My short hair and man’s garb have temporarily added an aggressive personality to my six foot stature and my strength. But, at a turn in the road I am likely to meet a physical strength greater than my own, which in conflict would utterly defeat me. The world is not mine, it is another’s to whom I am obliged to entrust myself. I am a childbearer, and of what worth are my physical powers of endurance? I am a woman; I am vain, jealous, changeable, dependant, and ever must remain so. Oh God! I pray, in my next incarnation, make me the best kind of man, and meanwhile as a compensation give me the consolation of having made one. MEXICO. _In Camp._ I have lost all track of days and dates. I get no papers, I receive no letters, no one knows where I am, I hardly can locate myself. It is a rough primitive life, and the situation necessitating a long walk on a hilly stony track with rivers to cross has tested the material of my four friends. The Scotchman never came at all, we left him in the village when we came to camp. He was invaluable in organizing our needs and dispatching the mule train, but there was no cold beer in these regions and he went back to Tampico. The Mexican started with us, but turned back half way. The Irishman is a man of affairs, he comes and goes--comes whenever he can snatch a spare few days. The Canadian has been able to remain. Dick calls it “home”--and I suppose for him it is the nearest thing approaching a “home” that he has had since we left England, or anyway New York. For me also it has somewhat of a home feeling. It is so primitive, so simple, so poetic. One comes to it with an appreciation that is very nearly love. How little one needs, if the climate is kind, a house with walls is no longer a necessity, nor is fuel. All one needs is a roof to shade one from sun and rain, and for furniture just books, heaps and heaps of books. One wants all the books one has longed for time to read, and all the books one loves that one dreams of re-reading. Our kind hosts, the man and wife Mexican peons, are allowing us to share their roof. It is a high thatch of palm leaves, it might be an open barn or hayrick. And under this roof, we have pitched our tent. At one end there is a room walled off transparently with battens like a birdcage, this is lent to us for a storeroom and the Japanese cook and his wife sleep in it. Behind a screen of wattles, on a plank, sleep the owners of the roof. I wonder if they will live all their lives in this place to die some day on the plank bed behind the wattle screen. They are a charming couple, so happy and devoted. He makes money by growing some sugar cane on the island, and a few feet away from our thatched barn is another, under it a primitive press in which they squeeze the juice out of the cane. Under that roof another tent is pitched, and there the men sleep. I don’t know who they all are, but they come and go, and some remain--they are all workers in the Tampico firm.