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doubted. It is interesting to see how the devotion to their Emperor of the higher class rose above every consideration and set the example to the nation. Here is an extract from the memorial to their Sovereign in acknowledgment of the death-blow to their privileges. "The place where we live is the Emperor's land and the food which we eat is grown by the Emperor's men. How can we make it our own? We now reverently offer up the lists of our possessions and men, with the prayer that the Emperor will take good measure for rewarding those to whom reward is due, and taking from those to whom punishment is due." Imagine for one instant the answer of the knights and barons of France upon a like request from their sovereign lord and master, Henry IV. A few years later, when the honor of wearing swords was extended to all within the bounds of Dai Nippon, the last and most coveted privilege of the warrior class had been made the common property of all. However hard it had been for the samurai-and before the Chinese War two killed their families, fearing that, uncared for, they would starve during their presence at the front-this sweeping social revolution has wonderfully encouraged the fighting spirit of the nation. Every Japanese has something of the warrior's spirit of the samurai; all have intense devotion to the Emperor. According to Ni-obe, "To us the country is more than land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain; it is the sacred abode of the gods, the spirits of our forefathers; to us the Emperor .. is the bodily representative of Heaven on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy."

Thus loyalty elevated to a religion, hundreds of years of martial life, and the consciousness of new awakening to national unity have fanned the spirit of the Japanese warrior to a white heat. As a boy at school he is guarded by night by the picture of the Mikado; he has studied the lives of the old daimyo; he has worshipped them in the ancient Shinto shrines. At home he has learned that his duty to his country is above all, and that in no way can he bring greater

honor to his family and to the revered dead than by serving it in the person of the Emperor. Traditions from the samurai class of strict obedience, of devotion to the leader, of passive endurance, and of the joy of a warrior death have been handed down for centuries from father to son. No wonder that the columns of the Japanese army are annihilated, not repulsed. When we read to-day of the heroism of Japan's soldiers; of men in their impetuosity rushing into a breach to perish in the falling débris; of an attack on a parapet in which seven successive standard-bearers were shot until the enemy accepted the inevitable and allowed the colors to remain; of man after man dying by his own hand rather than bear the disgrace of capture; we must remember that Yamato-Damashii is no mad impulse of a moment, but that it is the concrete expression of centuries of national life.

Herbert L. Bodman.

SONG AT DUSK.

The birds have ceased their song. The lingering bee
Swings from the rose and hastens to his rest,

A shadowed place in some dim tree.

A gray, tired light is settling in the westWatch fire-fly! Dream-goblins creep! Come lady wind and croon my love to sleep!

The vagrant butterfly has closed his wings

Light laden with the dust of flowers. He, too, Has felt the silence dim dusk brings.

He heard the brook's low evening prayer and knew 'Twas time to sleep. Watch fire-flies! Come lady wind and close my true love's eyes!

Behold the grasses nodding peacefully!

The perfumed breeze is strewing kisses. Hush!
The trees are whispering drowsily

Good-night to all the tangled underbrush.
Watch fire-fly! Dream-goblins creep!

Come lady wind and croon my love to sleep!

S. M. Harrington.

THE TUMBLEWEED.

WHEN the great men in the Chicago offices, the lesser

men in the blue-print rooms, and the hundreds of sweating little Italian men with the construction trains pushed those two ribbons of rail across the prairie, there were many things that they learned. Not the least, and certainly the oddest thing that the Italians on the grade learned, was the tumbleweed. This strange thing that seemed never to grow, but in the fall winds to come rolling over the sand-hills from somewhere, and wander on erratically, half-humanly to somewhere, was a creature of great wonder to the dark laborers-just as it always has been to those who dwell where the Kaw and the Republican are only creeks. So when Jacob Orris came to be known to this same horde of toiling scrapers and spikers, they gave him the name of the other inexplicable waif of the plains and called him the Tumbleweed. Thereafter, all the days that the Southwestern crawled across the plains, and finally corkscrewed its path into the continental divide, he was known as the Tumbleweed.

Jacob Orris was many things,—from boss of a shovelling gang to pay-clerk, but he was always one thing, a waif. In the long evenings in a contractor's tent, half a mile behind the new-laid ties, there would be a surveyor who would swear that he was a C. I., a college graduate who had heard him quoting Horace, and perhaps a trainman who believed that the Tumbleweed was a locomotive engineer. He did all things splendidly, and then some evening would show a cheerful, unshaved countenance at the plan-shanty and announce his going. Early next morning, with a few silver dollars, he would start his tramp towards the sunrise, to disappear into the settlements or the prairie for perhaps a month. When there was thirty miles more of new yellow dirt stretching westward, he might drift back again, from

the hills or the supply train, an unanswering enigma. Some few—most of all, Hutchins, the trestle-designer — knew more than they told about the Tumbleweed, even when they hinted at a story of derelict brilliance, discontent and shipwreck. To the men who carried the rails, and victimized the innumerable brown mules, he was always the Tumbleweed—a thing beyond and above their experience, which came and went, endlessly. And, somehow, they loved him with a distant impersonal sort of affection and looked for this tall cadaverous youth, whose stride could so devour the ties on the back-track. Partly because his capabilities were endless, but mostly out of charity, there was always some kind of work for Orris on the payroll.

The Southwestern spent a long, sunburnt autumn climbing through the foothills, and when it had switchbacked in sixty miles of pine woods to climb a mile and a half into the air, the transit crew suddenly realized that not an inch of it was due to Orris. It was January,—in the hill country that is to say, snow-when they plunged their last level and drove their last stake at the Great Gorge bridge. They stowed away level and rod in Hutchins' cabin, a scant fifty yards from the brink of the cañon that was yet to be spanned, and rode down in hand-cars to the valley towns. idle way they inquired the fate of the Tumbleweed, and asked the names of many men who had been shot in gambling hells. Until, four months later, the rescue parties had bucked the plows up to the cabin door, they heard nothing of Orris.

In an

Some day, the Southwestern promised, fifteen years hence, when the despatchers were unloading four overland trains a day into Salt Lake City, there should be a twelve-mile tunnel under the range. Meantime the railroad was to climb sheer over the divide, nearly three miles above the sea, and slide as steeply into Forest Park. Scarcely west of the pass, where now the fireman on a west-bound train can feel that his work is done-except to drive the brake pumpand the engineer tries the sand over and over again, there

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