So far I have played only a thinking part in the drama.  But I will not stand by and see the girl, whose very loneliness is a plea, sacrificed without some kind of a struggle to help her.  At the present writing I feel about as effective as a February lamb, and every move calls for tact.  Wish I had been born with a needle wit instead of a Roman nose!  For if Uncle has a glimmer of a suspicion that I would befriend Sada at the cost of his plans, so surely as the river is lost in the sea, Sada would disappear from my world until it was too late for me to lend a hand.

Good-by, Mate.  At eventide, as of old, look my way and send me strength from your vast store of calm courage and common sense.  The odds are against me, but the god of luck has never yet failed to laugh with me.

September, 1911.

I am in a monastery, Mate, but only temporarily, thank you.  It is a blessing to the cause that Fate did not turn me into a monk or a sister or any of those inconvenient things with a restless religion, that wakes you up about 3 A.M. on a wintry dawn to pray shiveringly to a piece of wood, to the tune of a thumping drum.  Some morning when the frost was on the cypress that carven image would disappear!

For one time at least I would have a nice fire, and my prayers would not be decorated with icicles.

For two weeks my friends and I have been tramping through picture-book villages and silk-worm country, and over mountain winding ways, sleeping on the floor, sitting on our feet and giving our stomachs surprise parties with hot, cold and lukewarm rice, seaweed and devil-fish.

It has been one hilarious lark of outdoor life, with nothing to pin us to earth but the joy of being a part of so beautiful a world.

The road led us through superb forests, over the Bridge of Paradise to Koyo San, whose peak is so far above the mist-wreathed valleys that it scrapes the clouds as they float by.  But I want to say right here; Kobo Daishi, who founded this monastery in the distant ages and built a temple to his own virtues, may have been a saint, but he was not much of a gentleman!  Else he would not have been so reckless of the legs and necks of the coming generations, as to blaze the trail to his shrine over mountains so steep that our pack-mule coming up could easily have bitten off his own tail if he had so minded.

Later.

This afternoon I must hustle down.  I suppose the only way to get down is to roll.  Well; anyway I am in a hurry.  My mail beat me up the trail and a letter from Sada San begs me to come to Kioto to see her as soon as I can.  She only says she needs help and does not know what to do.  And blessed be the telegram that winds up from Hiroshima; the school is in urgent need of an assistant at the Kindergarten and they ask me to come.  The principal, Miss Look, has gone to America on business, for three months.  Hooray!  Here is my chance to resign from the “Folded Hands’ Society” and do something that is really worth while, as long as I cannot go to my man.  How good it will seem once again to be in that dear old mission school, where in the long ago I toiled and laughed and suffered while I waited for Jack.