The signal was given for them to enter the parlour, and without further interruption the ceremony proceeded, if not in exact accordance with the plans of Mrs. Beaver, at least in obedience to the mandate of a certain little autocrat who sometimes takes a hand in the affairs of man even in Rear Ninth Street.

THE SOUL OF O SANA SAN

O Sana San stood in the heart of a joyous world, as much a part of the radiant, throbbing, irresponsible spring as the golden butterfly which fluttered in her hand.  Through the close-stemmed bamboos she could see the sparkling river racing away to the Inland Sea, while slow-moving junks, with their sixfold sails, glided with almost imperceptible motion toward a far-distant port.  From below, across the rice-fields, came the shouts and laughter of naked bronze babies who played at the water’s edge, and from above, high up on the ferny cliff, a mellow-throated temple bell answered the call of each vagrant breeze.  Far away, shutting out the strange, big world, the luminous mountains hung in the purple mists of May.

And every note of color in the varied landscape, from the purple irises whose royal reflection stained the water below, to the rosy-tipped clover at the foot of the hill, was repeated in the kimono and obi of the child who flitted about in the grasses, catching butterflies in her long-handled net.

It was in the days of the Japanese-Russian War, but the constant echo of the great conflict that sounded around her disturbed her no more than it did the birds overhead.  All day long the bugles sounded from the parade-grounds, and always and always the soldiers went marching away to the front.  Around the bend in the river were miniature fortifications where recruits learned to make forts and trenches, and to shoot through tiny holes in a wall at imaginary Russian troopers.  Down in the town below were long white hospitals where twenty thousand sick and wounded soldiers lay.  No thought of the horror of it came to trouble O Sana San.  The cherry-trees gladly and freely gave up their blossoms to the wind, and so much the country give up its men for the Emperor.  Her father had marched away, then one brother, then another, and she had held up her hands and shouted, “Banzai!” and smiled because her mother smiled.  Everything was vague and uncertain, and no imagined catastrophe troubled her serenity.  It was all the will of the Emperor, and it was well.

Life was a very simple matter to O Sana San.  She rose when the sun climbed over the mountain, bathed her face and hands in the shallow copper basin in the garden, ate her breakfast of bean-curd and pickled fish and warm yellow tea.  Then she hung the quilts over poles to sun, dusted the screens, and placed an offering of rice on the steps of the tiny shrine to Inari, where the little foxes kept guard.  These simple duties being accomplished, she tied a bit of bean-cake in her gaily colored handkerchief, and stepping into her geta, went pattering off to school.