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5

went to church this morning and I believe there were at least ten people who came up to Willie and said a cheery good morning to her so that she really feels that Syracuse is a bit like home. We had dinner at the Yates and at the next table was the entire Wynkoop family. Florence came over to speak to us for a moment, a mighty sweet girl and quite attractive. Cousin Puss dropped in late in the afternoon for a little while to say goodbye. She is just one of the[[underlined]] bulliest [[/underlined]] girls who ever lived, I think. I could fall in love with her. And finally the evening inevitably came around and at last, 8:30, time to leave for the station. Mother didn't come down with us as she was expecting Freddie and had to get his room ready. So she and Willie said goodbye and it was not long before we were standing on the ol' platform waiting for the 9:14, in Schenectady the 6:39; how often it seems it has figured in our lives in the last two years. We saw the sixth section of the Century pull out and tried to forget our sadness in the thrill we got in seeing that great steel animal being rubbed down for the next lap of his breathtaking race through the darkness. Nor did we surmise that this very sixth section the next morning would figure in a wreck in the LaSalle Street Station in Chicago. The engineer, with a cigar between his teeth, looked back, the yellow lanterns oscillated along the platform; he turned and gave the throttle a yank. The power flowed, the great steel animal snorted, and easily and smoothly, the great flyer started in pursuit of her five sister sections wending their way along the steel highway ahead. And then we came back to earth and our separation. As usual, I was incapable of realizing at the time, what it meant, and dry-eyed, I saw dear Willie's fill with tears. I wished I could cry. It is afterward for some strange inexplicable reason that my tears come. In rolled the first section and of course Car 58 was in it. We stood in the vestibule until the last minute; a last kiss, a dear, smiling, tear-stained face framed in steel, more bobbing yellow lights, a hand upon a throttle, and again the red blinkers mock me as they disappear in the west.

En route to Schenectady, N.Y.,
January 4, 1926.

Here am I on the way back to Industry after as happy a ten days as I have ever spent, I think. In those days has come a new year, gone an old, come new dreams, ideas, ideals, conceptions of life, hopes, realizations, appreciations.  In those days, I have known again the sweetness of love, the dear hope of a beautiful happiness. Pass in review the bygone months, pass in review the experiences of months gone by. Dawns on me, the conception of a new way of living which is living. My eyes are opening to the real values of life. The past year has not been everything I wanted it to be but it has brought me a lot nevertheless, and I believe it has made possible, future years far better than itself or its predesessors.