To Pine Tree and Maple Leaf and the ancient cook the young housekeeper was a gifted being from a wonderful country where every woman was a princess.  Unquestioningly they obeyed and adored her, but Ishi to whom no woman was a princess and all of them nuisances—­stood proof against Zura’s every smile and coaxing word.  Love of flowers amounted to a passion with the old gardener.  To him they were living, breathing beings to be adored and jealously protected.  His forefathers had ever been keepers of this place.  He inherited all their garden skill and his equal could not be found in the Empire.  For that reason, I forgave his backsliding seventy times one hundred and seventy, and kept him.

Often Zura took the children she used as models for her pictures into the garden and loaded them with flowers.  On the mossy banks they romped and indulged in feasts of tea and crackers.  Ishi would stand near and invoke the vengeance of eighty thousand deities to descend and annihilate this forward girl from a land of barbarians.  Finding his deities failed to respond, he threatened to cast his unworthy body upon the point of a sword, if Zura cut another bud.  But I knew, if Ishi’s love of flowers failed to prevent so tragic an end, his love of sake would do so.

For years the garden had been his undisturbed kingdom, and now that it should be invaded and the flowers cut without his permission and frequently without his knowledge enraged him to the bursting point.  His habits were as set as the wart on his nose and he proposed to change neither one nor the other.  “Most very bad,” he wailed to me.  “All blossoms soul have got.  Bad girl cut off head of same; peaceful makes absence from their hearts.  Their weep strikes my ear.”

So on the day we were to celebrate Thanksgiving and Jane’s happiness, and Zura had declared her intention of decorating every spot in the house, I was not surprised to hear coming from the garden sounds of an overheated argument.  “Ishi, if it weren’t for hurting the feelings of the august pig I would say you were it.  Stand aside and let me cut those roses.  There’s a thousand of them, if there’s one.”

The protest came high and shrill.  “Decapitate heads!  You sha’n’t not!  All of ones convey soul of great ancestors.”

“Do they?”—­in high glee—­“all right, I’ll make the souls of your blessed ancestors serve as a decoration for America’s glorious festival day.”

The outraged Ishi fairly shrieked.  “Ishi’s ancestors!  America!  You have blasphemeness.  I perish to recover!”

Hostilities were suspended for a minute.

Then Zura’s fresh young voice called out from below my window:  “Ursula, please instruct this bow-legged image of an honorable monkey to let me cut the roses.  Hurry, else my hand may get loose and ‘swat’ him.”

What the child meant by “swat” I had no idea; neither did I care.  She had called me “Ursula!” Since childhood I had not heard the name.  Coming from her lips it went through me like a sharp, sweet pain.  Had she beheaded every rose and old Ishi in the bargain I would have smiled, for something in me was being satisfied.