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