When the banquets and dinners and luncheons and receptions and teas had all been given; when the speeches had all been made, and the goodbyes had all been said, Mr. Taft hastened off to Washington once more to meet his colleagues and make final arrangements, and I was not to see him again until we met in San Francisco a week before the date set for sailing.

I asked my sister Maria to go with me for the first year, and she accepted with delight. So, one morning in early April, with our world waving at us from the platform of the station, we started south to join the Southern Pacific railroad at New Orleans and to make our way from there to Los Angeles and so to San Francisco.