able and beds just as the occupants left them. A
great pit near by full of ashes and bones tells the story of the
plague come to town, leaving silent, empty houses, and the
dust-laden winds as the only mourners.

The native doctors gave a splendid banquet the other night. With
the visiting doctors in full array of evening dress and
decorations. Jack says it looked like a big international flag
draped around the table. Everybody made a speech and Jack has not
stopped yet shooting off fireworks in honor of that Englishwoman.

Well, maybe _I_ should have studied science. It is too late now.
Besides, I have Uncle on my hands, and I have to commit to memory
pages on color printing that run like this: "Fine as a single hair
or swelling imperceptibly till it becomes a broken play of light
and shade or a mass of solid black, it still flows, unworried and
without hesitation on its appointed course."

Sada San is coining down nest week. I am looking forward to it
with great delight and hunting for a plan whereby I can help her.

Suppose Uncle should give me a glad surprise and come too!

HIROSHIMA.

_My dear Best Girl_:

If ever a sailor needed a compass, I need the level head that tops
your loving heart. I am worried hollow-eyed and as useless as a
brass turtle.

It has been days since I heard from Jack. When he last wrote, he
was going to some remote district out from Mukden. I dare not
think what might happen to him. Says he must travel to the very
source of the trouble.

If Jack really wanted trouble he could find it nearer home. Is n't
it like him, though, with his German education, to hunt a thing to
its lair? I suppose when next I hear from him, he will have
disappeared into some marmot hole at the foot of a tree in a
Siberian forest.

Sada is here. A pale shadow of her former radiant self. She is in
deadly fear of what Uncle has written he expects of her when she
returns.

For the first few days of her visit, she was like an escaped
prisoner. She played and sang with the girls. The joy of her
laughter was contagious. Everybody fell a victim to her gaiety.
We have been on picnics up the river in a sampan where we waded and
fished, then landed on an island of bamboo and fern and cooked our
dinner over a _hibachi_. We have had concerts, tableaux and
charades, here at the school, with a big table for the stage and a
silver moon and a green mosquito-net for the scenery.

In every pasti