Naturally I was anxious to exhibit my handiwork.  As well tempt a mountain lion to inspect a piece of beautiful tapestry in the process of weaving.

However tactfully I led up to the subject he walked around it without touching it.  To him she was not.  Reconciliation was afar off.  I said good-by and left.  It was this and the speech I had heard in the afternoon that occupied my mind as I wended my way home.

Of course the country must go forward; but it was a pity that, even if progress were not compatible with tradition, it could not be tempered with beauty.  Why must the youth of the land adopt those hideous imitations of foreign clothes?  The flower-like children wear on their heads the grotesque combinations of muslin and chicken feathers they called hats?  There are miles of ancient moats around the city, filled with lotus, the great pink-and-white blossoms giving joy to the eye as its roots gave food for the body.  Slowly these stretches of loveliness were being turned into dreary levels of sand for the roadbed of a trolley.  Even now the quiet of the city was broken by the clang of the street-car gong.  I was taking my first ride that day.

With Kishimoto San’s plea for progress of the right kind still ringing in my ears, my eyes fell upon some of the rules for the conduct of the passengers, printed in large type, and hung upon the front door of the car: 

“Please do not stick your knees or your elbows out of the windows.”

“Fat people must ride on the platform.”

“Soiled coolies must take a bath before entering.”

An advertisement in English emphasized the talk of the afternoon:  “Invaluable most fragrant and nice pills, especially for sudden illness.  For refreshing drooping minds and regulating disordered spirits, whooping cough and helping reconvalescents to progress.”

The force of Kishimoto’s appeal was strong upon me.

I alighted at my street and began the climb that led to my house.  Halfway up a picture-book tea-house offered hospitality; in its miniature garden I paused to rest and faced the sea in all its evening beauty.  Happily the glory of the skies and the tender loveliness of the hills still belonged to their Maker, untouched by commercialism.

The golden track of the setting sun streamed across the mountain tops and turned to fiery red a feathery shock of distant clouds.  High and clear came the note of a wild goose as he called to his mate on their homeward flight.  In the city below a thousand lights danced and beckoned through the soft velvet shadows of coming night.  There fluttered up to me many sounds—­a temple bell, the happy call of children at play, cheerful echoes of home-like content, the gentle gaiety of simple life.  It was for these, the foundations of the Empire, that Kishimoto San feared ruin, with the coming of too sudden a transition.

But I forgot the man and his woes.  The spell of heavenly peace that spread upon land and sea fell like a benediction.