Under the frail moon that touched the Embassy garden to such beauty, Haru walked home to the house "so-o-o small, an' garden 'bout such big" in the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods.

On Reinanzaka Hill the shadows were iris-hearted. From its high-walled gardens of the great came no glimpses of phantom-lighted shoji, no sound of vibrant strings from tea-houses nor gleams of painted lips and fingers of geisha.

Haru carried a paper-lantern tied to the end of a short wand, but it was not dark enough to need its light, and as she walked, she swung it in graceful circles. She heard a dove sobbing its low owas! owas! and once a crow flapped its sleepy way above her, uttering its harsh note, which, from some subtlety of suggestion hidden from the western mind, the Japanese liken to the accents of love. It startled her for a second; then she began to sing, under her breath, to the tune of her clacking gÉta, a ditty of her childhood:

On the crest of the hill, by the Street-of-Hollyhocks, a wall opened in a huge gate of heavy burnished beams studded with great iron rivet-heads. Here resided no less a personage than an Imperial Princess. Beside the gate stood a conical sentry-box, in which all day, while the gate was open, stood a soldier of the Household Guards. The box was empty now.

Opposite the gate, a hedged lane opened, into which she turned, and presently the song ceased. She had come to the newly built Chapel. Her father's name was on the household list of the temple across the way, but she herself walked each Sunday to Ts'kiji, to attend the bishop's Japanese service in the Cathedral. When, influenced by a school-mate, she had wished to become a Christian, the old samurai had interposed no objection. With the broad tolerance of the esoteric Buddhist, to whom all pure faiths are good, he had allowed her to choose for herself. She had grown to love the strangely new and beautiful worship with its singing, its service in a tongue that she could understand, its Bible filled with marvelous stories of old heroes, and with vivid imagery like that of the Kojiki, the "Record of Ancient Matters" or the Man-yoshu, the "Collection of a Myriad Leaves," over whose archaic characters her father was always poring. She had ceased to visit the temple, but otherwise the change had made little difference in her placid life. With the simplicity with which the Japanese of to-day kneels with equal faith before a plain Shinto shrine and a golden altar of Buddha, she had continued the daily home observances. Each morning she cleaned the butsu-dan—refilled its tiny lamp with vegetable oil, freshened its incense-cup and water bowl, and dusted its golden shrine of Kwan-on which held the scroll inscribed with the spirit names of a hundred ancestors, and the ihai, or mortuary tablet, of her dead mother. Though she no longer prayed before it, it still signified to her the invisible haunting of the dead—the continuing loving presence of that mother who waited for her in the Meidoland.

For many days Haru had watched the progress of the Chapel building. The Cathedral was a good two miles distant, but this was near her home; here she would be able to attend more than the weekly Sunday service. To-night, as she looked at the cross shining in the moonlight, she thought it very beautiful. A tiny symbol like it, made of white enamel, was hung on a little chain about her neck. It had been given her by the bishop the day of her confirmation. She drew this out and swung it about her finger as she walked on.

In the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods were no huge and gloomy compounds. It was a roadway of humbler shops and homes, bordered with mazes of lantern fire, and lively with pedestrians. At a meager shop, pitifully small, whose shoji were wide open, Haru paused. A smoky oil lamp swung from the ceiling, and under its glow, a woman knelt on the worn tatamÉ. Beside her, on a pillow, lay a newborn baby, and she was soothing its slumber by softly beating a tiny drum close to its ear. She nodded and smiled to Haru's salutation.

"Hai! Ojo-San," she said. "Go kigen yo! Deign augustly to enter."

"Honorable thanks," responded Haru, "but my father awaits my unworthy return. Domo! Aka-San des'ka? So this is Miss Baby! Ishikichi will have a new comrade in this little sister."

"Poison not your serene mind with contemplation of my uncomely last-sent one!" said the woman, pridefully tilting the pillow so as to show the tiny, vacuous face. "Are not its hands degradedly well-formed?"

"Wonderfully beyond saying! The father is still exaltedly ill?"

"It is indeed so! I have not failed to sprinkle the holy water over Jizo, nor to present the straw sandals to the Guardians-of-the-Gate. Also I have rubbed each day the breast of the health-god; yet O-Binzuru does not harken. Doubtless it is because of some sin committed by my husband in a previous existence! I have not knowledge of your Christian God, or I would make my worthless sacrifices also to Him."

"He heals the sick," said Haru, "but He augustly loves not sacrifice—as He exaltedly did in olden time," she hastily supplemented, recalling certain readings from the Old Testament.

"The gods of Nippon divinely change not their habit," returned the woman. "Also my vile intellect can not comprehend why the foreigners' God should illustriously concern Himself with the things of another land."

"The Christian Divinity," said Haru, "is a God of all lands and all peoples."

The other mused. "It passes in my degraded mind that He, then, would lack a sublime all-sympathy for our Kingdom-of-Slender-Swords. You are transcendently young, Ojo-San, but I am thirty-two, and I hold by the gods of my ancestors."

"Honorably present my greetings to your husband," Haru said, as she bowed her adieu. "May his exalted person soon attain divine health! To-morrow I will send another book for him to read."

The woman watched her go, with a smile on her tired face—the Japanese smile that covers so many things. She looked at the baby's face on the pillow. "Praise Shaka," she said aloud, "there is millet yet for another week. Then we must give up the shop. Well—I can play the samisen, and the gods are not dead!"

Behind her a diminutive figure had lifted himself upright from a f'ton. He came forward from the gloom, his single sleeping-robe trailing comically and his great black eyes round and serious. "Why must we give up the shop, honorable mother?"

"Go to sleep, Ishikichi," said his mother. "Trouble me not so late with your rude prattle."

"But why, Okka-San?"

"Because rent-money exists not, small pigeon," she answered gently. "So long as we have ignobly lived here, we have paid the banto who brings his joy-giving presence on the first of each month. Now we have no more money and can not pay."

"Why have we no more money?"

"Because the honorable father is sick and you are too small to earn. But let it not trouble your heart, for the gods are good. See—we have almost waked the Aka-San!"

She bent over the pillow and began again the elfin drumming at the infant's ear. But Ishikichi lay open-eyed on his f'ton, his baby mind grappling with a new and painful wonder.