rote once: "We (the two of us) love each
other, like to do things together (absolutely anything), don't need or
want anybody else, and the world is ours." Mrs. Willard once told me
that if she had read about our life together in a book, she would not
have believed it. She did not know that any one on earth could live like
that. Perhaps that is one reason why I want to tell about it--because it
was just so plain wonderful day in, day out. I feel, too, that I have a
complete record of our life. For fourteen years, every day that we were
not together we wrote to each other, with the exception of two short
camping-trips that Carl made, where mail could be sent out only by
chance returning campers.

Somehow I find myself thinking here of our wedding
anniversaries,--spread over half the globe,--and the joy we got out of
just those ten occasions. The first one was back in Oakland, after our
return from Seattle. We still had elements of convention left in us
then,--or, rather, I still had some; I don't believe Carl had a streak
of it in him ever,--so we dressed in our very best clothes, dress-suit
and all, and had dinner at the Key Route Inn, where we had gone after
the wedding a year before. After dinner we rushed home, I nursed the
son, we changed into natural clothes, and went to the circus. I had
misgivings about the circus being a fitting wedding-anniversary
celebration; but what was one to do when the circus comes to town but
one night in the year?

The second anniversary was in Cambridge. We always used to laugh each
year and say: "Gracious! if any one had told us a year ago we'd be here
this September seventh!" Every year we were somewhere we never dreamed
we would be. That first September seventh, the night of the wedding, we
were to be in Seattle for years--selling bonds. What a fearful prospect
in retrospect, compared to what we really did! The second September,
back in Oakland, we thought we were to be in the bond business for years
in Oakland. More horrible thoughts as I look back upon it. The third
September seventh, the second anniversary, lo and behold, was in
Cambridge, Massachusetts! Whoever would have guessed it, in all the
world? It was three days after Carl's return from that awful Freiburg
summer--we left Nandy with a kind-hearted neighbor, and away we spreed
to Boston, to the matinee and something good to eat.

Then, whoever would have imagined for a moment that the next year we
would be celebrating in