Just one more year and I will be turning the gladdest face homeward that ever a lonely pilgrim faced the West with. There will be many a pang at leaving Japan, I have learned life's deepest lesson here, and the loneliness and isolation that have been so hard to bear have revealed inner depths of which I never dreamed before. What strange things human beings are! Our very crosses get dear after we have carried them awhile! I have had three offers to sign fresh contracts, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and here, but I am leaving things to shape themselves for the future. Whatever happens I am coming home first. If happiness is waiting for me, I'll meet it with out-stretched arms, if not I am coming back to my post. Thank God I am sure of myself at last! The work at the hospital this month is much lighter, and the patients are leaving for home daily. The talk of peace is in the air, and we are praying with all our hearts that it may come. Nobody but those who have seen with their own eyes can know the unspeakable horrors of this war. It is not only those who are fighting at the front who have known the full tragedy, it is those also who are fighting at home the relentless foe of poverty, sickness, and desolation. If victory comes to Japan, half the glory must be for those silent heroic little women, who gave their all, then took up the man's burden and cheerfully bore it to the end. I was very much interested in your account of the young missionary who is coming through Japan on her way to China. I know just how she will feel when she steps off the steamer and finds no friendly face to welcome her. I talked over your little scheme with Miss Lessing and she says I can go up to Yokohama in July to meet her and bring her right down here. Tell her to tie her handkerchief around her arm so I will know her, and not to worry the least bit, that I will take care of her and treat her like one of my own family. Can you guess how eagerly I am waiting for your answer to my April letter? It cannot come before the last of June, and happy as I am, the time seems very long. Yet I would rather live to the last of my days like this, travelling ever toward the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, than ever to arrive and find the gold not there! You say that at last you know I am the "captain of my soul." Well, Mate, I believe I am, but I just want to say that it's a hard worked captain that I am, and if anybody wants the job--very much--I think he can get it. YOKOHAMA, July 5, 1905. Do you suppose, if people could, they would write letters as soon as they got to Heaven! I don't know where to begin nor what to say. The only thing about me that is on earth is this pen point, the rest is floating around in a diamond-studded, rose-colored mist!