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to stay with her. By the afternoon the situation seemed so serious that when Dorothy happened to meet a doctor on the platoform at a station she dragged him in. He proved to by Dr. Struthers of Tsinan, whom I had known before, returning from furlough. He and another doctor, a surgeon, examined Carey, and after some consultation decided that she probably had appendicitis, and that she should leave the train at Tsinan and go directly to the hospital. So we telegraphed ahead, and when we got to Tsinan at 2 A.M. a stretcher was there to meet us. I carried the patient out and put her [[strikethrough] e [[/strikethrough]] on the stretcher and Louise got off with her to see that all should go well with her. When Louise joined us in Peking later we leanred that Carey had been operated on at 5 that same morning. The doctor had found the appendix unusually small, and then, after poking around for an hour had discovered an intestinal stricture due to an old gunshot would acquired when Carey was five years old. It was too late to operate on that, but she will have to have it cared for soon after her arrival in Peking. 

We slept some the rest of the night, and got to Peking exactly on time Wednesday afternoon. The country is in a sad state. In Honan, one of the great rice provinces, there has been no crop because of drought. Almost all the way from Pukow to Peking the country has been flooded, and miles of Kaoliang killed. The water is standing on the fields between here and Tientsin almost as deep as it waslast year at this time. Forecasts indicate on e, of the worst famines in the memory of foreigners, though that may be overdone. Food prices are going up in Peking and elsewhere. 

Arrived in Peking we came on home at once, and Dorothy took Mears over to Ruby's. When she got back we found our house in very good condition. Our bed was in and up, my new desk had been delivered, the painting had been done and mats made and put down, and our dishes were in boxes in the front storeroom. I set the men to opening the dishes at once, while we got some of our suitcases unpacked. Our old cook, Han Shih Fu, is known to us as Grandpa, though we call him by his name as we call Ching Ch'en by his, Li Shih Fu. We got things settled around a little, and the boy and I got most of the trunks and boxes out of the front room so that the painters