with Ivanhoe already then), who taught me the Third California State Reader every evening in my little down-cellar room. My great sensitiveness to female beauty, which was in a speedy way of development, made me restless rather than learn the lesson in face of this beautiful woman, whose rich hair, when she sat by me, almost touched my blushing face. But that was sweet indeed. The one I hated with a sense of fear was the master of the house, large and stout in physique, red-faced again with a wonderful red nose. He came down to the cellar every morning calling me John, and pushed out his foot for his shoe to be cleaned. The feeling of being something like a slave made me rebel; besides, when I was told that I had to work one whole week for nothing as I had broken one large window, I decided to excuse myself from the house, not troubling to ask for my release, under the dusk of the night. When I left the Jew's house, I put myself at a Japanese newspaper office in the city, where I was engaged as a carrier boy. I was glad with the new place, because I found there a whole set of the Encyclopædia Britannica. From my childhood days I had not minded walking; while walking to deliver the paper to some eighty places (we had a circulation of less than one hundred

and fifty in the city), I always thought about some English book; and when I came to a lonely street with nobody in sight, I was pleased to recite loudly the lines from my memory. Hamlet's soliloquy I was thinking the greatest English writing; how hard I tried to remember each line of it. There lived at the office five or six young Japanese; to cook pancakes with water for their breakfast was my morning work. One day when I was perfectly forgetful of the burning pancakes on the fire, as my whole mind was absorbed in this newly discovered rôle of Hamlet, my young friend called me by name; in a fit of anger I threw over him a big tin pan brimming with flour and water. His dirty clothing was miserably white-washed. When I repented of my rash conduct, I found that we had to go without breakfast that day; and worse still, my poor friend had no other dress to change to. I was obliged to offer him my clothes when he had to go out, and to stay in bed myself the whole afternoon, now thinking on the reality that foolishness was altogether too expensive for me, then on Napoleon, who, as I had read somewhere, had one suit of clothes between him and his brother in his younger days.

When I set out to peddle the cheap modern

One

Japanese colour-prints which some Japanese had put down at a certain boarding-house in pawn for his board, to gain practice in spoken English or brush away my Oriental shyness in speech was the first purpose before earning a little pocket-money; I remember that my first day's clear profit amounted to almost two dollars. But the colour-prints were soon exhausted; and I turned my mind next to canvassing for advertisements in our paper, from which I received but little success. day when I was walking lazily with no particular purpose I found a little second-hand bookshop in a certain street, and dropped in to look around at the books, among which my quick eye caught a book Dora Thorne, a story translated in Japan by the now Viscount Suematsu under the title of Tanima no Himeyuri or the "Lily of the Valley." I felt a sudden desire for its possession which, being almost irresistible, made me commit the first and last crime of stealing; I put the book under my coat while the proprietor, an old man who seemed quite scholarlike and sympathetic, was looking away. I was so sorry for such a shameful act when I returned home; and my sorrow grew larger when my mind, I dare say of considerable literary taste at least for my age, found the book did not encourage

my soul's curiosity. I decided to take it back to the shop and to apologise to the old man for my crime; and I took the book one day there. But my courage failed, and besides, I could not find a chance to see the man alone. So I took it there again a day or two later; and the man approached me from within, when seeing me, and cast a friendly smile from his open and honest face, a type I only saw among the Americans of older generation. Then he asked what book I liked. "I cannot say what I like, but I know what I do not like; and here is one of the books not to my taste," I exclaimed. And to astonish him, I made my confession about the book as best I could. How glad the old man was to hear my story. He wanted to express his forgiveness emphatically when he asked me if I wished to take some book or books to read. I was glad that my crime was forgiven in a really nice way, and more glad that I gained a good friend from whom I could draw out the books to read. He handed me Keats' book of poems, when I told him that I wished to have a book which should have more an inner beauty than Longfellow; and he said that if I read the book intelligently, I might feel

"... like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken."

This old bookshop keeper and I became quite friends during my long stay in California; it was he who was the first to congratulate me when my first book of poems, Seen and Unseen, made some little literary excitement in America. He wished me the most sincere godspeed at my departure, a few years later, for New York, and still farther for London. I had a secret hope on my way home to Japan, in 1904, to find him again in San Francisco; my disappointment was that I could not see any shadow of his little shop or himself in all the city.

My stay at Palo Alto, a college town, whither I went by walking from San Francisco as I felt I heard the voice of a scholarly call, is one of the sweetest memories of my life. I found my home there in a certain lawyer's house, whose chief attraction for me was that it contained a library. There I first put my fingers on the pages of a book of Hugo's while the whole family were absent. The lady of the house, and her daughter, both of them, used to attend Stanford University, the mother for the study of zoology and the daughter as a literature student. The family had quite a sympathy with myself; when the lady discovered my great love of books, she did not mind if I read a book even while picking the