I want to say
right here; Kobo Daishi, who founded this monastery in the distant
ages and built a temple to his own virtues, may have been a saint,
but he was not much of a gentleman! Else he would not have been so
reckless of the legs and necks of the coming generations, as to
blaze the trail to his shrine over mountains so steep that our
pack-mule coming up could easily have bitten off his own tail if he
had so minded.

Later.

This afternoon I must hustle down. I suppose the only way to get
down is to roll. Well; anyway I am in a hurry. My mail beat me up
the trail and a letter from Sada San begs me to come to Kioto to
see her as soon as I can. She only says she needs help and does
not know what to do. And blessed be the telegram that winds up
from Hiroshima; the school is in urgent need of an assistant at the
Kindergarten and they ask me to come. The principal, Miss Look,
has gone to America on business, for three months. Hooray! Here
is my chance to resign from the "Folded Hands' Society" and do
something that is really worth while, as long as I cannot go to my
man. How good it will seem once again to be in that dear old
mission school, where in the long ago I toiled and laughed and
suffered while I waited for Jack.

The prospect of being with the girls and the kiddies again makes me
want to do a Highland Fling, even if I am in a monastery with a
sad-faced young priest serving me tea and mournful sighs between
prayers.

What a flirtatious old world it is after all. It smites you and
bruises you, then binds up the hurts by giving you a desire or so
of your heart. Just now the desire of my heart is to catch that
train for Kioto.

So here goes a prayer, pinned to a shrine, for a body intact as I
tread the path that drops straight down the mountain, through the
crimson glory of the maples and the blazing yellow of the gingko
tree, to the tiny little station far away that looks like a
decorated hen-coop.

KIOTO, September, 1911.

_Dearest Mate_:

I cannot spend a drop of ink in telling you how I got here. How
the baggage beast ran away and decorated the mountain shrubbery
with my belongings. And how after all my hurry of dropping down
from Koyo San, the brakesman forgot to hook our car to the train
and started off on a picnic while the engine went merrily on and
left us out in the rice-fields. Suffice it to say I landed in a
whirl that spun me down to Uncle's house and back to the