apped badger
when it was wrested from him, and said that he would find a way in
spite of them all. After this not even a medicine bottle was left in
the room, and the watch over the invalid was strengthened.

"But," as old Kano remonstrated, "even though we prevent him for a few
weeks more, how will it be when he can stand and walk,--when he is
stronger than I?" To these questions came no answer. The second
convalescence, so eagerly prayed for, became now a source of increasing
dread. Something must be done,--some way to turn his morbid thoughts
away from self-destruction. The old man climbed often, now, to the
temple on the hill.

The hospital room, in an upper story, was small, with matted floors,
and a single square window to the east. The narrow white iron bed was
set close to this window, so that the invalid might gaze out freely.
Tatsu did not ask that it be changed though, indeed, each recurrent
dawn brought martyrdom to him. The sound of sparrows at the eaves, the
smell of dew, the look of the morning mist as it spread great wings
above the city, hovering for an instant before its flight, the glow of
the first pink light upon his coverlid, each was an iron of memory
searing a soul already faint with pain. The attendant often marvelled
why, at this hour, Tatsu buried his face from sight, and, emerging into
clearer day, bore the look of one who had met death in a narrow pass.

At noon, when the window showed a square of turquoise blue, he grew to
watch with some faint pulse of interest the changing hues of light, and
the clouds that shifted lazily aside, or heaped themselves up into
rounded battlements of snow. Quite close to the window a single cherry
branch, sweeping downward, cut space with a thick, diagonal line.
Silvery lichens frilled the upper surface of the bark, and at the tip
of each leafless twig, brown buds--small armored magazines of
beauty--hinted already of the spring's rebirth. Life was all about
him, and he hated life. Why should cherry blooms and sparrows dare to
come again,--why should that old man near him wheeze and palpitate with
life, why--why--should he, Tatsu, be held from his one friend, Death,
when she, the essence of all life and beauty,--she who should have been
immortal,--drifted alone, helpless, a broken white sea-flower, on some
black, awful tide?

In the midst of such dreary imaginings, old Kano, late in the last
month of the year, crept in upon his son. He was an h