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