had to make himself a present. He picked her without her leave, of course. Simply handed papa a bank roll and the thing was done.'

You should see the Lady Mish's eyes blaze when she mentions this subject.

"Think of a country which has grown upward by leaps and bounds retaining this abominable law that permits a man to keep extra households. Of course anybody who knows the Orient knows that Japan is far from being alone in her guilt, but-" Kate preached a tenminute sermon with appropriate texts. I voted yes to everything she said, but I couldn't change the law and said as much, but I could hear the story and begged her to go on. Betweentimes I got a little of it.

Sometimes the woman, Otani San by name, brought her little girl to kindergarten. She was very shy. But that didn't matter. There is a look in Friend Katherine's eyes that would coax a wild flower to confidences. Otani San began to talk. Before coming to "Yochin" with her small daughter she never dreamed of any life save her own kind. She had watched the plays of the children. Their Christmas songs sang into her heart something of which she had never dreamed. The stories told by the teachers opened the windows to another world, always closed to her by isolation. Her family was built on the old feudal plan. Of course they were poor. When her father commanded her to go to another house she went without question. She had never disobeyed. Now the surprise of father's life was racing toward him. It would catch the broker man, too. She was going to leave. Her little girl should have a chance which had never come to her. You know there are times when astonishment stills my tongue. To a decision so rare and so costly to the decider, I could only say, "Think of it."

I was sorry I did. It switched the story. Kate said there was little use in thinking of it. Times were changing too fast; so were the Japanese girls. Only

last month the daughter of an old and noble house threw all the laws of rigid custom to the winds and eloped with the family chauffeur.

Now it was time for us to go and, would you believe it? I was left with that story hanging in mid-air, and me about consumed with thrills and interest. What of it? Wasn't the whole of Tokio bursting in a blaze of welcome to the first night of the year? And weren't the countless colored lights turning even the sordid spots of a great city into dreamland?

Before every door, rich or poor, swayed a flourishing bamboo-tree, its feathery branches all aflame with myriad strips of colored paper. Every tree on one side of the street bent gracefully to meet its neighbor on the other side. Beneath the enchanted bower walked countless holiday-makers who happily could forget for the moment they were but mortal.

You should see the big lobster as he hangs over many carved entrance gates. He is all tangled up in a wonderful bowknot of straw rope. He is there to wish long life to every passer-by, and his paper sides are pink with blushes as he looks down on a printed slip swinging from the lower limbs of two fresh young pine-trees shaved to order and placed on each side of the gate. Harken to what that printed slip says, Pat! "Another milestone on the road to hades." What a cheerful soul it must have been to have thought of it first. After all, it isn't as doleful as it sounds. It is only a reminder that if you are on the wrong path there's still time to turn and go the other way.

We were headed the right way and soon swung into the silver-light street called Ginza. On unfestival days the Ginza is the Fifth Avenue of Tokio, with ample space, semaphores, skyscrapers, and all the trimmings that go with them. How glad I was that night, that most things new and aggressive had the good sense to hide in the soft glow of numberless lanterns. Big ones and little ones,

rose ones and butterflies, rivaling in hue the gay clothes of the glad throng. And over all the magic touch of promise and hope which comes with the dawn of every New-Year.

Yes, I know you. It is the children you want to know about. They were there, thousands of them, rich and poor, but all sweet and fresh as the blossoms of plum-tree and cherry on the flowerman's stand. Many little brothers and sisters with littler brothers and sisters strapped to their backs, and so joyously light-hearted I found myself wishing they had never to grow up to find their Land of Enchantment filled with shadows of reality.

Happily, the shadows were afar off and the children danced from place to place like light-winged moths in a fullbloomed garden. Balls of silver bobbed in their black hair, pink and yellow balloons fluttered in their hands as they fled from one joy to another. Truly the gladness of the crowds of many colors, the keen delight in simple things, the cheerful pushing and jostling, always with smiles and more smiles, made a sight hard to be duplicated in the world.

It mattered neither to young or old that poverty and riches stared at each other with only the width of the pavement between. On one side gleamed the plate-glass windows filled with Oriental treasures. They were rare and costly as the boldest profiteer can make them. Crêpes of wonderful rainbow tints, cobwebby enough to catch the wisest fly, sashes so heavily woven with gold I am thinking the strongest back would have need of a crutch to support its weight. Doesn't it make you tired even to think of five yards of brocade heavy with tinsel, and all of a yard wide, wrapped around the middle, tied over a pillow in the back to give them the proper shape? No wonder that ladies of the smartest set receive their guests while sitting on the floor.

But it was the outer side of the pavement that gripped the emotion or imagination-anything which happened for

the moment to be on the lookout. It was fringed with the poor and the very poor, their meager wares spread out on squares of matting laid flat on the flagging, their owners eager and wistful, but thankful for the smallest sale. Kitty said these people came for this special night from all the out-of-the-way, nearly forgotten spots of Tokio. They brought all their own possessions and any they could borrow, with the hope that Good Luck would bring them a few extra pennies.

Don't you think it the act of a kindly government to make it possible for these poverty-stricken ones to have the same chance as the prosperous ones at the biggest time of the year? I do and did, but, shades of Shoguns! What stories those little pavement shops revealed! Tragedy and mirth as intermixed as bamboo fountain-pens and yellowed carvings of ivory.

I wondered what trick of fate sent those lacquer boxes with the crest of a proud and ancient dynasty embedded in gold to a sidewalk sale? Where was the deserted temple, once owner of the rich tapestries and priestly garments now tagged with a marked-down price? Was it a lover who penned the poem on the face of the dainty fan? But, goodness me! why shade the picture with melancholy musings? Let us laugh instead with a trader who turned his sense of humor into profit. Hear what I read from a board which topped a pile of bunnies tanned and ready to wear.

"Ladies' furs. Made from your skins or mine."

The sparkle in the owner's eyes made me suspicious. I asked, "You know?" "Oh yes. I have lived in Chicago fifteen years."

K

AIRWAN the Holy lay asleep, pent in its thick walls. The moon had sunk at midnight, but the chill light seemed scarcely to have diminished; only the limewashed city had become a marble city, and all the towers turned fabulous in the fierce, dry needle rain of the stars that burn over the desert of mid-Tunisia.

In the street Bab Djedid the nailed boots of the watch passed from west to east. When their thin racket had turned out and died in the dust of the market, Habib ben Habib emerged from the shadow of a door arch and, putting a foot on the tiled ledge of Bou-Kedj's fry shop, swung up by cranny and gutter till he stood on the plain of the housetops.

Now he looked about him, for on this dim tableland he walked with his life in his hands. He looked to the west, toward the gate, to the south, to the northeast through the ghostly wood of minarets. Then, perceiving nothing that stirred, he went on, moving without sound in the camel-skin slippers he had taken from his father's court.

In the uncertain light, but for those slippers and the long-tasseled chechia on his head, one would not have taken him for anything but a European and a stranger. And one would have been right, almost. In the city of his birth and rearing, and of the birth and rearing of his Arab fathers generations dead, Habib ben Habib bel-Kalfate looked upon himself in the rebellious, romantic light of a prisoner in exile-exile from the streets of Paris where, in his four years, he had tasted the strange delights of the Christian-exile from the university where he had dabbled with his

keen, light-ballasted mind in the learning of the conqueror.

Sometimes, in the month since he had come home, he had shaken himself and wondered aloud, "Where am I?" with the least little hint, perhaps, of melodrama. Sometimes, in the French café outside the walls, among the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened mockery, he would break off suddenly, "Voilà, messieurs! you will see that I am the best of Mussulmans!" He would laugh then in a key so high and restless that the commandant, shaking his head, would murmur to the lieutenant beside him, "One day, Genet, we must be on the alert for a dagger in that quarter there, eh?"

And Genet, who knew almost as much of the character of the university Arab as the commandant himself, would nod his head.

When Habib had laughed for a moment he would grow silent. Presently he would go out into the ugly dark of the foreign quarter, followed very often by Raoul Genet. He had known Raoul most casually in Paris. Here in the Tunisian bled, when Raoul held out his hand to say good-night under the gate lamp at the Bab Djelladin, the troubled fellow clung to it. fellow clung to it. The smell of the African city, coming under the great brick arch, reached out and closed around him like a hand-a hand bigger than Raoul's.

"You are my brother: not they. I am not of these people, Raoul!"

Zaroud two miles away. And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.

Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy name. A name is such a little thing. I'll call thee ‘Nedjma,' because we are under the stars."

"Ai, Nedjmetek-Thy Star'!" The girl's lips moved drowsily. In the dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady luster, unblinking, unquestioning, always unquestioning.

That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness.

He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west through the doorway, across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.

He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the terrace. It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when, half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and uncovered her face.

To-night she uncovered it herself. She put back the hooded fold of her haik, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.

The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city. For an hour nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky...

That hush was disrupted. The single long crash of a human throat! Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!

"La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul 'lah! Allah Akbar! God is great!"

One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It penetrated the vinebowered arbor. Little by little, tower by tower, it died. In a fondouk outside the gate a waking camel lifted a gargling wail. A jackal dog barked in the Oued

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 859.-3

The girl stirred now. Her eyes narrowed; the dark line of her lips thinned. At last something comprehensible had touched her mind.

"Thou hast known many women, then, sidi! Thou hast come here but to tell me that? Me, who am of little beauty in a man's eyes!"

Habib laughed under his breath. He shook her again. He kissed her and kissed her again on her red lips.

"Thou art jealous, then! But thou canst not comprehend. Canst thou comprehend this, that thou art more beautiful by many times than any other woman I have ever seen? Thou art a heaven of loveliness and I cannot live without thee. That is true. . . . Nedjma.