of family life and love and home and
children. It is quite true that they did not delve deep into the mines of
hidden passions, as their songs are what songs should be, telling
joyful tales of happiness and quiet loves. They are not like the songs
of warrior nations, songs of battle, lust and blood, but songs of peace
and quiet and deep contentment. When our women sang, like all
women who try to voice the thoughts within them, they sang their
poems in a sadder key, all filled with care, and cried of love's call to
its mate, of resignation and sometimes of despair.

My father learned to love the poets in younger days, but he still reads
them o'er and o'er. He says they take him back to other years when
life with all its dreams of beauty, love, and romance, lay before him. It
brings remembrance of youth's golden days when thoughts of fame
and mad ambition came to him with each morning's light. This father
of mine, who was stiffly bound with ceremony and acts of statecraft
for ten long months of the year, had the temerity to ask two months'
leave of absence from his duties, when he went to his country place in
the hills, to his "Garden of the Pleasure of Peace." It was always in
the early spring when "that Goddess had spread upon the budding
willow her lovely mesh of silken threads, and the rushes were
renewing for the year." He sat beneath the bamboos swaying in the
wind like dancing girls, and saw the jessamine and magnolia put forth
their buds.

What happy days they were when father came! For me, who lived
within the garden all the year, it was just a plain, great garden; but
when he came it was transformed. It became a place of rare
enchantment, with fairy palaces and lakes of jewelled water, and the
lotus flowers took on a loveliness for which there is no name. We
would sit hand in hand in our gaily painted tea-house, and watch the
growing of the lotus from the first unfurling of the leaf to the fall of the
dying flower. When it rained, we would see the leaves raise their
eager, dark-green cups until filled, then bend down gracefully to empty
their fulness, and rise to catch the drops again.

[Illustration: Mylady18.]

The sound of the wind in the cane-fields came to us at night-time as
we watched the shimmer of the fireflies. We sat so silently that the
only thing to tell us that the wild duck sought his mate amidst the
grass, was the swaying of the reed stems, or the rising of the teal
with whirring wings.