children of another family,
with whom custom hardly recognizes any tie. The children are the
children of the man whose name they bear. If the woman is a favorite
daughter, it may happen that her father will take her and her children
under his roof, and support them all; but this is a rare exception, and
only possible when the husband first gives up all claim to the children.

There comes to my mind now a case illustrating this point, which I think
I may cite without betraying confidence. It is that of a most attractive
young woman who was married to a worthless husband, but lived
faithfully with him for several years, and became the mother of three
children. The husband, who seemed at first merely good-for-nothing,
became worse as the years went by, drank himself out of situation after
situation procured for him by powerful relatives, and at last became so
violent that he even beat his wife and threatened his children, a
proceeding most unusual on the part of a Japanese husband and father.
The poor wife was at last obliged to flee from her husband's house to
her mother's, taking her children with her. She sued for a divorce and
obtained it, and is now married again; her youth, good looks, and high
connections procuring her a very good catch for her second venture in
matrimony; but her children are lost to her, and belong wholly to their
worthless, drunken father.

Of the lack of permanence in the marriage relation among the lower
classes, the domestic changes of one of my servants in T[=o]ky[=o]
afford an amusing illustration. The man, whom I had hired in the double
capacity of _jinrikisha_ man and _bett[=o]_ or groom, was a strong,
faithful, pleasant-faced fellow, recently come to T[=o]ky[=o] from the
country. I inquired, when I engaged him, whether he had a wife, as I
wanted some one who could remain in his room in the stable in care of
the horse when he was pulling me about in the _jinrikisha_. He replied
that he had a wife, but she was now at Utsunomiya, the country town from
which he had come, but he would send for her at once, and she would be
in T[=o]ky[=o] in the course of a week or two. Two or three weeks passed
and no wife appeared, so I inquired of my cook and head servant what had
become of Yasaku's wife. He replied, with a twinkle in his eye, that she
had found work in Utsunomiya and did not wish to come. A week more
passed, and still no wife, and further inquiries elicited from the cook
the information t