Shortly before these unhappy events my sister Maria was called back to America by the illness of our mother, and I was left to face the tragic excitements of the month of September without her comforting companionship. By October I began to feel that I would have to get out of the Philippine Islands or suffer a nervous breakdown, so my husband and I agreed that it would be well for me to “run up to China,” as they express it out there. Running up to China at that time of year meant getting out of tropic heat into bracing autumn weather with a nip of real winter in it, and there was nothing that I needed more.

Mrs. Wright and Mrs.

We sailed to Shanghai and went from there straight to Peking, where we became the guests of Colonel and Mrs. Robertson, who had gone in with the American troops in the Allied Armies and were quartered in no less a place than the Temple of Heaven. The casual tourist looking now upon that glorious collection of ancestral shrines would find it difficult to believe that they once served as barracks for American soldiers. Most people who visit the Temple of Heaven find in it an atmosphere of peace and serenity such as is achieved by few structures in the world, and to have this deep calm invaded by businesslike “foreign-devil” troops must have ruffled the spirits of the high gods. But the soldiers had to be quartered somewhere and this great, clean, tree-sheltered enclosure in the heart of the Chinese city offered ample space.