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.
Mate, think of the loveliest landscape picture you ever saw, put me in it and you will know where I am. With some friends from Honolulu and a darling old man—observe I say old!—from Colorado, we started two days ago, to walk around the base of Fuji. Everything went splendidly till a typhoon hit us amidships and sent us careening, blind, battered and soaked into this red and white refuge of a hotel, that clings to the side of a mountain like a woodpecker to a telephone pole. I have seen storms, but the worst I ever saw was a playful summer breeze compared with the magnificent fury of this wind that snapped great trees in two as if they had been young bean-poles, and whipped the usually peaceful lake into raging waves that swept through a gorge and greedily licked up a whole village.
Our path was high up, but right over the water. Sometimes we were crawling on all fours. Mostly we were flying just where the wind listed. If a tree got in our way as we flew, so much the worse for us. It is funny now, but it was not at the time! Seriously, I was in immediate peril of being blown to glory via the fierce green foam below. My Colorado Irishman is not only a darling, but a hero. Once I slipped, and stopped rolling only when some faithful pines were too stubborn to let go.
I wag many feet below the reach of any arm. In a twinkling, my friend had stripped the kimono off the baggage coolie's back, and made a lasso with which he pulled me up. Then shocked to a standstill by the shortcomings of the coolie's birthday suit, he snatched off his coat and gave it to him, with a dollar. Such a procession of bedraggled and exhausted pleasure-seekers as we were, when three men stood behind our hotel door and opened it just wide enough to haul us in. But hot baths and boiling tea revived us and soon we were as merry as any people can be who have just escaped annihilation.
The typhoon passed as suddenly as it came, and now the world—or at least this part of it—is as glowing and beautiful as if freshly tinted by the Master Hand.
A moment ago I looked up to see my rescuer gazing out of the window. I asked, "How do you feel, Mr. Carson?" His voice trembled when he answered: "Lady, I feel glorified, satisfied and nigh about petrified. Look at that!"
Below lay Shoji, its shimmering waters rimmed with velvety green. Every raindrop on the pines was a prism; the mountain a brocade of blossom. To the right Fuji, the graceful, ever lovely Fuji; capricious as a coquette and bewitching in her mystery, with a thumbnail moon over her peak, like a silver tiara on the head of a proud beauty; at her base the last fleecy clouds of the day, gathered like worshipers at the feet of some holy saint.