By chance--you could not have planned it, since the time it takes a letter to reach me depends on how interesting the censor finds it-- your celebration of that event reached me on its anniversary. You are absolutely wrong, however, to pull such a long face over my situation. You write as if I had passed through a year of misery. I have not. I am sure you never got that impression from my letters, and I assure you that I am writing exactly as I feel--I have no façade up for you. I own it has been a year of tension. It has been three hundred and sixty-five days and a fourth, not one of which has been free from anxiety of some sort or other. Sometimes I have been cold. Sometimes I have been nervous. But all the same, it has been fifty- two weeks of growing respect for the people among whom I live, and of ever-mounting love of life, and never-failing conviction that the sum of it is beauty. I have had to fight for the faith in that, but I have kept it. Always "In the midst of life we are in Death," but not always is death so fine and beautiful a thing as in these days. No one would choose that such things as have come to pass in the last year should be, but since they are, don't be so foolish as to pity me, who have the chance to look on, near enough to feel and to understand, even though I am far enough off to be absolutely safe,--alas! eternally a mere spectator. And speaking of having been cold reminds me that it is beginning to get cold again. We have had heavy hailstorms already, hail as big and hard as dried peas, and I have not as yet been able to get fuel. So I am looking forward to another trying winter. In the spring my coal-dealer assured me that last winter's situation would not be repeated, and I told him that I would take all the coal he could get me. Having said that, I took no further thought of the matter. Up to date he has not been able to get any. The railroad is too busy carrying war material. I was pained by the tone of your last letter. Evidently mine of the Fourth of July did not please you. Evidently you don't like my politics or my philosophy, or my "deadly parallels," or any of my thoughts about the present and future of my native land. Destroy the letter. Forget it, and we'll talk of other things, and, to take a big jump-- Did you ever keep cats? There is a subject in which you can find no offence, and if it does not appeal to you it is your own fault. If you never have kept cats, you have missed lots of fun, you are not half educated, you have not been disciplined at all. / A cat is a wonderful animal, but he is not a bit like what, on first making his acquaintance, you think he is going to be, and he never becomes it. Now I have been living a year this September with one cat, and part of the time, with two. I am wiser than I used to be. By fits and starts I am more modest.