"Well, as I was about to say, Harvard is of course straining every nerve to get into condition for Yale. The game comes off in about ten days, and I'm going over to Cambridge to see it. Who do you suppose is going to take me? Why, dear old Uncle Richard, who happens to be spending a few weeks East, on business. Little Hallie Holmes is the dearest baby in the world. Wasn't it lovely in Anemone to insist on naming her for me? Aunt Letitia is tremendously interested in two things--anti-vivisection and the Russo-Japanese trouble. She has attended several hearings at the State House, and at one of them she spoke her mind out so forcibly that old Jed, bless his heart, made a great racket pounding on the floor and set everybody applauding. He had sneaked in without Aunt's knowing it, and on reaching home was heard to express a strong desire to 'keelhaul them doctors.' He takes great delight in his lofty 'cabin' and regularly goes out 'on deck' at the top of the house every night, to have a last smoke and a 'look at the weather,' like Captain Cuttle, before turning in. Aunt Letitia reads every scrap she can find in the papers about Russia and Japan, and so, for that matter, do I. Sometimes my sympathies are with one nation and sometimes with the other. Of course Japan is ever so much the smaller of the two, and her people are so quick and bright that nearly everybody takes their side and hopes that if there is a war she will win. But then Russia sometimes seems to me less like a bear than a great Newfoundland dog, and, as somebody has said, it's fairly pathetic to see how she has been trying all these years to get to the water; that is, to the open ocean, where she can have a navy, big and well trained, like other nations. Her ships in the Baltic seem like boats in a tub. Anyway I do hope and pray that there won't be any war, after all. Surely we humans know enough, have got evolutionised enough, in this twentieth century, to settle a dispute without fighting like savages. "I miss you every day.... Write to me as soon as you can.... "Your loving wife, "HALLIE." [_From Fred Larkin to Lieutenant Staples._] "SAN FRANCISCO, December 29, 1903. "MY DEAR LIEUTENANT: "'If you get there before I do, Tell them I am coming too!'