TŌKYŌ, December, 1903.
DEAR MRS. WETMORE,-- ... Of course your critics have been kind.
Other things of yours seemed to have a distinct quality; but this is
your Self, the clearest and dearest best of you. It is so much alive
that I cannot believe I have been reading a story: I thought that I knew
and remembered all the people and all that they said--surely none of
the life in those pages could have been imagined! I am puzzled by the
brightness of the memories and the freshness of the feeling: the real
world of self-seeking has such power to dull and numb that I cannot
understand how you could have conserved the whole delightfulness of
child-experience in spite of New York....
With me all the past is a blur--except the pain of it. It is not so
much what one sees in your story, or what one hears folk say, that
makes the thing so pleasing: it is rather the soft appeal made to one's
moral understanding. I mean that I never imagined how good and brave
and lovable those people were till you made me comprehend. And I felt
about as "home-sick" as it is lawful for a Japanese citizen to feel.
But I am afraid that your very own South is now of the past:--wherefore
we can appreciate it incomparably more than when it was our every-day
environment....