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daughter of a priest is not a likely candidate for service in an inn. Nevertheless, there was the honor of the hospitality of Narii at stake. Messengers were sent to explain the problem to the maid and her father, and to use, if necessary, the pressure of "the state demands."

Thus came O-Hanna-san to the inn. In all Japan there could not have been a prettier, a more bashful, or a more modest maiden. Her eyes were downcast behind long black lashes. Her soft cheek flushed and paled-perhaps somewhat from the excitement of the adventure. Neither she nor her friends had ever seen a foreigner of so strange a race. And to be known to have been chosen as the prettiest maid!

Two great braziers had been filled with glowing charcoal. The foreigners, and the outer-world Japanese who could speak their strange words, were busily cooking the fowls, chopped into dice, and they were arguing about their respective talents, as do all amateur cooks. Perhaps she could now look up for an instant unobserved. No, a glance met

her eyes and she felt hot blushes grow again on her cheek.

While they feasted and laughed she had to run many times to the kitchen for forgotten dishes. When she passed along the hall by the street entrance she was stopped and besieged by the questions of the gathered mob. Some of those inquiring investigators had also gathered outside the wall of my bath an hour before. I had been suddenly aware of an eye at every crack and crevice of the boards as I was cautiously stepping into the superheated tub. There was not a sound, merely the glitter of the star-scattered eyes.

The foreigners put sugar on their rice, and one of them even put sugar in his tea. They handled their chopsticks so awkwardly that it was marvelous that they did not spill the rice grains on the matting. At last, the three feasters finished the mighty meal and stretched out on the cushions to smoke in deep contentment. She doubted whether they had even noticed that her superior kimono was not such as the maid of an

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inn would possess. After the feast, her After the feast, her quick feet, in spotless white tabi, carried away the bowls and little tables. Then she sat down by the door to await any clapping of hands.

The host came in and bent his forehead to the floor. He had himself arranged the flowers, in an old iron vase, to stand in the takemona corner. We tried to express our appreciation for the flowers and our admiration of the

vase.

We asked him how old the inn was. It had been

his father's and his grandfather's. Yes, in those days the Nakescendo had rivaled the Takaido, and yearly, on the hastening to Yedo to give obeisance to the shogun, the great nobles of the northwest provinces, with their armed retainers, had had to pass through Narii. This now forgotten inn had then been famous. Our room, which overhung the river, he repeated, had been only given to the daimios. The samurai had crowded the other rooms. The inn had boasted a score, twoscore, of trained and pretty ne-sans to wait upon those fiery warriors. The modern geisha, be it said, by the way, in many of her accomplishments, is daughter to the inn maidens of feudal days, who sang and danced and played musical instruments in addition to possessing the graces of more domestic duties. The inn had then rung with shouting and laughter, and sometimes the dawn of the morning start of the cavalcade found the retainers still sitting around the feast.

plunged its hands into the purses which had been filled from the rice taxes, the return journey to the provincial castles was often quite a different story. No rare occurrence was it for some haughty samurai to declare in the morning that he could not pay his inn bill, however modest it might be. Pledges would be left, and upon one occasion a certain warrior had been forced to leave the first mistress of his heart his sword. And once, went on the old man, a noble, upon leaving the door, had caused

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After the great city of Yedo had

a vase to be unwrapped from its encasements of one silken bag after another, and had given it to the inn. The donor had written a a poem of dedication with his own hand. The vase was shaped like a bottle, and the inn had been called "The Bottle Inn" from that day, seventy years in the past. Our host, a youth then, had thought that the inn would

ever be rich and renowned. He sighed. The tradition of its renown had faded and been forgotten in this age of railways. No longer did turbulent guests demand that the bottle be brought out and shown.

If his dramatic genius had been subtly leading us toward turbulence, we obeyed the pulling of the strings. We demanded to know whether the vase was still under his roof. Our host smiled. The sacred vase was hidden safely. Would we like to see it?

He returned, carrying an old wooden box. The great-granddaughter dragged the unredeemed sword after her. The well-worn scabbard was of mediocre, conventional design, but the blade had

been forged by one of the famous swordmakers. Hori read the sword's origin from the characters graved in the steel. The old man slowly slipped it back into the scabbard, leaving us to ponder what might have been the tragic fate of the ronin that he had never returned for his pledge.

No casket of precious metal can be so alluringly suggestive of trove as the simple, unpainted, pine boxes into which the Japanese put their treasures. A woven cord clasped down the lid of the box of the bottle. The untying of it began the breathless ceremony. When the lid was lifted we saw the first silken wrapping, then came another, and another, and another. Some were of brocade, some were of faded plain color, red, blue, or rose. Finally the drawing-string of the last bag was pulled open and the old man lifted out the bottle. It was of yellow pottery, with a thick brown glaze overruning the sides. The mouth of the vase was capped by a bronze-and-silver band, carved with an irregular motif. The trustee of the possession allowed us to pass it from hand to hand.

giveness. But, because temptation and conscience can generally be argued around to our satisfaction, the gods have ironically added impulse as the third part of us. It must have been some such impulse which was the irrational lever which moved us to action. We soared to the heights. It was a superior endurance to any flight that it is likely either of us will ever attempt again. Truly, such virtue is more regretted than gloried in. We did not take the bottle with us. The bottle still functions in its environment, in harmony with its tradition. Taken away, it could be only a superior vase with a history, an object of art. In that old inn it is a living part, an inspiration. In the forgotten village of Narii no numbered museum tag hangs around its neck.

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READY TO SERVE US AT THE CLAPPING OF OUR HANDS

What was one of our reasons for being in Narii at that very moment? It was that our eyes were prying for those rarer treasures in Japan which may be sometimes gleaned "away from the beaten track." Unaccountable chance had led us to the inn. The old man was hopelessly beaten in his contest with poverty. I knew that he did not wish to sell, but if there should be the jingling of a few yen-was it likely that he could refuse? Our eyes were gleaming with desire. Surely, even if it were a venal sin to take away the bottle from The Bottle Inn, the very greatness of the temptation would have brought its own special for

The bottle dropped back into the brocade bag lined with faded crimson silk. Then the other wrappings, one by one, muffled it. It went into the box; the lid was fitted into place and the cord was tied. Do we gain strength from resisting such temptation? The writers of the Holy Church of the Middle Ages said so. By refusing that bottle I merely gained exhaustion. This moment I am stifled by the dust of the ashes of that murdered passion. My conscience replies with no comforting response. It has lost the vitality of recoil, and thus, if ever such time may come, I may yet glory in a greater vandalism, some supreme Hunnish act, and there will be no rasping regret.

The breezes up among the snows of the mountains came down into the valley for the night. Wherever they were going, they seemed to be quite undetermined as to their path. They blew from every side and into every corner of the room by turn. Little by little, to

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escape the draughts, we had kept pushing along the wooden shutters until we were at length completely walled in. It was not possible to imagine that a few miles away, down on the rice-plains, the millions were nudely stifling, while we were going to bed to get warm. The daughter of the priest had been dragging layers of bedding as far as the door, and when we clapped our hands she had innumerable mattresses for each of us. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to blow out the lights and cry, "Oyasuma nasai!" to the retreating patter of her footsteps.

"What's the midget granddaughter waiting for?" I asked Hori.

"She wants you to go to bed," said he from under his quilt.

I jumped into the soft center of my mattresses as requested. Then the butterfly dropped on her knees and crept backward around our beds. Out of a box she was pouring a train of powder until she had us each inclosed in a magic circle.

"Why?" I demanded.

Kenjiro laughed at me. "It's nomiyoke," he said. "Insect powder—what do you say in America? Bug medicine?"

I insisted that I had not seen the sign of anything looking like a marauder.

"Of course not!" Hori stopped me as if I should have known better. "It's just courtesy to honored guests, to show you that they would wish to protect you, if there were any. If there were crawlers," he concluded, with some scorn, "do you suppose that they'd make such an effort to call attention to the fact?"

That bushido explanation satisfied Hori, but I was doubtful. For the sake of verification I carefully destroyed the integrity of the rampart around my bed by opening up passages through the powder. I was willing to display a few bites in the morning to prove the truth. I went to sleep dreaming about twosworded samurai who looked like pinchbugs, and they were swaggering around a wall of insect powder. However, the morning proved that Hori was quite correct. The delicate attention had been born of pure courtesy.

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 813.-52

Their Places

BY HELEN MACKAY

CAME out from a doorway in the Boulevard de Strasbourg, just before the Gare de l'Est. It was one of those terribly hot days that came early this year toward the end of May. The shade of the chestnut-trees was grateful in the crowded, dusty boulevard.

On a bench, just there in the shade, a soldier was lounging uncomfortably in his hot, long infantry coat, that had once been blue, his heavy, dusty boots thrust out in front of him, his. arms sprawled along the back of the bench, his head sunk forward from down between his hunched shoulders. He had taken off his battered helmet, and it lay with his knapsack and rolled blanket on the ground at his feet. His hair was quite gray. He seemed so forlorn and alone that I spoke to him.

"Something wrong?"

He looked up; his face was sunburnt to the color of yellow leather. He had a rough, small, gray beard, and black eyes under rough gray eyebrows.

"What would you?" he said.

I thought I recognized the accent. I looked at his knapsack and things and said, "You are come on leave?"

He jerked his head back toward the station and said, "I arrived an hour ago." "But," I said, "leave is not meant for sitting drearily alone; it is for family and friends and things to do."

He said again: "What would you? I am not of Paris; I have no one here and nothing to do."

"You are just waiting between trains," I asked, "on your way home?" He said, "It is of no use going home." "But your people. Have you no people?"

"Oh yes, my wife and the little boys." "And you do not go to them?" "No use.' He was staring straight in front of him.

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I waited, not wanting to say too much, and not wanting to leave him.

After a minute he picked up his arms. from along the back of the bench, drew in his legs and leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Then I sat down on the bench beside him.

"Please, tell me, where is your home? Is it in the High Provence?"

"Yes," he said, "in the mountains. Between Barrême and Senez-at Ourjas, you know."

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I could see and feel that country, ancient and very strange, all the color of wild beasts. The wide, bare, stony beds of rivers, and the great bare sweeps of mountain-sides are the color of lions' shoulders. The yellow-grays of wild thyme and lavender and olive are tawny and warm, the color of lions' breasts. Only the cypresses are black, long, straight markings, like the stripes in the skins of tigers. All the little, poor, stone houses and the ruins of watch-towers and castles are of tawny, live, wild colors, like the rocks and the rare patches of corn and vine. Tawny oxen drag the plow or stand with the cart in the vineyard. The sheep and the sheep-dogs are tawny together under the olives.

There is a certain little tawny house, square, with three cypress-trees beside it, set back, up a rough path from the road, among olives and vines. The sheep were going home to it in one twilight when I passed, quite a large flock, managed by a very busy dog. There were two or three lambs with the flock. The shepherd was a very small boy. He was carrying one of the lambs over his shoulder, its feeble little legs crossed under his chin, its long little face nodding beside his little brown round face. He was toiling up the steep path laboriously, for he was so small that even the tiny autumn lamb was heavy for him.

It was September, the grape-vines

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