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so far as I can judge from my brief acquaintance with him. The Italian is not a testman really but is on test here for awhile. He is thirty, having been on railway motor design for five years in Italy and is here studying GE design and testing methods. I shall have interesting things to tell you about them too. I am certainly having a wonderful opportunity for studying people and I am trying to do it justice.

[[underlined]] To Willie, February 10, 1926 [[/underlined]]: With Erie having perfectly devilish weather most of the time, it seems impossible that robins can have been seen in Louisville, so relatively near. This morning I woke up and found a young snowdrift on the floor by the window and the wind a near-hurricane outside. ...... Ferella gives one a new viewpoint just as all these educated foreigners do. Most of us Americans get our conception of the foreigner from the immigrants who come here and that conception is so false, as I am just discovering. I wonder what they would think of us in Europe if they were to judge us by our lower class. I am finding out too that the Europeans haven't any such glorified idea of America as we fondly imagine. They miss so much here that is a part of their life there, the cultural side of it. Industrially we are a source of marvel to them, but culturally, ye Gods! they are terribly highbrow about it. I saw an advertisement in "Time" in which it said that the only thing necessary to culture was a familiarity with Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book. To my mind, such a statement is absolute rot. The idea that a man can be cultured because he has read a lot of extracts from famous authors seems to me absurd. To be really cultured requires endless reading on many many subjects. Allende absolutely amazes me, for he seems to have read and be familiar with every subject from art to politics. He knows much more about American politics than I do, and I daresay just as much about American history. And if he knows American history and politics that way, imagine how he knows his own. ...... I accepted the "sign-up" so shall be in Erie in all probability until the middle of October. I'm not sorry for I like it here immensely and it will be very profitable both from the point of view of experience and finances and friendships.

[[underlined]] To Mother, February 20, 1926 [[/underlined]]: I've been thinking about your feeling of no longer being of any real use to anyone. I want to see you ride of that feeling and also the one of life no longer being worthwhile to you. It hurts me to know you feel that way and I'm convinced it's not the right way for you to be. If perhaos our lives at times seem a bit aimless, how can we tell what the future may bring to us, what opportunities for service that we don't even dream of right now. Who can tell what we may be preparing for? Our paths are like ways leading up to and passing beneath a vast curtain. When that great curtain of time rises, what may it not show us of those paths that before ended in mystery, and beyond the new scene, there is another curtain,