breakfast of bean-curd and pickled
fish and warm yellow tea. Then she hung the quilts over poles to sun,
dusted the screens, and placed an offering of rice on the steps of the
tiny shrine to Inari, where the little foxes kept guard. These simple
duties being accomplished, she tied a bit of bean-cake in her gaily
colored handkerchief, and stepping into her _geta_, went pattering off
to school.

It was an English school, where she sat with hands folded through the
long mornings, passively permitting the lessons to filter through her
brain, and listening in smiling patience while the kind foreign ladies
spoke incomprehensible things. Sometimes she helped pass the hours by
watching the shadows of the dancing leaves outside; sometimes she told
herself stories about "The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom,"
or about "Momotaro, the Little Peach Boy." Again she would repeat the
strange English words and phrases that she heard, and would puzzle out
their meaning.

But the sum of her lore consisted in being happy; and when the shadow of
the mountains began to slip across the valley, she would dance back
along the homeward way, singing with the birds, laughing with the
rippling water, and adding her share of brightness to the sunshine of
the world.

As she stood on this particular morning with her net poised over a
butterfly, she heard the tramping of many feet. A slow cavalcade was
coming around the road,--a long line of coolies bearing bamboo
stretchers,--and in the rear, in a jinrikisha, was a foreign man with a
red cross on his sleeve.

O Sana San scrambled up the bank and watched with smiling curiosity as
the men halted to rest. On the stretcher nearest her lay a young
Russian prisoner with the fair skin and blond hair that are so
unfamiliar to Japanese eyes. His blanket was drawn tight around his
shoulders, and he lay very still, with lips set, gazing straight up
through the bamboo leaves to the blue beyond.

Then it was that O Sana San, gazing in frank inquisitiveness at the
soldier, saw a strange thing happen. A tear formed on his lashes and
trickled slowly across his temple; then another and another, until they
formed a tiny rivulet. More and more curious, she drew yet nearer, and
watched the tears creep unheeded down the man's face. She was sure he
was not crying, because soldiers never cry; it could not be the pain,
because his face was very smooth and calm. What made the tears drop,
drop on the hard pill