and Rose will work it out.  I wish to God I could throw down my practical job and go at it with ’em.  Darned if I couldn’t get it going! though I say it, as shouldn’t.  And we are going pretty soon to begin with the medical colleges; that, I think, is good—­very.

But the most efficient workmanlike piece of organization that my mortal eyes have ever seen is Rose’s hookworm worm work.  We’re going soon to organize country life in a sanitary way, the county health officer being the biggest man on the horizon.  Stiles has moved his marine hospital and his staff to Wilmington, North Carolina, and he and the local health men are quietly going to make New Hanover the model county for sanitary condition and efficiency.  You’ll know what a vast revolution that denotes!—­And Congress seems likely to charter the big Rockefeller Foundation, which will at once make five millions available for chasing the hookworm off the face of the earth.  Rose will spread himself over Honduras, etc., etc., and China, and India!  This does literally beat the devil; for, if the hookworm isn’t the devil, what is?

I’m going to farming.  I’ve two brothers and two sons, all young and strong, who believe in the game.  We have land without end, thousands of acres; engines to pull stumps, to plough, to plant, to reap.  The nigger go hang!  A white boy with an engine can outdo a dozen of ’em.  Cotton and corn for staple crops; peaches, figs, scuppernongs, vegetables, melons for incidental crops; God’s good air in North Carolina; good roads, too—­why, man, Moore County has authorized the laying out of a strip of land along all highways to be planted in shrubbery and fruit trees and kept as a park, so that you will motor for 100 miles through odorous bloom in spring!—­I mean I am going down there to-morrow for a month, one day for golf at Pinehurst, the next day for clearing land with an oil locomotive, ripping up stumps!  Every day for life out-of-doors and every night, too.  I’m going to grow dasheens.  You know what a dasheen is?  It’s a Trinidad potato, which keeps and tastes like a sweet potato stuffed with chestnuts.  There are lots of things to learn in this world.

God bless us all, old man.  It’s a pretty good world, whether seen from the petty excitements of reforming the world and dreaming of a diseaseless earth in New York, or from the stump-pulling recreation of a North Carolina wilderness.

     Health be with you!

     W.H.P.

     To Edwin A. Alderman

     Garden City, L.I.

     March 10, 1913.

     MY DEAR ED ALDERMAN: