ly a little while) the time was
come, and Hoshiko cut her hair, rubbed her face each morning with a
rough brush, put on Arisuga's uniform, pinned his medal over her heart,
and sent her last cable:--

"Keep colors. Aboard.

"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."

And so it was that the morning the Imperial Guards started for the Yalu,
Shijiro Arisuga, though dead in America, answered to his name at Sendai.

But how that was accomplished, I must stop my story to tell.

THE REINCARNATION OF SHIJIRO ARISUGA

XXIX

THE REINCARNATION OF SHIJIRO ARISUGA

For I think that you will wish to know what Hoshiko did to appear
learned in the trade of the soldier before she joined the Guards. But it
is not easy. For I am very near her now. And the satin hands must be as
leather; the tiny feet must often leave their prints in blood on the
snow; the plump, pink cheeks must be pounded into caverns and scarred
with wounds; the nails must be deliberately torn and broken from the
exquisite hands; the beautiful hair must be shorn. And last and hardest
to tell, in her forehead must be made a ragged scar like that Arisuga
got at Pekin--the one which had brought him to her. That I shall tell
first--the making of the wound.

For a long time she studied it. This all men knew and it must be
perfect. Once she mistrusted her own skill and went to see a surgeon.
She showed him the picture of Arisuga and asked whether he could
reproduce his wound upon herself. But immediately the doctor began to be
wary. For he was a doctor like all other doctors, and when confronted
with a thing unusual--one which no other doctor had put into the
books--he was not wise.

"Ugly women," he said, "have often asked me to make them pretty. But
this is the first time, in a somewhat extended practice, that I have had
a pretty one ask me to make her ugly. Tell me the reason for it, and
perhaps I can convince you that such beauty as the creator graciously
gives us ought to be preserved, not destroyed, for it is more rare than
you think."

But while he opened his case for some instrument of exploration, Hoshiko
fled--so quietly and swiftly that when he turned he wondered if she had
ever been there. Yes, there was in the air the flower perfume with which
she had anointed her pretty body for his offices.

Of course she could run no such risk again. She must do it herself. So
for long she thought upon wounds and woundings. How they were made; how
they were healed; h