RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
I gave up my house in Cincinnati and stored my belongings, packing for shipment to the Orient only such things as I thought would be absolutely necessary. We were to leave almost immediately and I had very little time in which to do a great many things. Mr. Taft came back to Cincinnati for a short period and we entered upon a busy season of good-bye hospitality. Everybody we knew, and we knew nearly everybody, wanted to give us a farewell dinner or entertainment of some sort. Mr. Taft, especially, was fêted in a way which proved to him how much more widely he was valued in his native town than he had ever realised. In the opinions of people then we were going, sure enough, to the ends of the earth, and many of our friends were as mournful about it as if they had private foreknowledge that it was to be a fatal adventure.
When the banquets and dinners and luncheons and receptions and teas had all been given; when the speeches had all been made, and the good-byes 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.
I had with me my three children, Robert, Helen and Charlie. Robert was ten years old, Helen eight, while Charlie, my baby, was just a little over two. It did not occur to me that it was a task to take them on such a long journey, or that they would be exposed to any danger through the experience. They were normal, healthy and very self-reliant little people and I made preparations for their going with-
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