On the hospitality of the President it is only necessary to say that, looking back to those records of 1900-1, I find this expression—warm from the heart—respecting General and Madame Diaz:
“Their kindness and courtesy, the extraordinary thoughtfulness and consideration with which I was treated, will ever remain in my mind. Without the personal aid of General Diaz I could not have written Mexico as I saw It, and perhaps this peep into the life of the people, over whom he rules so powerfully, may help to make that wonderful country a little better understood.”[5]
Five years later I returned to Mexico and wrote the Life of the President.
The first time I left the country I was limping with pain after a serious illness of blood-poisoning—the second time I left almost limping again, but that was from the weight of the precious documents I bore away.
No one knew but the President, his wife, and three of his Ministers, what important material I was taking with me, or that I was going to write the Life of General Diaz from his diaries and notes. It was published in England and America in February, 1906, and reprinted with additions two months later. One kindly critic said: “It is a romance, a history, a biography, one of the most thrilling stories of real life ever written.” Later it was translated into German and Spanish. I was so pressed with work at that time I had one Spanish and two English secretaries constantly employed—I often sat at my desk for nine or ten hours a day, and rarely went to any social entertainment except an occasional public dinner.
CHAPTER XII
THE CONTENTS OF A WORKING-WOMAN’S LETTER-BOX
THE fact of having committed a book into printer’s ink lays one open to curious correspondence. I am sure there are autograph hunters who seek the appearance of each new writer, in order to mark her down, as eagerly as ever angler watched for a trout rising to his fly. Some ask directly and are unashamed; others wrap up their request by desiring some piece of information. Happily it has not yet become a recognised custom for a writer to be asked by people entirely unknown to her to give them her books, but I have experienced even such modest requests. One circumstance was perhaps a little unusual.
From far-away Mussoorie, in the North-West Provinces of India, came a letter one day. It was dated “January,” after the season at the hill station was over, by some exile compelled to stay on through the dreariness of a deserted health resort, to live through the monotonously dull days and watch the successive falls of snow on the mountains. My correspondent had been reading about myself and my books in a popular monthly which had reached her, and became emboldened to ask “if the writer would lend her a copy of A Girl’s Ride in Iceland, which she would carefully return.” As she covered the thin pages of her foreign note-paper her boldness grew, for next she “confessed” that she would like to possess the book; and she wound up with a suggestion that if my name “was written on the fly-leaf, signifying that the book was a gift to her by the author, it would add to its value.”