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Show Foochow, February 23, 1937. Dear and many friends*- It has seemed as impossible as usual to write to all of you as I have wished, so a few have had word, and the rest will have forgotten my name unless I send soon some report of my doings; I hope this will reach you by Easter, and that it may a blessed day for every one of you; especially for dear Abbie Hogen, and Josephine Shepherd, and Alice Ryther, and some others who have been pulled up by the roots and transplanted. Seme of you will have had my husband's letter written at Christmas time. That does not tell you what a hit he made with his speech on the occasion of Chiang Kai Shek's release. One of the Shanghai papers had a very good abstract of what he said, and all the Foochow ones quoted it with great approval. This will partly answer Belle Livermore's question as to our local papers, and our touch on local affairs. It was a very great occasion, the greatest and most widely celebrated joy I have seen in China; and whatever the cynics say, nothing can dim the fact that China was welded together as never before by the experiences and triumphs of her great leader. Bat I remember with interest that I have never reported fully to any one our trip last Autumn to Peiping; surprisingly placid in the face of Japanese activity in the neighborhood. Fortunately for my feelings the war maneuvers they put on there did not begin until the morning we were leaving, after we had taken a daylight train southward. The empty space in the Legation area did have some tanks about, and more cavalry, training and showing off generally; but the city itself was wisely and peacefully absorbed in its own business, in spite of efforts to stir up resentment and make an "incident." The city is a gray old place, wide and sunny streets, dusty underfoot and sometimes, but not specially in October, overhead; the dull gray enlivened in places by the great brilliantly colored pailous and the temples and old palaces which are being gradually restored by certain patriotic organizations. It is a very different place from the city we visited a generation ago, when the Empress Dowager was just back from her flight to Sianfu, and the looted Forbidden City was closed to outsiders, neglected even by the royal household. Now the old palaces are open to the public on certain days for a small fee, and Coal Hill and the Temple of Heaven can be seen for very small sums on any day. We were most fortunate in having a friend who was in charge at the summer hotel in the Summer Palace grounds west of the city, and he took us there for a visit of some days. You can imagine our thrills at being quartered in rooms that had been the study of one of the little emperors named as successor to Kwang Hsu. We slept in the glass-walled rooms he had occupied, rising straight from the shallow vater of the lake, to the lapping of the water against the foundation s ones of our island shelter, and wondered if any boy eroporer ever wa» as happy there as we were. Certainly poor Kwang Hsu never could have been; his little gray hou^e, of four or five rooms, drew me to it again and again. Standing in tte tiny courtyard one could see through the lattice work on each sidethe gray brick walls built by his domineering aunt to prevent commuiQation with him, and incidentally to prevent most pleasure from ^ming to him. He could see the great trees in front of his door, hough they may have been much smaller when he lived there, and he COU4 hear the lapping of the lake ripples; but he could not see |