four years
+of waiting. Then I realized how the lines had deepened in his face,
+and how the grey was streaking his hair, and I surrendered promptly.
+
+We were married in a little English church on the Bluff, with half a
+dozen witnesses. Several Americans whom Jack had met on the steamer, a
+missionary friend of mine, and the Japanese clerk constituted the
+audience.
+
+It is all like a beautiful dream to me still, and I am afraid to let
+Jack get out of my sight for fear I will wake up. It was Fourth of
+July, and Christmas, and birthday, and wedding day all rolled into
+one. The whole city was celebrating, the hotel a flutter of flags and
+ribbons, the bay full of every kind of pleasure craft. At night there
+was a grand lantern fete and fireworks, and a huge figure of Uncle Sam
+with stars in his coat tails.  Thousands of Japanese in their gayest
+kimonas thronged the Bund, listening to the music, watching the
+foreigners and the fire-works.
+
+Jack and I were like two children, he forgot that he was a staid
+doctor, and I forgot that I had ever been a Foreign Missionary
+Kindergarten teacher. We were boy and girl again and up to our eyes in
+love. It was the first Fourth of July for fifteen years that I did not
+have some unhappiness to conceal. As one of my girls said about
+herself: "My little lonely heart had flewed away!"
+
+All the loneliness, the heartaches, the pains are justified now. I do
+not regret the past for through it the present is.
+
+Do you remember the lines: "He shall restore the years that the locust
+hath eaten?" Well I believe that while I have been struggling out
+here, He has restored them, and that I will be permitted to return to
+a new life, a life given back by God.
+
+Of course you know we are going on around. It seems rather
+inconsistent to say I am glad of it after all my wailing for home. The
+truth is, home has come to _me_!
+
+Jack says we are to meet you and Dr. Leet in Paris. You needn't try to
+persuade me that Heaven will be any better than the present!
+
+There is no use in my trying to thank you for your part in all this,
+dear Mate. I have been in a chronic state of gratitude to you ever
+since I was born! I can only say with all my heart and soul "God bless
+you and Good-bye."
+
+P.S. In my wedding ring is engraved M.L.O.T.D. Can you guess what it
+means?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Lady of the Decoration, by Frances Little
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