Bareness and spareness were the rule, and when the tall, bony, woman manager stood near the yellow-brown partition, it took keen eyes to tell just where her face left off and the plaster began.  She did not believe in education.  But I was born with ideas of my own and a goodly share of ambition.  I learned to read by secretly borrowing from the wharf master a newspaper or an occasional magazine which sometimes strayed off a river packet.  Then I paid for a four years’ course at a neighboring semi-college by working and by serving the other students.  I did everything—­from polishing their shoes to studying their lessons for them; it earned me many a penny and a varied knowledge of human nature.  But nothing ever happened to me as it did to the other girls.  I never had a holiday; I was never sick; I never went to a circus; and I never even had a proposal.

One night I went to church and heard a missionary from Japan speak.  My goodness! how that man could say words!  His appeal for workers to go to the Flowery Kingdom was as convincing as the hump on his nose, as irresistible as the fire in his eyes.  The combination ended in my coming as a teacher to the eager Nipponese, who were all athirst for English.  Japan I knew was a country all by itself, and not a slice off of China; that it raised rice, kimonos and heathen.  Otherwise it was only a place on the map.  Whatever the new country might hold, at least, I thought, it would open a door that would lead me far away from the drab world in which I lived.

My appointment led me to the little city of Hijiyama, overlooking the magical Inland Sea.  It is swung in the cleft of a mountain like a clustered jewel tucked in the folds of a giant velvet robe.  It is a place of crumbling castles and lotus-filled moats.  Here progress hesitated before the defiant breath of the ancient gods.  For centuries a city of content, whispers of greater things finally reached the listening ears of eager youth, fired ambition, demanded things foreign, especially the English language, and I came in on this great wave.

I found near contentment and sober joy in my work and my beautiful old garden.  But deep down in my heart I was waiting, ever waiting, for something to happen—­something big, stirring, and tremendous, something romantic and poetical; but it never did.  Year after year I wore the groove of my life deeper, but never slipped out of it, and one day was so like another it was hard to believe that even a night separated them.

Then without the slightest warning the change came.  One day in my mail I found a letter from a student which read as follows: 

     O!  Most Respected Teacher.