Now that we have Kiku married, we must leave her to glide into the cool, sequestered paths of a Japanese married lady’s life.  Only one thing we regret, and that is that her marriage could not have happened in the year of our Lord 1874 and of “Enlightened Peace the seventh, and of the era of Jimmu, the first Mikado, the two thousand five hundred and thirty-fourth.”  Had she been married during the present year, her coiffure would need no alteration, her eyebrows would still knit with care or arch with mirth, and her teeth would still keep their virgin whiteness, unsoiled by astringent galls or abhorred vitriol.

The leader of feminine fashion in Japan, the young empress Haruko, has set her subjects the example by for ever banishing the galls and iron, appearing even in public with her teeth as Nature made them.  Kiku and Taro, though once proud to own allegiance to the Sho-gun, are now among the staunch supporters of the lord of the Sho-gun, the Mikado, the only true sovereign of the Sunrise Kingdom.

     W.E.  GRIFFIS.

THE LOST BABY.

She wandered off one dismal day;
No one was by to bid her stay: 
The earth was white, the sky was gray,
When the poor little baby wandered away.

The sun went down with crimson crown
Behind the clouds and the tree-tops brown: 
The cold road stared with a colder frown
When the poor little feet went wandering down.

Her mother lived up in the shining sky,
Thought poor little baby, wondering why,
As hours and days and weeks went by,
She never came down at her baby’s cry.

If the crimson wave in the west led true,
The skyward road she surely knew: 
She heeded not that the sharp winds blew,
Or her cold little feet sore tired grew.

She hummed some broken baby song,
And talked to herself as she trudged along: 
She feared no failure, recked no wrong,
But she thought that the way was lone and long.

Tired and cold, she lingered to rest
Under a snow-drift’s treacherous crest: 
She cuddled herself in a tiny nest,
White and cold as her mother’s breast.

They found her there on the snowy ground,
Her silky hair with snowflakes crowned. 
She made no sign, she breathed no sound,
But the skyward road she had surely found.

     CLARA G. DOLLIVER.

THREE FEATHERS.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF “A PRINCESS OF THULE.”

CHAPTER XXIII.

SOME OLD SONGS.

“Are you dreaming again, child?” said Mrs. Rosewarne to her daughter.  “You are not a fit companion for a sick woman, who is herself dull enough.  Why do you always look so sad when you look at the sea, Wenna?”

The wan-faced, beautiful-eyed woman lay on a sofa, a book beside her.  She had been chatting in a bright, rapid, desultory fashion about the book and a dozen other things—­amusing herself really by a continual stream of playful talk—­until she perceived that the girl’s fancies were far away.  Then she stopped suddenly, with this expression of petulant but good-natured disappointment.