Jack thinks the native doctors have put up a brave fight, but so far the laugh has been all on the side of the frisky germ.

It blasts everything it touches and is most fastidious.  Nobody can blame it for choosing as its nesting-place the little soft furred Siberian marmots, which the Chinese hunt for their skin.  If only the hunters could be given a dip in a sulphur vat before they lay them down to sleep in the unspeakable inns with their spoils wrapped around them, the chance for infection would not be so great.  Of course the bare suggestion of a bath might prove more fatal than the plague, for oftener than not the hunters are used only as a method of travel by the merry microbe and are immune from the effects.  Of course Jack has all sorts of theories as to why this is so.  But did you ever see a scientist who didn’t have a workable theory for everything from the wrong end of a carpet-tack to the evolution of a June bug?

From the hunters and their spoils the disease spreads and their path southwards can be traced by desolated villages and piles of bones.

Jack tells me he is garbed in a long white robe effect (I hope he won’t grow wings), with a good-sized mosquito net on a frame over his head and face.  He works in heavy gloves.  Mouth and nose being the favorite point of attack, everybody who ventures out wears over this part of the face a curiously shaped shield, whose firm look says, “No admittance here.”  But all the same, that germ from Siberia is a wily thief and steals lives by the thousands, in spite of all precautions.

Jack is as enthusiastic over the fight against the scourge as a college boy over football.  His letter has so many big technical words in it, I had to pay excess postage.

I ’ve read his letter twice, but to save me I cannot find any suggestion of the remotest possibility of my coming nearer.  Yes, I know I said Japan only.  But way down in the cellar of my heart I hoped he would say nearer.

What a happy day it has been.  Here is your letter, just come.  The priests up at the temple have asked me to see the ceremony of offering food to the spirits, in the holy of holies.

There is not time for me to add another word to this letter.  What a dear you are, to love while you lecture me.  What you say is all true.  A woman’s place is in her home.  But just now out of the East, I ’ve had a call to play silent partner to science and while it ’s a lonesome sport, at least it ’s far more entertaining than caring for a husbandless house.  Anyhow I am sending you a hug and a thousand kisses for the babies.

SHOJI LAKE, August, 1911.