I am in the very thickest of Christmas, and yet such a funny, unreal Christmas, that it does not seem natural at all. Hiroshima is busy decorating for the New Year, and everything is gay with brilliant lanterns, plum blossoms and crimson berries. The little insignificant streets are changed into bowers of sweet smelling ferns and spicy pines, and the bamboo leaves sway to every breeze, while the waxen plum blossoms send out a perfume sweet as violets.

The shop-keepers and their families put on their gayest kimonos and their most enticing smiles and greet you with effusion.

On entering a shop you are asked if your honorable eyes will deign to look upon most unworthy goods. Please will you give this or that a little adoring look? The price? Ah! it's price is greatly enhanced since the august foreigner cast honorable eyes upon it. (Which is no joke!) Whether the article is bought or not, the smile, the bow, the compliment are the same. All this time the crowd around the door of the shop has been steadily increasing until daylight is shut out, for everyone is interested in your purchase from the man who hauls the dray up to the highest lady in the land. The shop-keeper is very patient with the crowd until it shuts out the light, then he invites them to carry their useless bodies to the river and throw them in.

Once outside you see another crowd and as curiosity is in the air, you crane your neck and try to get closer. The center of attraction is a man in spotless white cooking bean cake on a little hibachi. The air is cold and crisp, and the smell of the savory bean paste, piping hot, makes you hungry.

Next comes the fish man with a big flat basket on each end of a pole, and offers you a choice lot; long slippery eels, beautiful shrimp, as pink as the sunset, and juicy oysters whose shells have been scrubbed until they are gleaming white. Around the baskets are garlands of paper roses to hide from view the ugly rough edges of the straw.

The candy shops tempt you to the last sen, and the toy shops are a perfect joy. Funny fat Japanese dolls and stuffed rabbits and cross-eyed, tailless cats demand attention. Perhaps you will see a cheap American doll with blue eyes and yellow hair carefully exhibited under a glass case, and when you are wondering why they treasure this cheap toy, you happen to glance down and catch the worshipping gaze of a wistful, half starved child, and your point of view changes at once and you begin to understand the value of it, and to wish with all your heart that you could put an American dolly in the hands of every little Japanese girl on the Island!

It is getting almost time to open my box and I am right childish over it. It has been here for two days, and I have slipped in a dozen times to look at it and touch it. Oh! Mate, the time has been so long, so cruelly long! I wake myself up in the night some time sobbing. One year and a half behind me, and two and a half ahead! I remember mother telling about the day I started to school, how I came home and said triumphantly, "Just think I've only got ten more years to go to school!"

Poor little duffer! She's still going to school!

Last night I had another mother's meeting for the mothers of the Free Kindergarten. This time I gave a magic lantern show, and I was the showman. The poor, ignorant women sat there bewildered. They had never seen a piano, and many of them had never been close to a foreigner before. I showed them about a hundred slides, explained through an interpreter until I was hoarse, gesticulated and orated to no purpose. They remained silent and stolid. By and by there was a stir, heads were raised, and necks craned. A sudden interest swept over the room. I followed their gaze and saw on the sheet the picture of Christ toiling up the mountain under the burden of the cross. The story was new and strange to them, but the fact was as old as life itself. At last they had found something that touched their own lives and brought the quick tears of sympathy to their eyes.

I am going to have a meeting every month for them, no matter what else has to go undone.

It is almost time to hang up our stockings. Miss Lessing and Dixie objected at first, but I told them I was either going to be very foolish or very blue, they could take their choice. I have to do something to scare away the ghosts of dead Christmases, so I put on my fool's cap and jingle my bells. When I begin to weaken, I go to the piano and play "Come Ye Disconsolate" to rag time, and it cheers me up wonderfully.

I guess it's just about daylight with you now. Pete is tiptoeing in to make the fires. I can hear him now saying: "Christmas Gif' Mister Sam, Chris'mus Gif' Miss Bettie!" and the children are flying around in their night clothes wild with excitement. Down in the sitting room the stockings make a circle around the room and underneath each is a pile of gifts. I can see the big log fire, and the sparkle of it in the old book-case, and in the long glass between the windows. And in a few minutes here you all come, you uncles and you cousins and you aunts, trooping in with the smallest first. And such laughing, and shouting, and rejoicing! and maybe in the midst of the fun somebody speaks of me, and there's a little hush, and a little longing, then the fun goes on more furiously than ever.

Well even if I am on the wrong side of the earth in body, I am not in spirit, and I reach my arms clear around the world and cry "God bless you, every one."