er went through me like a draft of wine. The echo
swept a long silent chord, and the tune it played was the jig-time of
youth.

When Zura caught her breath and explained the meaning of her words, it
disclosed to me a phase of life of which I had never dreamed. Pictures
that moved and talked while you looked, public halls for dancing, and
boys meeting young girls alone after dark to "treat" them! The child
spoke of it all easily and as a matter of course. I knew more than I
wanted of the dark side of Oriental life, but I had been so long
accustomed to idealizing my own country and all its ways that her talk
was to me like an unkind story about a dear friend.

But happy to find a listener who was interested in things familiar to
her--Zura chattered away, of her friends and her pleasures, and though
many of her words were in an unknown tongue, the picture she
unconsciously drew of herself was as clear as transparency. It was an
unguided, undisciplined life, big with possibilities for love or hate
that even now was wavering in the balance for good or bad.

Once again the afternoon sun fell upon the girl. It touched her face,
tender of contour and coloring. It found her hair and made of it a crown
of bronze and gold. For a moment it lingered, then climbing, lighted up
a yellow parchment hanging on the wall just above.

Through its aged dim characters I read an edict issued in the days of
long ago, banishing from the land of fair Nippon all Christians and
Christianity. It threatened with relentless torture any attempt to
promulgate the faith, and contained an order for all citizens to appear
in the public place on a certain day for adherents of the new religion
to recant, by stamping on the Cross.

As the girl talked on, she revealed a life strangely inconsistent in a
land which to me stood for all that was highest and most beautiful. A
curious thought came to me. I wondered if the man who framed that edict
had a vision of what foreign teachings might bring in its trail?
Possibly some presentiment haunted him of the great danger that would
come to his people through contact with a country leagues removed in
customs and beliefs. Neither crucifixion nor torture had availed to keep
out the new religion. With it came wisdom and great reforms.
Misinterpretation too, had followed. Old laws were shattered, and this
girl, Zura Wingate was a product of a new order of things, the result of
broken traditions, a daughter of two coun