ssible preparation for skill in all other arts. This is
especially true of the art of painting, which is simply the next step,
after writing has been learned. The painting master, when he comes to
the house, brings no design as a model, but sits down on the floor
before the little desk, and on a sheet of paper paints with great
rapidity the design that he wishes the pupil to copy. It may be simply
two or three blades of grass upon which the pupil makes a beginning, but
she is expected to make her picture with exactly the same number of bold
strokes that the master puts into his. Again and again she blunders her
strokes on to a sheet of paper, until at last, when sheet after sheet
has been spoiled, she begins to see some semblance of the master's copy
in her own daub. She perseveres, making copy after copy, until she is
able from memory to put upon the paper at a moment's notice the three
blades of grass to her master's satisfaction. Only then can she go on to
a new copy, and only after many such designs have been committed to
memory, and the free, dashing stroke necessary for Japanese painting has
been acquired, is she allowed to undertake any copying from nature, or
original designing.[*49]

I have dwelt thus far only upon the entirely Japanese education that was
permitted to women under the old regime. That it was an effective and
refining system, all can testify who have made the acquaintance of any
of the charming Japanese ladies whose schooling was finished before
Commodore Perry disturbed the repose of old Japan. As I write, the image
comes before me of a sweet-faced, bright-eyed little gentlewoman with
whom it was my good fortune to become intimately acquainted during my
stay in T[=o]ky[=o]. A widow, left penniless, with one child to support,
she earned the merest pittance by teaching sewing at one of the
government schools in T[=o]ky[=o]; but in all the circumstances of her
life, narrow and busy as it needs must be, she proved herself a lady
through and through. Polite, cheerful, an intelligent and cultivated
reader, a thrifty housekeeper, a loving and careful mother, a true and
helpful friend, her memory is associated with many of my pleasantest
hours in Japan, and she is but one of the many who bear witness to the
culture that might be acquired by women in the old days.

But the Japan of old is not the Japan of to-day, and in the school
system now prevalent throughout the empire girls and boys are equally
pro