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.