that he is feeling "bully," and that it all will come out right, that
every boy, when he starts out in the world, sends back to his
mother.

"I am in first-rate health and spirits, so I don't want you to fuss
about me. I am big enough and ugly enough to scratch along
somehow, and I will not starve."

To his mother he proudly sends his name written in Chinese
characters, as he had been taught to write it by the Chinese
Consul-General in San Francisco, and a pen-picture of two
elephants. "I am going to bring you home _two_ of these," he
writes, not knowing that in the strange and wonderful country to
which he is going elephants are as infrequent as they are in
Pittsburg.

He reached China in April, and from Nagasaki on his way to
Shanghai the steamer that carried him was chased by two French
gunboats. But, apparently much to his disappointment, she soon
ran out of range of their guns. Though he did not know it then,
with the enemy he had travelled so far to fight this was his first
and last hostile meeting; for already peace was in the air.

Of that and of how, in spite of peace, he obtained the "job" he
wanted, he must tell you himself in a letter home:

TIEN-TSIN, CHINA, April 13, 1885.

"MY DEAR MOTHER--I have not felt much in the humor for
writing, for I did not know what was going to happen. I spent a