I recall my horror when a nun at Margaret’s Convent told her that she must never look at herself because the human body is “disgusting” (she used the term), and Margaret asked her, “Who made our bodies? and who made our clothes?” Such an attitude of mind in a nun is perhaps not unexpected, but one is surprised at the lack of simplicity in a great primitive country. But in the United States the Puritan origin has dominated over all other races with which it has eventually become amalgamated; stronger than the Latin is the Puritan--stronger than the German, the Dutch, the Irish, or the Jew. In this amazing country even the mature foreign element is bent, broken, molded, forced into an American! And in a very short space of time--it is this standardization that suppresses individuality. In this particular instance I suppose it is good that the masses should bathe in suits, it is good for the masses that the bathers should undress under cover, and so it goes on from little to larger things, from unimportant details to larger issues. Some day perhaps, when there is time to stop to take a breath a few individualities will be allowed to live among the standardized--at present those few slip off abroad, and live there! But I am not complaining, I am only wondering why with all its restrictions, I like living in it better than I like living in the freest country on earth--England! On Sunday night I had one of the great surprises of my life. It will be as memorable as any of the big events that have come to me. We were sitting on the piazza at dusk, and I asked, pointing to the bushes: “Am I mad? What is that?” “That is a firefly.” I had heard vaguely of fire-flies, but no one had ever described to me what a June night in America could be like. W. B. Yeats has written of Ireland that “the night was full of the sound of linnets’ wings,” but I have not read the poet who has sung about the fireflies. As the night became darker, the world became full of small, twinkling, winking, dancing lights, from the highest tree-tops down to the grass. I ran upstairs. Dick was asleep. I hoisted him on to my back and carried him, still sleeping, out into the wild orchard across the road. Presently Dick lifted a sleepy head from my shoulder and looked around him. “It’s the Germans shootin’,” he said. “No,” I corrected, “it’s fairies.” He gave a little giggle of delight and exclaimed: “Fairies! To guard us?--” And as I walked towards the dark trees in the distance he clung around my neck. “Don’t let’s get lost in fairyland.” The crickets were making an unholy and flippant noise. It was all very merry and happy. There were darting lights all around us, in the long grass at our feet, in the bushes overhead, against the darkness of the distance, exactly like the scene of the treetops in Peter Pan. On our way home Dick said, “I don’t think they’re fairies, I think it’s the stars have come down to play.”