marry him because she loves him, but because she
wishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through college
in America. When this brother comes back to Japan--he is the touch of
melodrama in the pretty idyl--he is maddened by an acquired Occidental
sense of his sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever
and dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of
the young wife and husband. There is enough incident, but of the kind
that is characterized and does not characterize. The charm, the
delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki. Her
father was an Englishman who had married her mother in the same sort of
marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his wife till he dies,
and possibly something of the English constancy which is not always so
evident as in his case qualifies the daughter's nature. Her mother
was, of course, constant, and Yuki, though an outcast from her own
people--the conventions seen to be as imperative in Tokyo as in
Philadelphia--because of her half-caste origin, is justly Japanese in
what makes her loveliest. There is a quite indescribable freshness in
the art of this pretty novelette--it is hardly of the dimensions of a
novel--which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is
native to the best art everywhere. Yuki herself is of a surpassing
lovableness. Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girl
could, I should think keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana's book
from going out and marrying Japanese girls. They are safe from this,
however, for the reason suggested, and therefore it can be safely
commended at least to young men intending fiction, as such a lesson in
the art of imitating nature as has not come under my hand for a long
while. It has its little defects, but its directness, and sincerity,
and its felicity through the sparing touch make me unwilling to note
them. In fact, I have forgotten them.

VI.

I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of an
author who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us as the
Japanese, but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not our
interest. Mr. Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary quality in
acquiring literary quantity, and though his book, "The Marrow of
Tradition," is of the same strong material as his earlier books, it is
less simple throughout, and therefore less excellent in manner. At his
worst, he is n