Emperor and country are believed to gather. The men of the regiments temporarily quartered in our suburb, on their way to the war, found time to play at mimic war with the small folk of the neighborhood. (At all times Japanese soldiers are very kind to children; and the children here march with them, join in their military songs, and correctly salute their officers, feeling sure that the gravest officer will return the salute of a little child.) When the last regiment went away, the men distributed toys among the children assembled at the station to give them a parting cheer, — hairpins, with military symbols for ornament, to the girls; wooden infantry and tin cavalry to the boys. The oddest present was a small clay model of a Russian soldier's head, presented with the jocose promise: "If we come back, we shall bring you some real ones." In the top of the head there is a small wire loop, to which a rubber string can be attached. At the time of the war with China, little clay models of Chinese heads, with very long queues, were favorite toys.

The war has also suggested a variety of new designs for that charming object, the toko-niwa. Few of my readers know what a toko-niwa, or "alcove-garden," is. It is a miniature garden - perhaps less than two feet square contrived within an ornamental shallow basin of porcelain or other material, and placed in the alcove of a guest-room by way of decoration. You may see there a tiny pond; a streamlet crossed by humped bridges of Chinese pattern; dwarf trees forming a grove, and shading the model of a Shinto temple; imitations in baked clay of stone lanterns, perhaps even the appearance of

a hamlet of thatched cottages. If the tokoniwa be not too small, you may see real fish swimming in the pond, or a pet tortoise crawling among the rockwork. Sometimes the miniature garden represents Horai, and the palace of the DragonKing.

ion. One is a model of Port Arthur, showing the harbor and the forts; and with the materials for the display there is sold a little map, showing how to place certain tiny battleships, representing the imprisoned and the investing fleets. The other toko-niwa represents a Korean or Chinese landscape, with hill ranges and rivers and woods; and the appearance of a battle is created by masses of toy soldiers — cavalry, infantry, and artillery-in all positions of attack and defense. Minute forts of baked clay, bristling with cannon about the size of small pins, occupy elevated positions. When properly arranged the effect is panoramic. The soldiers in the foreground are about an inch long; those a little farther away about half as long; and those upon the hills are no larger than flies.

But the most remarkable novelty of this sort yet produced is a kind of tokoniwa recently on display at a famous shop in Ginza. A label bearing the inscription, Kai-téï no Ikken (View of the OceanBed) sufficiently explained the design. The suïbon, or "water-tray," containing the display was half filled with rocks and sand so as to resemble a sea-bottom; and little fishes appeared swarming in the foreground. A little farther back, upon an elevation, stood Otohimé, the DragonKing's daughter, surrounded by her maiden attendants, and gazing, with just the shadow of a smile, at two men in naval uniform who were shaking hands, dead heroes of the war: Admiral Makaroff and Commander Hirosé! ... These had esteemed each other in life; and it was a happy thought to thus represent their friendly meeting in the world of Spirits.

Though his name is perhaps unfamiliar to English readers, Commander Takeo Hirosé has become, deservedly, one of Japan's national heroes. On the 27th of March, during the second attempt made to block the entrance to Port Arthur, he was killed while endeavoring to help a comrade, a comrade who had formerly

saved him from death. For five years Hirosé had been a naval attaché at St. Petersburg, and had made many friends in Russian naval and military circles. From boyhood his life had been devoted to study and duty; and it was commonly said of him that he had no particle of selfishness in his nature. Unlike most of his brother officers he remained unmarried,

- holding that no man who might be called on at any moment to lay down his life for his country had a moral right to marry. The only amusements in which he was ever known to indulge were physical exercises; and he was acknowledged one of the best jujutsu (wrestlers) in the empire. The heroism of his death, at the age of thirty-six, had much less to do with the honors paid to his memory than the self-denying heroism of his life.

Now his picture is in thousands of homes, and his name is celebrated in every village. It is celebrated also by the manufacture of various souvenirs, which are sold by myriads. For example, there is a new fashion in sleeve-buttons, called Kinen-botan, or "Commemoration-buttons." Each button bears a miniature portrait of the commander, with the inscription, Shichi-shō hokoku, "Even in seven successive lives for love of country." It is recorded that Hirosé often cited, to friends who criticised his ascetic devotion to duty, the famous utterance of Kusunoki Masashigé, who declared, ere laying down his life for the Emperor GoDaigo, that he desired to die for his sovereign in seven successive existences.

But the highest honor paid to the memory of Hirosé is of a sort now possible only in the East, though once possible also in the West, when the Greek or Roman patriot-hero might be raised, by the common love of his people, to the place of the Immortals. . . . Wine-cups of porcelain have been made, decorated with his portrait; and beneath the portrait appears, in ideographs of gold, the inscription, Gunshin Hirosé Chusa. The character "gun" signifies war; the character

"shin," a god, - either in the sense of divus or deus, according to circumstances; and the Chinese text, read in the Japanese way, is Ikusa no Kami. Whether that stern and valiant spirit is really invoked by the millions who believe that no brave soul is doomed to extinction, no well-spent life laid down in vain, no heroism cast away, I do not know. But, in any event, human affection and gratitude can go no farther than this; and it must be confessed that Old Japan is still able to confer honors worth dying for.

Observing the playful confidence of this wonderful people in their struggle for existence against the mightiest power of the West, their perfect trust in the wisdom of their leaders and the valor of their armies, the good humor of their irony when mocking the enemy's blunders, their strange capacity to find, in the world-stirring events of the hour, the same amusement that they would find in watching a melodrama, one is tempted to ask: "What would be the moral consequence of a national defeat ?” . . . It would depend, I think, upon circum

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stances. Were Kuropatkin able to fulfill his rash threat of invading Japan, the nation would probably rise as one man. But otherwise the knowledge of any great disaster would be bravely borne. From time unknown Japan has been a land of cataclysms, earthquakes that ruin cities in the space of a moment; tidal waves, two hundred miles long, sweeping whole coast populations out of existence; floods submerging hundreds of leagues of well-tilled

fields; eruptions burying provinces. Calamities like this have disciplined the race in resignation and in patience; and it has been well trained also to bear with courage all the misfortunes of war. Even by the foreign peoples that have been most closely in contact with her, the capacities of Japan remained unguessed. Perhaps her power to resist aggression is far surpassed by her power to endure.

As Mrs. "Judge" Chouteau laid her handbag on the writing-shelf of the newspaper counting-room and went to work at her glove, going over her fingers successively many times with careful rubs and pulls, she glanced up and down the columns of the advertiser's copy of the paper, looking unconsciously for a department of Not Wanted.

In the Judge's stone front residence, on a street whose name could be spoken with distinction, was a melodeon of that description. Its extensible legs, in days gone by, had lengthened with her own, until one day she was a young lady come into the estate of a piano; and the melodeon needed to grow no more. It had followed her fortunes and been a pensioner of space for years whose number I will forbear to mention. It was allowed to stay in that second-story rear room which was the limbo of unornamental but possibly usable things, stepping aside frequently to make room for another bundle of legal literature. And now, whenever the Judge went there being in a hurry to find an old record or perplexed with a nebulous remembrance of an article in a back number of the Green Bag - the melodeon would be sure to stand in front of the very place it was not wanted. And the Judge

would say, when he came downstairs for Sapphira, who always found things as if her arm were a divining-rod, "Sapphira, what are we going to do with that melodeon ?"

"Was it in the road again, Cyrus?" "It was. As an Obstructionist it seems to be sticking to your father's politics."

And that was the last time he had cause to speak of it. She said she would sell it, averring it with conclusiveness because she had often made the claim that it was

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worth money. And the Judge said "Humph," which was a mere ditto mark to what he had said aforetime, that there was nobody who would buy it.

As Mrs. Chouteau picked up the impotent public pen and paused to compose an "ad," she was really had she but known it - trying to put herself in touch with a certain log residence on the summit of a rounding hill overlooking a sweet and sleepy valley town on the shore of the Missouri. In it there dwelt a family of the same complexion as the rosewood melodeon, and quite as soulful of melody. There were little Forrest and his "Pa" and his Mammy.

If it were permitted me to become edifying and useful on the subject of a melodeon, I would choose for the text some

words from a sermon which I one time heard delivered to a preponderance of ladies, "Life is mostly a struggle with dirt." And I would expand it with a chemico-philosophical statement, - Dirt is only something out of place. In the Chouteau establishment the melodeon had certainly become dirt. Little Forrest's residence was the place where it would become the fertile soil of melody. Indeed, if Providence were to have a department of Economics its time could well be spent in merely shifting things about, making useful articles out of dirt without the least expenditure. But as this work of finding the affinities of things is left to chance and the newspapers, Mrs. Chouteau had to struggle with the selecting of words that were to be printed and to put forty cents in jeopardy.

While the melodeon had become unwelcome for reasons that are obvious, it belonged otherwhere for reasons esoteric and peculiar. Forrest's "Pa" was a steamboat hand, a roustabout on a boat that ran from St. Louis. He was one of the trotting file who pour wheat-sacks aboard at landings, who "coon-jine" coal forward to the boilers between landings, and who sit, whenever there is an opportunity, with their feet hanging above the sliding yellow waters, humming melodies and enjoying the sunshine.

The Missouri roustabout, having raised his station from the agricultural class, preserves a tradition in common with the American farmer, not to mention the bee and the bear. He does not work in winter. He has just enough providence that, as winter closes down, when he cannot venture forth for firewood without gunnysacking around his shoes, he can retire within with a barrel of flour, some sides of bacon, and a modicum of molasses. There he waits for navigation to open up again, having solved the entire American problem of worry and hurry. While the white man's happiness may be only negative, and can safely aspire to nothing more than the absence of evil (if we are to believe what Schopenhauer states and

Browning bothers about), the black man has, without doubt, a supply of the positive kind that he has stored up from the sunshine. But he cannot get at it by mere reflection as the bear sucks his paw; he must have pretext to give it voice and shake it out of his feet. A melodeon to pump the hours rhythmically away and instill happiness would cause a winter to lapse without even the effort of turning the back on boredom. Forrest's "Pa" had often thought this; he admitted it on the day that Forrest first yearned for an organ. And now that Forrest was become intellectually bright he should have a musical education. Forrest agreed with him.

One generously heated day, when the "coon-jiners" were sitting along the hogways with their laps turned toward the "largess of the sun," which, not being in the poetic trade, they spoke of only as "fine wahm weathah,' - Forrest's father was lying in the hold on a pile of wheatsacks, being lulled to rest by the pulsing of the engines and ruminating on the forthcoming winter when there would be no such rhythm unless, perchance, he could get the organ. He reached out and drew toward him a copy of the GlobeDemocrat which had fluttered from above. He looked at the typographic pictures of steamboats on the time-tables and the names of the packets printed in larger letters, which he recognized by having seen them on the boats themselves rather than by any ability to spell things out. When he had gone through all these pictures of names, with a flattering sense that he was somewhat of a reader, his eye fell upon a musical paragraph signalized by a little picture of a piano. He raised his head and looked about for Forrest.

"Fo'est, come heah. What do dis say?" Forrest could read with a precocity peculiar to little darkies with bulbous foreheads and big eyes. It was because of this amusing ability to scan and sing off the most mysterious words from the almanac or the cookbook that the Captain overlooked his frequent trips on the boat. The

Captain, being himself an agriculturist, was disposed to regard his crew as members of the household; he made no objection to Forrest so long as he kept out of the way at landings and made his meals from the superfluity which his father heaped on his own tin plate. And at times he served for amusement.

"Read dis off chile- what it say 'bout de piano."

And Forrest, who had mastered all the circus posters in St. Louis, and was, therefore, not to be daunted by language, read:

"For Sale-A rosewood melodeon in excellent condition. Keys slightly discolored. Has extensible legs; suitable for child or grown person. Cheap."

The melodeon had been polished and brought downstairs into the hall and set so far forward on its way out that the street door would barely clear it as it swung open. It was on her way home from the newspaper office that Sapphira, pondering the fate of her moquette carpet at the feet of a troop of applicants, calculated this arrangement. And foreseeing that because of the door it would be necessary for such callers to come in one step in order to decide, she sorted over the storeroom in her mind, and saw that there was not a rug or other covering suitable for the invaders' pathway and still presentable to social callers. It was necessary for her to stop in at the draper's and order two yards of linen at forty cents the yard.

About a month afterward it being a Tuesday morning the Judge was sitting in the bow-window reading. The melodeon was still pausing at the threshold. The Judge suddenly straightened up in his chair and looked out over his glasses, dropping the Green Bag on the floor. When he had peered out for some time he called Sapphira.

"Sapphira, what do you suppose that little negro can be walking up and down in front of our house for? It is the third Tuesday I have noticed him. There he is again. He has been doing that for ten minutes."

Now any one who had taken a moment's notice of Forrest could not thenceforth be mistaken in his identity. He was one of the species in a general way, but differentiated, with eyes that were, if possible, more all-seeing, forehead more prominent, and legs a great deal more spindle-shanked. His stockingless legs were very thin and flat, and his calves were put on in a chunk; his underpinning seemed the purely mechanical contrivance of some ingenious designer of light and efficient machinery for working a large pair of shoes. And when his ankles worked back and forth in the yawning mouth of his man's pair of gaiters they seemed all the thinner and flatter and more purely mechanical.

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He walked and down with his eyeballs rolled in the direction of the house. At times he would sit down on the carriage block and jingle on it an iron ring which he took from his pocket as if to divert his mind from too constant vigil. Again he would stroll up and down, variegating his progress with an occasional fantastic step, periodically looking up at the big black door, and never going beyond the length of the iron fence. Sapphira drew the curtain aside and looked out.

"Why, that's the little darky!" she exclaimed; "the one that came with his father to look at the melodeon."

As Forrest caught her eye he ventured a look of half recognition. Then, as if her countenance had brought him out of a state of irresolution, he idled his way up the flight of scoured stone steps. There was an interval of hesitation; then the bell rang, and Mrs. Chouteau went to the door.

"Good-morning," she said.

"How do," said Forrest. He regarded her furtively, and then gazed fixedly at the silver-plated bell-knob. Evidently he was at a loss for an explanation as to why he rang the bell.

"Was there anything you came to tell me?" asked Sapphira.

"Has somebody done bought yo' m'lo