What king so strong, Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? SHAKESPEARE. The following are excerpts from letters written to the author: LOVED AND LOYALLY TRIED TO SERVE In April, 1909, she writes as follows: “Does ‘Mexico’ recall to your mind a request I once made of you that you should see me across the border line of that strange country? However much I needed it and whether well or ill I never knew. I only know I did not go. But my own country seemed to me so hard that I thought I could not live it through. “The Government which I thought I loved and loyally tried to serve has shut every door in my face and stared at me insultingly through its windows. What wonder I want to leave? “The locks have never turned, the doors are rusted in their hinges. The old warders go out and the new ones come in, sworn faithfully to their charge, with no knowledge of why they are charged to do it; ignorant of every fact, simply enemies by transmission; and yet I stay represented as of ‘doubtful integrity,’ ‘weak,’ ‘decrepit,’ ‘imbecile,’ but yet, very ‘dangerous.’” She then draws a picture of a Sultan of Turkey who was made a prisoner. “He was locked in and I locked out, but my whole country seemed my prison and I struggled to free myself of it. Pardon me, I never thought to recall the disagreeable subject again, but like the boy’s whistle it ‘blew itself.’” A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. ECCLESIASTES. I am reminded of what Theodore Parker used to say so piteously of himself—‘I can never talk but I talk too much.’ CLARA BARTON. The following is an excerpt from a letter under date of Nov. 9, 1909: THE STRICTEST SILENCE “There has never been an occasion, nor a time, when I have so missed my old time privilege of speaking in behalf of a friend. I never before have so fully realized what a pleasure that privilege had been to me through half a century. It is a change to me, to come to feel that my only help must lie in the _strictest_ silence; an expressed wish for any one would be fatal; not perhaps with President Taft _personally_, for I am of small importance to him, if he even knows me, but from the advice he would be sure to receive from those he does know. So I wait and hope....” Excerpts from letter written under date of Dec. 14, 1909: OVER THE MEXICAN LINE