yet, but irresistibly sweet, piercing, and subtle. She gave a little cry; her heart leaped, and her swift feet followed.

The yellow jasmine! She found it in a little clearing of oaklings at the very top of the hill. The trees were leafless yet, but at the tip of every spray grew a swollen red leaf-bud apparently on the point of bursting. Upon the ground between the trees tangled masses of vines writhed and struggled, wiry, purple stems winged at intervals with flame-points of emerald and silver. No blossom crests tossed on these riotous waves, but up the trunk of every tree ran green and purple spirals, which darted, aspiring, to the very tip, and there, audacious, glorious, triumphant, shouted the praises of spring from a thousand golden bugles. The echo of the call was perfume. Truth felt her senses reel with it.

"Oh, I can't reach you! Come down, come down! I must have you."

The flowers bridled and tossed; the yellow sprays tinkled in the sun like a golden fountain.

"Come down!" she cried again. A saucy flower unhooked itself and struck her between the eyes. She laughed as she caught it. "Is this all I'm to have? Then all right!" She turned away singing.

"How clumsy and stupid hot-house flowers are!" she thought. "They are just like stuffed squirrels. I wonder why things get so heavy and helpless when they are cultivated. Just imagine having to smoke off bugs from a wild jasmine vine!" She regarded the flower in her hand with close scrutiny.

"I reckon these seem more real because they grow as nature meant to have them. Somehow it seems almost wicked to over-cultivate flowers-or people either." The thought of cities choked up in her throat. She tossed it off with a shake of her head. "How I hate hot-houses, glass, and gardeners!"

The smile faded from her eyes. She walked abstractedly, with drooping head, until a big blue violet, staring eagerly, caught her attention. She was down beside it in a moment, one finger under the velvet chin, that she might gaze more deeply into the single, mysterious, yellow eye. "Dear little violet," she said in a solemn voice, "if ever you see a gardener coming, you take my advice and just-die! It will save lots

of trouble." The violet nodded sagely, and continued nodding, as if talking to itself, long after Truth had passed. The two understood each other perfectly.

But sad thoughts had no power to cling a day like this. Oh, the joy of being in her woods again! Was ever a sky so blue? No chiselled dome could be more tangible. The fringed openings of pine-branches cut it into irregular shapes; each area might have been a slab of turquoise set in green bronze. The beams of the sun came in sheaves and bands through purple pine-trunks, that were half dissolved in golden mist before they could touch the earth. Sharp contrasts were eliminated. The luminous solvent crept with the warmth and lull of an elixir into the heart.

Truth wandered inconsequently from point to point, her course making odd little parallelograms and zigzags through the dry, scant grass. Now a wild iris beckoned her, a pointed, azure flame springing from the ashes of last year's growth; now a group of ferns, half-hidden in some tiny cave or dell, about to unroll curled fronds of chrysoprase, hung with loose white filaments, as of forgotten moon-rays. The great bronze welts upon the buckeye she knew for volcanoes of struggling leaves; the dried umbels and racemes of a vanished summer were pledges of beauty and rebirth. The dogwood trees gleamed out ever and again, and always with startling effect. Violets, iris, jasmine, and arbutus abounded. Not an inch of earth but might produce a friend. These, these alone were her kin, her companions; this was true living, this the only life-to blend one's self with the being of the kind old earth, to lean one's tired head upon her knee, and let the mesmeric fingers of the wind exorcise the circle of the world's troubled phantoms.

She threw herself prone upon the old shawl, but kept her hands and cheek upon the sand. Her eyes closed in a drowsy beatitude of utter irresponsibility. The great, steady magnet of the earth radiated peace. She smiled dreamily as the sun threw over her a thin coverlet of warmth.

For an hour she lay there, neither asleep nor awake, but in the blessing of unreflecting trance, of impression more keen and inclusive for its directness, the consciousness of Nature's primeval races, and, so lying, so dreaming, her

human body drifted, as it were, into a world of other dimensions, the plane of things that leaf and bud; her blood ran as cool as the sweet sap along swaying boughs, and, through a stillness as absolute as if her heart had stopped-out of the very hush of finite movement-a new and larger rhythm filled gradually the vacuum of her perceptions and she drew herself to be a mere sentient atom, part of the diurnal motion of a great, dumb planet, helplessly secure, transmutably persistent.

In her slow return to a perception of personal identity, Truth Dexter, the individual, dawned as a clear vision from the troubled haze of recent experiences. What had she to do with Craighead, culture, and Boston? It was a pagan soul that lay there, sleepy and strong. A slight movement overhead drew her attention to a squirrel that peered down at her from a pine-branch, with round bright eyes and head tilted daintily. At that moment he was much nearer of kin than the grandmother who waited so anxiously at home.

Truth closed her eyes again, and a drowsy stir of speculation made her wonder whether, in some early incarnation, in a world as yet unpeopled, her spirit might not have been that of a pine tree or a hillside stream, which to-day's loosening of successive sheaves had freed for a last vision of Nature's harmony.

The sun, now directly overhead, caressed her with too fervent kindness. Idly she planted a little weed-stalk upward and noted that it cast no shadow.

"Why, it must be twelve!" she said aloud.

She gave a long sigh that was half a smile, and rose slowly to her feet, looking all the while around upon the forest.

"Yes, I must go," she repeated as if to the trees. "But, oh, how glad I am that I came! It is not lost. I have found it now, forever, and it was, myself. Sometimes it seemed to be lost, but it was only watching for me here!"

She stooped for the shawl and bonnet. Suddenly the old look of anguish darkened her face. Letting them fall she flung her arms impetuously about the nearest pine. "Old pine!" she cried, "did you ever have lightning crash down through your branches, so that you thought for a while you were dead, and could never grow any more? Well, that is

just how I have been feeling! But after a while the first dreadful hurt passes, and you know that you are not dead— that you are even going to keep on growing. Yes, even if half of you is torn away you must keep on growing with what is left. The birds and squirrels won't laugh at your scars; and after a while, vines will creep up to hide the ugly spaces. Isn't it so, dear tree-friend?"

The tree answered nothing, but that is often the way with a thoughtful listener.

ΚΑΝΟ

From The Dragon Painter.' Copyright by Little, Brown and Company. Used by permission of the publishers.

THE old folks call it Yeddo.

To the young, "Tokyo"

has a pleasant, modern sound, and comes glibly. But whether young or old, those whose home it is know that the great flat city, troubled with green hills, cleft by a shining river, and veined in living canals, is the central spot of all the world.

Storms visit Tokyo-with fury often, sometimes with destruction. Earthquakes cow it; snow falls upon its temple roofs, swings in wet, dazzling masses from the bamboo plumes, or balances in white strata along green-black pine branches. The summer sun scorches the face of Yeddo, and summer rain comes down in wide bands of light. With evening the mist creeps up, thrown over it like a covering, casting a spell of silence through which the yellow lanterns of the hurrying jinrikishas dance an elfish dance, and the voices of the singing-girls pierce like fine blades of sound.

But to know the full charm of the great city, one must wake with it at some rebirth of dawn. This hour gives to the imaginative in every land a thrill, a yearning, and a pang of visual regeneration. In no place is this wonder more deeply touched with mystery than in modern Tokyo.

Far off to the east the Sumida River lies in sleep. Beyond it, temple roofs-black keels of sunken vessels-cut a sky still powdered thick with stars. Nothing moves, and yet a something changes! The darkness shivers as to a cold

touch. A pallid haze breathes wanly on the surface of the impassive sky. The gold deepens swiftly and turns to a faint rose flush. The stars scamper away like mice.

Across the moor of gray house eaves the mist wavers. Day troubles it. A pink light rises to the zenith, and the mist shifts and slips away in layers, pink and gold and white. Now far beyond the grayness, to the west, the cone of Fuji flashes into splendor. It, too, is pink. Its shape is of a lotos bud, and the long fissures that plough a mountain side are now but delicate gold veining on a petal. Slowly it seems to open. It is the chalice of a new day, the signal and the pledge of consecration. Husky crows awake in the pine trees, and doves under the temple eaves. The east is red beyond the river, and the round, red sun, insignia of this land, soars up like a cry of triumph.

On the glittering road of the Sumida, loaded barges, covered for the night with huge squares of fringed straw mats, begin to nod and preen themselves like a covey of gigantic river birds. Sounds of prayer and of silver matin bells come from the temples, where priest and acolyte greet the Lord Buddha of a new day. From tiny chimneyless kitchens of a thousand homes thin blue feathers of smoke make slow upward progress, to be lost in the last echoes of the vanishing mist. Sparrows begin to chirp, first one, then ten, then thousands. Their voices have the clash and chime of a myriad small triangles.

The wooden outer panels (amado) of countless dwellings are thrust noisily aside and stacked into a shallow closet. The noise reverberates from district to district in a sharp musketry of sound. Maid servants call cheerily across bamboo fences. Shoji next are opened, disclosing often the dull green mosquito net hung from corner to corner of the low-ceiled sleeping rooms. Children, in brilliant night robes, run to the verandas to see the early sun; cocks strut in pigmy gardens. Now, from along the streets rise the calls of flower peddlers, of venders of fish, bean-curd, vegetables, and milk. Thus the day comes to modern Tokyo, which the old folks still call Yeddo.

On such a midsummer dawn, not many years ago, old Kano Indara, sleeping in his darkened chamber, felt the sum