e blue eyes of the
boy.

"Yuki, Yuki!" came the voice of the mother in her native tongue.
"Come, the feast is prepared, and the sandals are worn from my feet
running to seek you. Hurry! before the red beans grow cold."

The child sent a long-drawn "Hei" in answer to her mother, then to
herself she said over and over:

"Be goodu--be goodu."

She had heard the words a few times before, but they were associated
with her visits to the mission-school and a certain oblong box out of
which came sticks of red and white with a very sweet taste. Now, as
she said them, a new meaning seemed to play about them.

She slipped through the gate and walked with unhurried feet toward the
small house, so gay in its festal plumage. As she passed the old
plum-tree she looked up and saw the mother bird cuddling her babies
beneath her breast.

Some tender thought lighted the child's face into a strange beauty, as
a stray sunbeam finds a hidden flower and glorifies it. Turning her
face upward to the nest, she patted her own cheek and said: "Be goodu,
Yuki, be goodu."

CHAPTER II

In the springtime a Japanese house is a fairy-like thing, with only
top and bottom of straw and a few upholding posts to give it a look of
substance.

Yuki Chan's house was typical. The paper screens were carefully put
away during the day, that the breezes might play unobstructed through
the house. At night the heavy wooden doors were fitted into grooves
and served not only to keep out the night air, but also the evil
spirits that come abroad when the great sun ceases watching.

Binding the whole was a narrow porch, showing a floor polished like a
mirror from the slipping and sliding of generations of feet. Yuki Chan
first learned to know her face in its reflections and, alas! by the
same method had learned the saucy fascination of sticking out her
small pink tongue.

On the side of the porch toward the plum-tree the child found her
father and mother waiting. The two old people sat on gay cushions with
hands folded and feet crossed. Their festal attire bore the marks of a
once careless luxury, but now shabbiness tried to hide itself under
the bravery of tinsel, where once had been pure gold.

Each year the struggle of obsolete methods of business and the
intricacies of progress plowed the furrows a little deeper in the
man's face, and when his eyes, that in youth had blazed with ambition,
grew wistful and troubled, he dropped them that his wife