Scidmore was then nearly eighty years of age I think, but she was as bright and young as a woman of fifty. The last time I saw her she was nearly ninety and she entertained us at luncheon in Nagasaki, where her son was American Consul. She dresses with as much care and is as interested in fashions and fabrics as any girl, and it is a rare pleasure to see her, with her snowy hair piled up on her head and a white silk gown spread out about her, sitting in the centre of a group of people discussing, with great animation and entire comprehension, general topics of current interest. She afterward went to “keep house” for her son in Seoul, Korea, where he became Consul General, and she continues to be a sort of uncrowned queen of foreign society.

Leaving our children at the bungalow with their nurses, Mrs. Wright, Maria and I went about, to Nikko, to Kamakura, to Kyoto and other interesting places, and we spent the intervals, indeed all our time, in restraining our intense desire to purchase everything we saw in the extraordinarily attractive little shops.