This is the second summer of books read to the pouring of tropical rains. Mr. S. has brought me several volumes of Jean Christophe--_l'Aube_, _La Révolte_--unread before and deeply relished. With all his other gifts, Romain Rolland[57] has the international mind and keeps his seat extremely well, _à cheval_ as he is, between France and Germany. To-day I finished _Le Buisson Ardent_. During two strange, restless afternoons, I followed Anna's story in the darkness of the tropical downpour, an earthy freshness coming up from the flowers in the _patio_, and a sound of heavy water falling from rain-spout and roof. _July 27th._ A lovely morning on the roof with E., drying our hair in matchless sun, looking at the volcanoes and talking. She said I reminded her of the _art nouveau_ inkstand, that for my sins I won at bridge the other day, which has the hair drawn down to the feet of the figure for the pen to rest on. _She_ looked as if she had stepped out of some lovely old Persian tile with her masses of dark hair standing out about her handsome head. There is a poet brother, whose portrait of some years ago hangs in one of the rooms, a large-eyed, straight-featured boy, with a speculative forehead and remote eyes. From what I gather, he is evidently a genius, not meant for harness, feeling the world owes him a living (which it probably does), that he may toss off a sonnet, when so impelled, or feel free to read Euripides in some choice edition bought with his last dollar, in the completest insouciance as to the date and amount of the next remittance. He used to take long, lonely, timeless walks about these hills and valleys, reappearing after hours or days, with a poem that he wouldn't show, or a thought not convenient in family life.[58] [54] Orozco was arrested with General Huerta by the United States authorities on June 27, 1915. A few days later he escaped his guard at El Paso, and shortly afterward was killed during a raid on the border. [55] A young mining engineer lately come out of Mexico on one of the intermittent trains, over the once favorite northern route, tells me that everywhere the stations are destroyed. Overturned rolling-stock lies rotting in the ditches; at one point where the fuel gave out the trainmen got down and chopped up the seats remaining on what once had been a station platform, and at another a Pullman car was smashed and fed to the engine. What intending travelers and the stockholders in the company think of Carranza's passion for reconstruction is said to be too fierce for expression!--E. O'S., January, 1917. [56] Marquis de la G., then military attaché at the French Embassy in Berlin.