Dear Comrades of 1903! -

I am so sorry that Round Robin has been so delayed in my hands. He rested for sometime in Anna Haslup's office before I was able to call for him, and then it was still longer before I had the time to read all the letters. I have taken to day to do it, letting all else go. It has been nearly seven years since he has come to me and I have wanted to read from the very beginning. And it has not been so (?usual?) the occupation of twice as (?absence?) that has (?laundered?) as I have been frequently away from home visiting various missionary societies in New Jersey.

I wish I had the gift of expression that some of you have, to tell you how the reading of your letters makes me feel. I do think Round Robin was an inspiration! I hope he will never be allowed to die! As I read your letters - his whole panorama of events during these most eventful seven years seems passed before me, all the more perhaps from my isolation on the other side of the world from the things in which you have been so deeply involved and in which I could only share most indirectly.

It has been most interesting to trace the various problems as represented in different letters- differing yet so nearly the same- attitude toward suffrage; the war cloud first looming on the horizon - then bursting over your heads and the swellings of the retreating storm; now the latest account of and repairing damages.

And I have so enjoyed the (?slowing) (back?) of remembered characteristics and no less the development of some that would not have been suspected- at least by me - seventeen years ago. Some of the letters are so vigorous and go so to (respect) like Mabel Day and Claire Ackerman and all of them do show 1903 girls as being so equal to the emergency and altogether worth while that it is an honor - as it always was- to belong in this class.

I am afraid I can't give any such accounts of myself. I went back to my home in Nanking, just after the War was declared. How little I dreamed that America would be involved! In a year I was at my own business- evangelistic work particularly in the country. I There I was appointed to take charge of a Woman's Bible School while the Principal took her furlough. I was to have it for a year and a half but the time was cut short by the necessity of an operation. After my recovery I had been in the country for only a month when the death of the Principal of the Girls Boarding School and the illness of the Vice Principal made it necessary for me to take charge of the school for over a year, to keep it together while the present Principal was completing her second year at language study- Can you fancy Jane Hyde in charge of a school- High school, grades and kindergarten with (?Industrial?) department and many things to be attended to which in America never fall under the care of the Principal? One thing, however, my experience in Goucher helped- the care of sick pupils which falls to the lot of the Principal.

The last two years I have been able to give to evangelistic works again but it has been much interrupted- by the illness of others, when my knowledge of nursing was called into requisition and by my own for I too had 'flu' and pneumonia last year. Now I have been here for nearly eight months and expect to return in August. I wonder if it will ever be my happiness to attend a 1903 reunion. I hoped for 1921, but an allusion in one of the letters sounds as though that were not to be. I do not want to start another page, so I will say 'Au revoir'

Yours in 1903,
Jane A. Hyde

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