I’d like to have Anne’s perfect sureness as to the future, but lacking it, I do not look forward with fear, even if the worst should happen.  I’ve never done a wrong to any man or woman or child that I can now recall—­but maybe my memory is failing.

My boy and his bride came back this morning—­happy!  Oh, so happy!  And my “best beloved” brother who sings Scotch songs is here—­a great philosopher whom you would deeply admire—­and our friends the Severances of St. Paul, thirty year-old friends, they come over tonight.  So we will be a merry, merry company.  I’d love to see you and the gay Cavalier, but let us hope it won’t be long till we meet!  Au revoir!

F. K. L.

To friends who had telegraphed and written urgently for news

May 11, 1921

It is Wednesday afternoon and I am now sitting up in bed talking to my good friend, Cotter.  Until yesterday I did not clearly visualize any one thing in this room and did not know that it had a window, except that there was a place that noise came through, but I did know that it had a yellow oak door that stared at me with its great, big, square eye, all day and all night.

Last Friday, you see, about ten in the morning, I took the step that I should have taken months, yes, years ago.  I was stretched on a stiff, hard table, my arms were clamped down and in three-quarters of an hour I had my appendix and my gall bladder removed, which latter was a stone quarry and the former a cesspool.  Today, most tentatively, I crawled on to a chair and ate my first mouthful of solid food.  But four days ago I managed to shave myself, and I am regarded as pretty spry.

I have seen death come to men in various ways, some rather novel and western.  I once saw a man hanged.  And I have seen several men shot, and came very near going out that way myself two or three times, but always the other fellow aimed poorly.  I was being shot at because I was a newspaper man, and I should have been shot at.  There must be public concern in what is printed, as well as its truth, to justify it.  That is something that newspapers should get to know in this country.  After the earthquake in San Francisco, I saw walls topple out upon a man.  And I have had more intimate glimpses still of the picturesque and of the prosaic ways by which men come to their taking off.

But never before have I been called upon deliberately to walk into the Valley of the Shadow and, say what you will, it is a great act.  I have said, during the past months of endless examination, that a man with little curiosity and little humor and a little money who was not in too great pain could enjoy himself studying the ways of doctors and nurses, as he journeyed the invalid’s path.  It was indeed made a flowery path for me, as much as any path could be in which a man suffered more humiliation and distress and thwarting and frustration, on the whole, than he did pain.

But here was a path, the end of which I could not see.  I was not compelled to take it.  My very latest doctor advised me against taking it.  I could live some time without taking it.  It was a bet on the high card with a chance to win, and I took it.