from her home pastor, requesting just a little companionship for “a tender young soul who is trying her wings for the first time in the big and beautiful world”!  I have a very private opinion about reading my title clear to the Christian Sister business, but no woman with a heart as big as a pinch of snuff could resist giving her very best and much more to the slip of a winsome maid, who confidingly asks it—­especially if the sister has any knowledge of the shadows lurking in the beautiful world.

Mate, these steamers as they sail from shore to shore are like giant theaters.  Every trip is an impromptu drama where comedy, farce, and often startling tragedy offer large speaking parts.  The revelation of human nature in the original package is funny and pathetic.  Amusement is always on tap and life stories are just hanging out of the port-hole waiting to attack your sympathy or tickle your funny bone.  But you ’d have to travel far to find the beginning of a story so heaped up with romantic interest as that of Sada San as she told it to me, one long, lazy afternoon as I lay on the couch in my cabin, thanking my stars I was getting the best of the bare tablecloth and the empty house at home.

Some twenty years ago Sada’s father, an American, grew tired of the slow life in a slow town and lent ear to the fairy stories told of the Far East, where fortunes were made by looking wise for a few moments every morning and devoting the rest of the day to samisens and flutes.  He found the glorious country of Japan.  The beguiling tea-houses, and softly swinging sampans were all too distracting.  They sang ambition to sleep and the fortune escaped.

He drifted, and at last sought a mean existence as teacher of English in a school of a remote seaside village.  His spirit broke when the message came of the death of the girl in America who was waiting for him.  Isolation from his kind and bitter hours left for thought made life alone too ghastly.  He tried to make it more endurable by taking the pretty daughter of the head man of the village as his wife.

My temperature took a tumble when I saw proofs of a hard and fast marriage ceremony, signed and counter-signed by a missionary brother who meant business.

You say it is a sordid tale?  Mate, I know a certain spot in this Land of Blossoms, where only foreigners are laid to rest, which bears testimony to a hundred of its kind—­strange and pitiful destinies begun with high and brilliant hopes in their native land; and when illusions have faded, the end has borne the stamp of tragedy, because suicide proved the open door out of a life of failure and exile.

Sada’s father was saved suicide and long unhappiness by a timely tidal-wave, which swept the village nearly bare, and carried the man and his wife out to sea and to eternity.