My knowledge of English is unaffected; I can still read scientific German and some French, because I had occasion to use those languages fairly often after I was twenty-eight. The scraps of Latin dating from high school are gone. So are algebra and all but the simplest proposition of high school geometry: I never needed them. * * * * * I can remember thinking of my mother after twenty-eight, but I do not know whether the image this provides really resembles her. My father died when I was thirty-one, so I remember him as a sick old man. I believe I had a younger brother, but he must have died in childhood.[4] [Footnote 4: Dr. Bannerman's mother died in 1918 of influenza. His brother (three years older, not younger) died of pneumonia, 1906.--BLAINE] Judy's passing was tranquil--pleasant for her, I think. It took the better part of a day. We went out to an abandoned field I know, and she lay blinking in the sunshine with the angel sitting by her, while I dug a grave and then rambled off after wild raspberries. Toward evening the angel came and told me I could bury Judy--it was finished. And most interesting, she said. I don't see how there can have been anything distressing about it for Judy. After all, what hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away, and I don't think Judy had any. I have not found the recall painful, at least not in retrospect. There must have been sharp moments, mercifully forgotten along with their causes, as if the process had gone on under anesthesia. Certainly there were plenty of incidents in my first twenty-eight years which I should not care to offer to the understanding of any but the angels. Quite often I must have been mean, selfish, base in any number of ways, if only to judge by the record since twenty-eight. Those old letters touch on a few of these things. To me, they now matter only as material for a record which is safely out of my hands. However, to any person I may have harmed, I wish to say this: you were hurt by aspects of my humanity which may not, in a few million years, be quite so common among us. Against these darker elements I struggled, in my human fashion, as you do yourselves. The effort is not wasted. One evening--I think it was June 12--Lester dropped around for sherry and chess. Hadn't seen him in quite a while, and haven't since. There is a moderate polio scare this summer and it keeps him on the jump. The angel retired behind some books on an upper shelf--I'm afraid it was dusty--and had fun with our chess. She had a fair view of your bald spot, Lester. Later she remarked that she liked your looks, but can't you do something about that weight? She suggested an odd expedient, which I believe has occurred to your medical self from time to time--eating less.