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