Our large, oval, wooden Japanese bath-tub furnishes him with one of the most pleasing of objects. He will get in it even when the water is hardly warm; he does not mind cold water a bit. If I happen to see him in there, he will proudly let me admire his stomach, which is, in fact, big for such a little child; it is his proudest exhibit. He calls it "Baby's Bread-basket"; I cannot help smiling when I think that it was wisely named. We have a little folklore story of a monkey and a tortoise; the latter was outwitted by the former when he attempted to get the monkey's liver. Mrs. N told him of this story, changing the liver to stomach; the variation was effective, and took his little heart by storm. A day or two later, when a monkey player dropped into our house, and made the monkey dance, he kept watching its stomach; and when it was gone, he was tremendously sorry that he could not get near enough to see it.

Isamu hates anything which does not move, or makes no noise. When he has nothing new to play with, he will begin to open and shut the shojis; when he tires of that, he will try to go around the house and hunt after the clocks which I hid, as they lost the right track of the time since he came. And

presently I send him away with a servant to the Botanical Garden to look at and feed the "kwakwa," as he calls the ducks.

He made a habit of playing with our shadows on the walls of the sitting-room after supper every evening. "Mama, shadow gone! Give Baby shadow, mama," he will exclaim, sulkily seeing his own shadow disappear. "Go to papa! He will give it to you," Léonie will say; then he will hunt for it, pushing his hand everywhere about my dress. "There it is, Baby," I will say, seeing his shadow accidentally appear on the wall. How delighted he is! He is not pleased to go to bed if he does not see the moon. But I doubt if he has any real knowledge of the moon. When I say that he must go to bed, he will go outside the door, and say there is no moon yet. Then I quietly steal into the drawing-room and light a large hanging lamp with a blue-coloured globe, and say to him: "Moon is come now. See it, Baby!" He will be mighty pleased with it; a few minutes later, he will be in bed, soundly sleeping. Really, his sleeping face looks like a miniature Buddha idol, as Léonie wrote me long ago.

Any child appears wonderful to his father; so is Isamu to me. I confess that I made

many new discoveries of life and beauty since the day of his arrival in Japan. I never pass by a store in the street without looking at the things which might belong to children.

IX

THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE

I AWOKE to the song of the nightingale. (Such a beginning may sound, I am afraid, prosaic in these days of disillusion.) Negishi of my recent residence, however, is one of the few places in Tokyo still with old reminiscences clinging gossamer-like, where the nightingale always associated with ancient art does not look out of place. My attention, which had become my morning habit while stretching forth my body in bed, was interrupted at once most harshly by the bells of a newsboy; I knew that the Tokyo Asahi was already in my mail-box. When I called the housegirl for the paper, the nightingale, certainly indignant at the discord of modern life, gracefully slipped away. The shaft of the sun pierced through the pane into my

room.

I opened the paper mechanically, without any desire for news, my body still attached to the pillow; my eyes were

suddenly drawn to the picture of an old woman, no one but the mother of Denjiro Kotoku, the so-called anarchist, who had been condemned to the gallows; it was an announcement of her death. I am told that she stood, a week or ten days ago, before her son's cell, to say her farewell after making a long, tiresome journey to Tokyo from far-away Tosa, this old lady of seventy years, and advised Kotoku: "Make your last moment manlike! You must never act like a coward." She died as it seems almost immediately after her return home; she died on the 28th of December.

The paper printed Kotoku's letter written to his friend Kosen Sakai soon after her call on him in the cell; in part he writes:

"I should have felt more easy if she had cried on seeing me here. I was awe-struck with the shrill of her old soul heightening to silence. Dear mother was trembling. Silence was a far greater reproach than tears. It is said that the mother always loves the more stupid child, and I know how much she loves me. Oh, how I love her!"

The news was broken to him in court by the lawyer Isobé; his face turned pale, the paper says, for a while, with no word.