RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
of anxiety for the baby and the other children. And, as I shall make plain further on, our anxiety was not without cause.
In reading over my own and my husband's letters, written on that trip to various members of the family, I find that Charlie was very much in evidence at all times. I suppose he was spoiled because, certainly, everybody took a hand in his misguidance, but the spoiling process at least kept him in high good humour, unless it happened to take the form of secret indulgence in prohibited sweets; then I had to meet the consequences. I find my husband writing to his brother Charles: "Charlie continues to be as full of spirits and as determined to have his own way as ever. We call him 'the tornado'; he creates such a sensation when he lands in the midst of the children on board the ship. He is very badly in need of discipline and I long for the time to come when he will be better able to appreciate it. Maria has become quite as much a slave to him as Nellie and you may tell his Aunt Annie that I am still the only hope the boy has of moral training." This sounds so much like the average father that I thought I ought to quote it.
When Bessie, Charlie's nurse, was taken away form him and quarantined we got for him a Japanese "amah" who filled him at first with indignation, not unmixed with fear. But she was so patient, and followed him around so much like a faithful watchdog, that he grew to be exceedingly fond of her and straightway proceeded to exchange his small English vocabulary, for, to him, more useful Japanese words.
The first thing to claim our attention in Yokohama Harbour was the American cruiser Newark, the Admiral's flagship of the Asiatic fleet, with Admiral Kempff aboard. As soon as we came inside the breakwater she fired a salute of seventeen guns, and we wondered what it was all about, until suddenly we remembered that the Commissioners had the rank of ministers plenipotentiary and decided that it was
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