r natural fruit. But at her father's death she found herself
isolated, without friends and without amusements. She found herself
marooned on the island of Eurasia, a flat and barren land of narrow
confines and stunted vegetation. The Japanese have no use for the
half-castes; and the Europeans look down upon them. They dwell apart
in a limbo of which Baroness Miyazaki is the acknowledged queen.

Baroness Miyazaki is a stupendous old lady, whose figure might be
drawn from some eighteenth-century comedy. Her late husband--and
gossip says that she was his landlady during a period of study in
England--held a high position in the Imperial Court. His wife, by
a pomposity of manner and an assumption of superior knowledge,
succeeded, where no other white woman has succeeded, in acquiring the
respect and intimacy of the great ladies of Japan. She has inculcated
the accents of Pentonville, with its aitches dropped and recovered
again, among the high Japanese aristocracy.

But first her husband died; and then the old Imperial Court of the
Emperor Meiji passed away. So Baroness Miyazaki had to retire from
the society of princesses. She passed not without dignity, like an
old monarch _en disponibilite_, to the vacant throne of the Eurasian
limbo, where her rule is undisputed.

Every Friday afternoon you may see her presiding over her little court
in the Miyazaki mansion, with its mixture of tinsel and dust. The
Bourbonian features, the lofty white wig, the elephantine form, the
rustling taffeta, and the ebony stick with its ivory handle, leads
one's thoughts backwards to the days of Richardson and Sterne.

But her loyal subjects who surround her--it is impossible to place
them. They are poor, they are untidy, they are restless. Their black
hair is straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are
desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired. They chatter together
ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in
their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular.
They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild
peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness. They are
a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the
face of a land where they can find no permanent resting place. They
are the children of Eurasia, the unhappiest people on earth.

It was among these people that Yae's lot was cast. She stepped into an
immediate ascendancy ov