The last page of my narrative is finished. I lay it aside with the others and gaze out through the open balcony of my tower room upon the majestically beautiful stretch of Kagoshima Bay. From this pagoda eyrie I can look with equal ease down the blue gulf and upon the gray roofs of the city beneath the castle height.

There, in the mouth of the inlet, off the volcanic island in the head of the bay, is the anchorage where the Sea Flight lay that eventful night for Fate to send me my brother Yoritomo.

My thoughts wander from the classroom below me where, as honorable and honored teacher of the tojin learning, I instruct the young samurais of my great friend Satsuma. I pass in rapid review those eventful months in Yedo. I recall the sacrifice of my dear friend and rejoice to know that the years promise a maturing of good fruit from the seed sown by his spirit and watered with his blood. I recall how even Mito and the cautious Abe were forced to accept the treaty they abhorred, by the menace of Perry’s black ships, in the Spring of fifty-four. The brother of the sweetest woman on earth or in Heaven still sits on the stool of the Sei-i-tai Shogun. But now Ii Kamon-no-kami the Great Elder holds the place of Abe, and seconds the efforts of the wise first consul to Japan, the American Townsend Harris. Word has come that the treaty for the opening of ports to commerce and intercourse will be signed. The Shogunate and feudalism verge towards their inevitable fall. But the truth must penetrate to the ears of our sacred Mikado through the age-old barriers of ignorance and prejudice. I see a new Japan.

A hand touches my arm with the lightness of a perching butterfly. I turn and draw to me my wife, the Shogun’s daughter, and press my lips upon her coral mouth. So much I have retained of my tojin manners.

She withdraws her soft arms from about my neck, and glides back to kneel before her lord and clap her hands gently. There is no responsive “Hai!”—but through the entrance floats a graceful woman, bearing a blue-eyed baby girl. Little Azai is handed to her mother, while Kohana San smiles the greeting she cannot speak, and kowtows to the master.

A sturdy boy of four rushes in to fling himself down before his august father in the required salute. But there is a light not altogether Nipponese in his lustrous black eyes as he springs up to tell of his war game with his playmates in the castle garden.

And O Setsu San? She still attends upon the Shogun’s daughter when not serving her lord and husband, the Swordmaster of Kagoshima, once known as Yuki the ronin. But of the august Prince of Owari and his quaint and dainty lady Tokiwa, who for a time I called father and mother,—from them I have been cut off as from the dead.

Kagoshima is far from Yedo, yet even Shimadzu Nariakira, Daimio of Satsuma, dare not whisper abroad the secret of my presence among his counsellors. For Keiki and old Rekko still plot and intrigue in the capital of my wife’s august brother, and in Kyoto the Son of Heaven still dwells in the Past, and in his eyes the hairy tojins are beasts and demons.

May Ama-terasu, bright Goddess of the Sun, soon illumine the night of Kyoto with her rays of truth!

THE END