him to health.  One of the dreariest aspects of such an experience is its tediousness and loneliness.  Yet the maintenance of one’s good spirits and optimism is an essential part of the treatment.  And it was in this work that Page now proved an indispensable aid to the medical men.  As soon as Dr. Alderman found himself stretched out, a weak and isolated figure, cut off from those activities and interests which had been his inspiration for forty years, with no companions except his own thoughts and a few sufferers like himself, letters began to arrive with weekly regularity from the man whom he always refers to as “dear old Page.”  The gayety and optimism of these letters, the lively comments which they passed upon men and things, and their wholesome and genial philosophy, were largely instrumental, Dr. Alderman has always believed, in his recovery.  Their effect was so instant and beneficial that the physicians asked to have them read to the other patients, who also derived abounding comfort and joy from them.  The whole episode was one of the most beautiful in Page’s life, and brings out again that gift for friendship which was perhaps his finest quality.  For this reason it is a calamity that most of these letters have not been preserved.  The few that have survived are interesting not only in themselves; they reveal Page’s innermost thoughts on the subject of Woodrow Wilson.  That he admired the new President is evident, yet these letters make it clear that, even in 1912 and 1913, there was something about Mr. Wilson that caused him to hesitate, to entertain doubts, to wonder how, after all, the experiment was to end.

     To Edwin A. Alderman

     Garden City, L.I. 
     December 31, 1912.

     MY DEAR ED ALDERMAN: 

I have a new amusement, a new excitement, a new study, as you have and as we all have who really believe in democracy—­a new study, a new hope, and sometimes a new fear; and its name is Wilson.  I have for many years regarded myself as an interested, but always a somewhat detached, outsider, believing that the democratic idea was real and safe and lifting, if we could ever get it put into action, contenting myself ever with such patches of it as time and accident and occasion now and then sewed on our gilded or tattered garments.  But now it is come—­the real thing; at any rate a man somewhat like us, whose thought and aim and dream are our thought and aim and dream.  That’s enormously exciting!  I didn’t suppose I’d ever become so interested in a general proposition or in a governmental hope.

     Will he do it?  Can he do it?  Can anybody do it?  How can we help him
     do it?  Now that the task is on him, does he really understand?  Do I
     understand him and he me?  There’s a certain unreality about it.