Deyn Karuryn: My last letter was simply a Thanksgiving service for the wonderful things you and the girls sent me. Between your box and Mother's I could almost set up a gift shop. But I shan't begin thank-yous all over again for this is to be a News Supplement and Special Resolutions Number.
My new motto is Count that day Jost whose slow descending sun notes that you've left your sightseeing undone." I'm adding one wore to the long list of clubs enumerated in the Hong Book—"The Sight-Seers Association, Limited." You know how it is when you live in a place, you never really see it till you have company from out of town to parade past the Soldiers' Monument, out to the Twin Cascades, into City Hall and round to the site of the first log cabin erected in the township. Well, I can't expect to have many country cousins dropping in at Shanghai so I reckon li just have to show myself the town.
It's a cinch no one else is going to show me. Every one says: "O there's nothing to see here. Wait till you go to Peking."' But suppose I don't get to see that Imperial City. Suppose my shop shuts down! or I get homesick and take the next boat home with hardly-a souvenir to my trunk and mighty few landmarks in my memory! No sirree, T've started 1922 with the vow to see something new every single day.
I'm Chairman, Honorary Secretary and Treasurer and members-at-large of the S. A. Monty Pearson wants to join because he says certain far-famed sights such as Moonlight on the Huang-pu or Daybreak at Del Monte could never he appreciated alone. But I reckon blackball him, as we went around together enough the last month to have the town eriers come out with the announcement that a "marriage had been arranged between Montague Pearson of N.Y.C. and Phyllis Benson of Iowa Center.' I should care if that rumour fluttered round the Center as far as Jack, but be sure you let Mother know there's nothing to it. we It's not going to be a bit hard seeing something new every' day in Shanghai. Indeed it would be hard not to. The other morning the power went off as I was coming downtown on the tram and we were stuck in the middle of Nanking Lon (Loo, my darling, is what one says for street out this-a-way to give the effect of speaking the language fluently) That's one of the main streets of the town and as you walk along the sidewalk it looks very foreign. But just look up at the upper stories and see the black and gold scroll work, the figures in stone carved over the doorways, the little prancing figures on the eaves.
Yesterda I did the Public Library, or it did me. Any way, 1 belong to it or it to me for the next three months, for the trifling consideration of two and a half.
It's a blow to have to blow real money for literature privileges, but it will show you how anxious I am to improve my mind. The place is deliciously quaint and quiet. You can take -a 'Cosmopolitan' or "Life" turn your back on the room, draw up to the fire and there you are as cozy as a cricket on the hearth.
I must admit that the room being well filled when I dropped in-there the air seemed rather bad, but perhaps that's due to the bad tempers of the Americans who can't find the magazines or new books they want. "Main Street'? was only put into circulation on November 21. But the classics are alli there and V'll bet my hat there are plenty of first editions tucked away on the top shelves of the dim little stack room.
On holidays you may read only the papers and magazines, as the stock' room is locked. But there's one shelf of reference books and T made for them at once, thinking it would be handy to know where there was a dictionary or handbook of poetic quotations or any, other compendium of useful knowledge. But this is what I found: two Peerages (didst ever see one?) Educational Year Books, Post Office London Directory, Griffin's Chemical Handicraft, Canadian Annual Review, a directory for China, Javan. Straits Settlement (but no Hong Book), the Philadelphia Year Book for 1917 and the Bulletin of the New York Library. Can you beat that, for a miscellany? oe I've jumped from the intimacy of a "family circle" boarding house into the isolated wastes of a small hotel and feel a bit small and scared in consequence. When I discovered that we had to walk though a quarter mile or:0 of dining room dotted with a hundred or less small tables set out on the side lines and filled with critical spectators I begged for a place near the door. But Madge, my room mate, refused. You have to dress for dinner here anyway," quoth she, "and what's the use of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.