I am glad to have an opportunity to see the remainder of the diaries of Loti’s youth. And what a youth it was! Do you know of another so splendid? It was enhanced by contact (comprehension) with the beauties of creation. And while he was writing his account of it, I, in a far, lonely, wind-swept prairie village was living his youth with him. I was caring almost nothing for the people or the things about me. Instead, I was climbing the mountain highways of Persia, _with Loti_, to look upon Persepolis, and dream of the face of that Greek courtesan for whom Alexander the Great gave order that it be burned. I was slipping along hot jungle-ways, by night, to look for the first time, with startled senses, upon fabulous Angor. _J’ai vu l’étoile de soir se lever sur les ruines d’Angor._ Angor, too, under the swift light of Eastern dawns, when the stealthy tigers come. I have lived intensely in many lands through the prose of many masters. I saw plum blossoms fall like rain in rare forgotten spring times of Japan, and listened to the clear falling of sweet water in South Sea Isles, where are men whose bodies keep black gleams like bronze. I saw Pekin, with its gold and jade; perishing temples of Egypt, in sumptuous and brilliant evocations, and deserted rose-marble cities upon the highlands of India. I climbed the Street of the Kasbah, in windless African nights, when scent of almond blossoms hung heavy on the air. The too _troublante_ beauty of Africa brushed my senses. And I enjoyed the rare, early African spring creeping northward over the Sea, to Sicily, whose little old villages were literally buried in flowers, and where there were violets as rich, as deeply fragrant, and as purple, as the mists of England make. How I have loved night and sunset on his distant seas, and chaste, too ardent tropic dawns. I have not found my own country so lovely. Nothing has moved me here in the same degree save human life, and for that I have kept something resembling a scientist’s interest, because of our racial complexity. We are the New World’s newly made people. Loti said he was afraid of Dame Reality. Perhaps I am, too. He was fortunate in being able to go from dream to dream. But if for the briefest time this precious, inspired wandering were interrupted, he suffered. He cried out: “_Il y a dans la vie de ces périodes d’ennui que l’on traverse ... en compagnie de Dame Réalité_. (There are periods of boredom which one is forced to traverse in life ... in company with Dame Reality.)” The more ancient, the more manifold, the life of a city, the lovelier I always find it. That is why Sicily has delighted me. Certain villages, certain streets, in Sicily, and canals in Venice, are the only perfectly satisfying things I have known. They are greater than love, because they keep twice its intensity. Love may be a vulgarity, but an enchanting city—never. And men are about the same, while cities change.