Dick, gathering bunches of wild penstimon was joined by two little Indian girls. One could not have been more than three years old. She wore a single garment of coarse linen. It reached nearly to her little barefeet, was sleeveless and cut in a big square decolleté. She had the loveliest little face, huge eyes and regular features ... and as she crushed a big bunch of long stemmed penstimon in her arms, as if it might have been a baby, she made a picture that one longed to preserve. But a sadness overwhelmed me at the thought that these little young things on the flowery hillside were surveying their destiny, as it passed along the road below them. They had been born into a world where early in life, they would be bent double, by the burden back and front, of merchandise and baby, and there would seem to be no escape. “Why do they submit?” was the question that kept rising in my heart. Why does man, woman or child submit; and then I imagined myself in their place, and I got the answer: If my father had always done it, and my mother whilst she bore me, and my father’s father and mother, and my mother’s, and my brother already accompanied them, and the neighbors went too, and they talked pantingly as they started off together, or rested at the wayside places, then I who was young enough to be left behind, (and not so young as to be a burden that must be carried with them), I would know that my life would not always be one of watching, or of gathering flowers. When everyone is doing it, and it is in your tradition and in your environment, there is a submission to conditions that no one would dream of breaking. We went for a walk along a stream, out of view of the saddening road, and our path was a mosaic of flowers, and the shrubs and trees grew in such a way that it might have been a carefully planted and tended English rock garden. At seven o’clock Mr. Rubio came to see me. Sent by de la Huerta. He was accompanied by a well known writer called Velazquez, who is also a poet. Rubio delivered into my hands a photograph from the Minister; it was inscribed in a way that only the Spanish language lends itself to. Apparently he was pleased by my letter. I had said that I appreciated his personality and his aims, that a few more people of his calibre in the world, and there would be less of suffering for the masses. Rubio says that everything was arranged for General Calles to come and see me last Thursday at seven, but that at five, they telephoned he had been taken suddenly ill, in his office. He has been ill ever since. I had already heard the rumor that he had been poisoned. Rubio asked why I was leaving so quickly. I explained Dick was not well. I did not explain that I had finished my work. To all appearance I have not had any! A letter has just come from the President’s Secretary, inviting Dick and me to Chapultepec at five on Monday. MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 1921. _Mexico City._