I am as much in the air as to the future as I was in the russet days of Bethel. But one of these days, let us hope we may gather over a bottle of something sound and mellow, and laugh together over our adventure into the land of the woebegone. I do not take to it, tho' they say some people live in it by choice, for they find something to talk of there, and feel saintly because they suffer. Well, we will have more knowledge in that happy future and more of sympathy. What a lot one must endure to gain a wee bit of wisdom. And then to have it die with us. Maybe it does not, eh? Maybe it somehow, somewhere finds a corner into which it drops and carries someone over a hard place. I don't know what kind of theology this is that I am dripping from my pen, but I cannot yet be beaten to the point where I say it is all purposeless. And that is the faith that may not save a soul but does save souls, I guess. I wish you the joy and elevation of spirit that you have many times given to my sick soul and to others. Did I tell you my boy is married--to a Catholic girl too, of much charm? They were married on the ancestral farm with the ancestor of ninety years present and in high spirits. A Dios, Padre mio, F. K. L. To John G. Gehring Rochester, Minnesota, [April] 30, [1921] Tomorrow will be May day--once, before the world became industrial, a day of gladness, now a day of dread, another result of mal-adjustment. What ever would these doctors do if they had no cheeks in which to hold their tongues while telling sick folk what ails them, and the cure? You are learning, Sir, how much of wisdom some men lack who have certain knowledge. And wisdom is what we are after, we Knights of the Mystic Sign. Wisdom--the essence of lives lived; knocks, blows, pains, tortures reduced to fears, and these incorporated into a string or queue of people who have eyes, nerves, and powers of inference, and the initiative to experiment and the impulse to try, and try again. Result--a nugget no larger than a mustard seed of intellectual or spiritual radium, y-clept wisdom. It does not grow on ancestral trees or on college campuses, nor does it come out of laboratories or hospitals, tho' it is sometimes found in all these places. A Carpenter is known to have possessed more of it than any other man; tho' most of us don't possess enough wisdom to know that He did possess so much of it. An Indian Prince is also celebrated for the richness of his supply. These men have been followed by others who sometimes carried mirrors, but some had tiny grains of the real thing also. And those are called Optimists and Transcendentalists and Idealists and Fools who think that more and more of these grains will come into the hearts and minds of men; while those are called sensible, and shrewd, and sane, who assert that the supply is uniform, stationary in quantity but moved about from time to time, producing nothing but the illusion that something is worth while.