Yesterday the American mail came after a three weeks' delay. None of us were good for anything the rest of the day. Twenty letters and fifty-two papers for me! Do you wonder that I almost danced a hole in the parlor rug?

The home news was all so bright and cheery, and your letter was such a bunch of comfort that I felt like a two year old. It was exactly like you to think out that little farm party and get Jack into it as a matter of accommodation to you. I followed everything you did, with the keenest interest, from the all-day tramps in the woods, to the cozy evenings around the log fire. I can see old Jack now, at first bored to death but resolved to die if need be on the altar of friendship, gradually warming up as he always does out of doors, and ending up by being the life of the party. He once told me that social success is the infinite capacity for being bored. I know the little outing did him a world of good, and you are all the trumps in the deck as usual.

Who is the Dr. Leet that was in the party? I remember dancing a cotillon with a very good looking youth of that name in the prehistoric ages. He was a senior at Yale, very rich and very good looking. I wore his fraternity pin over my heart for a whole week afterward.

We have been having great fun over the American accounts of the war. Through the newspapers we learn the most marvelous things about Japan and her people. Large cities are unblushingly moved from the coast to an island in the Inland Sea, troops are passported from places which have no harbor, and the people are credited with unheard of customs.

We are still in the midst of stirring times. The city is overflowing with troops, and we are hemmed in on every side by soldiers. Of course foreign women are very curious to them, and they often follow us and make funny comments, but we have never yet had a single rudeness shown us. In all the thousands of soldiers stationed here, I have only seen two who were tipsy, and they were mildly hilarious from saki. There is perfect order and discipline, and after nine o'clock at night the streets are as quiet as a mountain village.

The other night, five of the soldiers, mere boys, donned citizens' dress and went out for a lark. At roll-call they were missing and a guard was sent to search for them. When found, they resisted arrest and three minutes after they all answered the roll-call in another world.

And yet although the discipline is so severe, the men seem a contented and happy lot. They stroll along the roads when off duty hand in hand like school girls, and laugh and chatter as if life were a big holiday. But when the time comes to go to the front, they don their gay little uniforms, and march just as joyfully away to give the last drop of their blood for their Emperor.

I tell you, Mate, I want to get out in the street and cheer every regiment that passes! No drum, no fife, no inspiring music to stir their blood and strengthen their courage, nothing but the unvarying monotony of the four note trumpets. They don't need music to make them go. They are perfect little machines whose motive power is a patriotism so absolute, so complete, that it makes death on the battle-field an honor worthy of deification.

I look out into the play-ground, and every boy down to the smallest baby in the kindergarten is armed with a bamboo gun. Such drilling and marching, and attacking of forts you have never seen. That the enemy is nothing more than sticks stuck at all angles matters little. An enemy there must be, and the worst boy in Japan would die before he would even play at being a Russian! If Kuropatkin could see just one of these awful onslaughts, he would run up the white flag and hie himself to safety. So you see we are well guarded and with quiet little soldiers on the outside, and very noisy and fierce little soldiers on the inside, we fear no invasion of our peaceful compound.

On my walks around the barracks, I often pass the cook house, and watch the food being carried to the mess room. The rice buckets, about the size of our water buckets, are put on a pole in groups of six or eight and carried on the shoulders of two men. There is a line about a square long of these buckets, and then another long line follows with trays of soup bowls. Tea is not as a rule drunk with the meals, but after the last grain of rice has been chased from the slippery sides of the bowl, hot water is poured in and sipped with loud appreciation. Last Sunday afternoon we had to entertain ten officers of high rank, and it proved a regular lark. Their English and our Japanese got fatally twisted. One man took great pride in showing me how much too big his clothes were, giving him ample opportunity to put on several suits of underwear in cold weather; he said "Many cloth dese trusers hab, no fit like 'Merican." They were delighted with all our foreign possessions, and inspected everything minutely. On leaving, one officer bowed low, and assured me that he would never see me on earth again, but he hoped he would see me in heaven first!

The breezes from China waft an occasional despairing epistle from Little Germany, but they find me as cold as a snow bank on the north side of a mountain. The sun that melts my heart will have to rise in the west, and get up early at that.