Today, June 6, a promise has been fulfilled. It was made late last October when aeroplanes were zooming overhead, artillery was barking and roaring to the north and west of us and ever and anon, the ground shook with the heavy detonation of bombs dropping on Chinese villages and farmsteads just beyond the railway line not over half a mile away. Things were at their blackest and there seemed no hope for any of us in. Shanghai. It was then that the promise was made, a promise that all the horror and destruction should pass and be forgotten, and that the. "scorched earth" of China should once more bring forth flowers and fruit in abundance. My wife and I were walking in our garden in the twilight of a nerve-rackitiz day, trying to recover some of that serenity of soul which alone can see one through, such period of crises as we all experienced last yea Suddenly I noticed a white patch shining through the gloaming, and, approaching to see what it was, discovered a magnificent gardenia bloom. Several weeks had passed since the shrub on which it grew had ceased blooming. It had, no conceivable right to be there, yet there it was in all its white purity and loveliness, the most perfect blossom of its kind I had ever seen. With the boom of artillery and the rattle of machine-gun fire in my ears, it nevertheless seemed to promise that all would yet be well, that, just as it was there spreading its fragrance on the evening air, would the fair land of China once. m "blossom as the rose." Turning to my wife, I read the message of the beautiful waxy wlifie flower, a message of hope to revive our waning courage and our belief in the eternal rightness of things and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. All through the days and weeks and months that have followed, that white blossom has shone like a star through the darkness of despair—a promise for the future. Today, on the very same shrub and at almost the identical spot, I found, as I walked in my garden in the cool of the morning, a glorious white gardenia bloom, the first of the season, and the exact counterpart of the bloom that appeared so late last October. It said, "My promise has been fulfilled; no matter how evil is man, no matter how horrible the scars he makes on the face of the earth, Mother Nature obliterates his evil deeds and covers up the scars he makes with verdure and sweetness. Again I promise, all will yet be well!"—a, DE C. S. i
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.