of the sword and spear, but had the best education that the classics of Confucius and the Chinese college and literati in Yedo could give them.  Next to them in his love was his only daughter Kiku, seventeen years old, and as fair as the fairest of Yedo’s many fair daughters.  No vain doll was Kiku, but, inheriting her mother’s beauty, she added to it the inner grace of a meek and dutiful spirit.  Besides being deft at household duties, her memory was well stored with the knowledge of Japanese history and the Chinese classics.  She had committed to memory the entire books of the Woman’s Great Learning, and had read carefully five other works on etiquette and morals which her father had presented to her on successive birthdays.  Kiku was a remarkably well-educated maiden, and would have been a prize for the richest daimio in the empire.

Faithfully following Japanese etiquette, Kiku had been carefully kept from the company of any of the male sex since her eighth year.  She never talked with any young man except her brothers.  Occasionally at family parties she was addressed by her uncles or cousins.  Sometimes, when gentlemen called to see her father, Kiku would bring tea to the guest, and was thus made the subject of compliments; but as to “receiving” male company, she never did it.  Kiku never went out unless accompanied by her mother or the maid, who was like her shadow.

The gods of Japan meet together at the great temples in Ise during the eleventh month and tie all the nuptial knots for the following year.  Kiku’s marriage-knot had been tied by the gods six months before she even suspected the strings had been crossed.  How happened it?

In Japan only the people in the lower classes are acquainted with and see each other frequently before marriage.  The business of selection, betrothal and marriage is attended to by the parents or friends of the pair, who carry on negotiations by means of a third factor, a middleman or go-between.  Children are often betrothed at birth or when on their nurses’ backs (there are no cradles in Japan).  Of course the natural results, mutual dislike and severance of the engagement at mature age, or love and happy marriage, or marriage, mutual dislike and subsequent divorce, happen, as the case may be.  In general, when the parents make the betrothal of grown-up children, it is not probable that the feelings of son or daughter are outraged, or that marriages are forced against the consent of either, though this does sometimes take place.  In Asiatic countries, where obedience to parents is the first and last duty, and in which no higher religion than filial obedience exists, the betrothal and marriage of children is not looked upon as anything strange.  The prevalence of concubinage as a recognized institution in Japan makes it of no serious importance whether the husband loves his wife or not.