g Jack from me, in the skilful hands of a good
woman, gave him back to me.

The one comfort left me in the humiliation of my petty, unreasoning
jealousy--yes, I had been jealous--was to tell her.

And she, whose name was Edith Bowden, opened to me the door of her
secret garden, wherein lay the sweet and holy memories of her
lover, dead in the long ago.

For forty long and lonesome years she had unfalteringly held before
her the vision of her young sweetheart and his work, and through
them she had toiled to make real his ideals.

I take it all back, Mate. A career that makes such women as this
is a beautiful and awesome thing.

In spite of all my pleadings to come with us, Miss Bowden started
once again on her lonely way across the wind-swept plains, back to
Europe and her work, leaving me with a never-to-be-forgotten
humility of spirit and an homage in my heart that never before have
I paid a woman.

I am too polite to say it, but I have had a taste of the place you
spell with four letters. Also of Heaven. Just now, with Jack's
thin hand safely in mine, I am hovering around the doors of
Paradise in the house of the boys in Kalgan. If you could see the
dusty little Chinese-Mongolian village, hanging on the upper lip of
the mouth of the Gobi Desert, you would think it a strange place to
find bliss. But joy can beautify sand and Sodom.

Yesterday my hosts made me take a ride out into the Desert. Oh,
Mate, in spots these glittering golden sands are sublime. My heart
was so light and the air so rare, it was like flying through sunlit
space on a legless horse.

Life, or what answers to it, has been going on in the same way
since thousands of years before Pharaoh went on that wild lark to
the Red Sea. Every minute I expected to see Abraham and Sarah
trailing along with their flocks and their families, hunting a
place to stake out a claim, and Noah somewhere on a near-by
sand-hill, taking in tickets for the Ark Museum, while the "two by
two's" fed below. I never heard of these friends being in this
part of the country, but you can never tell what a wandering spirit
will do.

Jack is getting fat laughing at me. But Jack never was a lady and
does not know what havoc imagination and the spell of the East can
play with a loving but lonesome wife. And take it from me,
beloved, he never will. Nothing gained in exposing all your
follies. He sends love to you. So do I--from the joyful heart of
a woman whose