this picture is one of veneration, sometimes almost of fearsome awe. It is certainly not in accord with the wishes of His Majesty that his picture should become a source of apprehension to his subjects, and yet such has been the result, in many cases, of official practice. Persons have lost their lives in trying to rescue the photograph from fire, and school principals have committed suicide because the imperial picture had been destroyed or removed.

A peculiar situation has thus been brought about. In the schools, from which religious instruction is excluded, there has grown up a political cult, which claims the entire force of the religious sentiments of the pupils in deep reverence, and the unquestioned acceptance of mythical explanations of national origins. The moral capital accumulated during the feudal era has been invested almost entirely in loyalty to the Emperor. By the side of this cult, no other religious feelings are encouraged in the schools; any ethical ideas that do not directly contribute to its strength are frowned upon by the authorities. A certain kind of official guardianship over morals is also illustrated by an order issued by the Tokio police to troops of itinerant story-tellers, to the effect that only such stories are to be related as teach loyalty to superiors and filial piety. It is not difficult to imagine how readily these

While speaking of ethical motives in Japanese life, we ought not to overlook the fact that ethical conflicts form the deepest interest in Japanese drama and literature. The Japanese distinguish between giri, which is reason, principle, duty, and ninjo, human affections. When these two are in conflict, the knightly code of Japan demands an absolute sacrifice of all human feeling. The moral grandeur of suppressing the strongest passions and affections of the heart and obeying without a murmur the dictates of duty, will always move the Japanese, to the point of causing them to shed tears even when the conflict is presented only in poetry or on the stage. This great ethical force, though focused upon loyalty to a superior, might in time come to form a strong substructure for broader moral sentiments and enthusiasms. The problem of developing it in such a manner as to comprise the social relations between man and man, and to bring these powerful ideas of duty and justice to bear upon the ordinary affairs of life, is what Japan has set herself to solve, as a result of the social transformations during the Meiji era.

AFTER the first cold fog of the California coast, there came sunny days and a sparkling ocean. Lazy days, given over to watching the ship's wake, and to watching the water creatures that for a moment would show themselves, and to watching the western horizon, clear and incredibly far, its final streak of light surely the sunshine on Japan.

In a while the Mexican ports began, - a day here, an hour there. There would be a swift turning from the green ocean into a land-locked bay, always a light-blue bay with hills sheer to a light-blue sky, and with white adobe houses scattered about, wherever there was foothold between hill and sea.

At our imperious whistle, launches would come out with the ship's mail and her coal; and boats would come out laden with fruits, flowers, parrots, shells, drawn-work, fans, pottery; and on the beautiful southern water would show the still reflections of the boats and of the red-robed boat-women.

and soon we were standing off Port San José whistling for row-boats.

A train waited, and there was an all-day ride up the beautiful Central American Cordillera. Toward evening came the circling of a volcano whose ridges and cañons were rich in pink and purple and strongest greens; then the final rush over a splendid plain, the flash of a white stone bridge, and a glimpse of domes and palms above a level of rich brown tiles.

But this was only the Valley of the Hermitage and Guatemala City. My valley, the valley that had, it seemed, been especially made for me, lay still farther on in the mountains, and the next morning I started for it by mule team, for, thanks be, no railway leads there.

The road went for thirty miles straight toward the volcanoes, past a three-hundred-years-old Indian city and through many a pueblo. The streams were high, the stone bridges moss-grown. I wondered at the beauty of sky and trees. The magnificence of the trees gave me hope; surely the hills and the air that had quickened them would be able to do something for me.

At perhaps six o'clock in the afternoon, we got into the Valley, a great volcano-trough that has often been torn and sundered, and drove toward its ruined city, Antigua, that since the earthquake of Santa Marta, in the seventeen hundreds, has lain literally prostrate at the foot of Mount Fuego. We followed an old, crooked, treeshaded road, across rivers and up and

down barrancas. The sun was setting and shone like snow on the volcano tops; but the valley itself was almost darkened by the huge pyramidal shadow of Mount Agua.

Toward evening we entered Antigua by the Gate of the Arch of Saint Catherine, and followed along the Avenida del Calvario. There were trees, trees; and ruined churches; and old adobe houses, with crosses and saints carved above the doorways, and marble virgins in niches under far-jutting eaves.

Women were about in black shawls. All was peaceful, unearthly.

We drove through the town to the Hotel Palacio, a long adobe set back amongst coffee trees; the wretched Hotel Palacio with its dark mouldy rooms, and its dinners of black beans and tortillas; and for ten melancholy nights I slept at the Palacio.

By day I would prowl about the narrow streets or along the outlying old avenues. Often, while passing an isolated cane-stalk hut, or some deep, silent place under canopy of the fine trees, I would find myself wondering whether or not it would be too unconventional to come out here and live in the almost open, not too far from humans, yet away from deadly walls and doors. I would incline seriously to the idea for a moment, but did not have the courage: the snakes, the rains,

nothing would come of it. But one blessed morning I happened upon what was left of the monastery La Recoleccion. I walked about its wide arcaded corridors and climbed to its domes and towers. And, on the moment, I knew that this monastery had been as especially made for me as had the valley.

But, even in Antigua-Guatemala, one may not enter a ruined monastery and set up housekeeping without leave. I must, so the hotel people told me, see the Doñas Quevedo about it.

I found the Doñas Quevedo, two

oldish bachelor sisters, in a mellow adobe opposite the ruined cathedral. They were of the old Spanish school, and it seemed incredible to them that I should plan to live alone for a year on the monastery top. They could not understand, they did not approve.

But in the end, such was my insistence, ethically the place was more mine than theirs, - the old sisters told me graciously that La Recoleccion was at my 'disposition.' A rental was named, also at my insistence, and the sisters delivered to me twenty-eight heavy brass keys, upon whose flattened thumb-pieces were carven all sorts of heavenly things.

More than this, the next morningso kind are ladies of the old Spanish school the Doñas Quevedo brought to the hotel a servant for me; they said that I, myself, might be unable to find one willing to live so eccentrically as I proposed.

This servant was an hija de la casa,

daughter of the house, whose people, for generations, had been born and had lived and died in the service of the Quevedo family. She was, they said, a good cook, laundress, fetcher and carrier; her name was Innocente Bolanos, and with much pleasure they would lend her to me for a year.

And for a little more than a year I lived there in the old monastery, in that silent medieval city, with the kind servant and a few books.

The walls of La Recoleccion inclosed large patios - gardens - surrounded by wide, arched corridors from which open thick-walled, windowless cells. I made no use of the cells, excepting, once in a while, to look about them for hidden treasure, but lived my year up on the roof among the broken domes and turrets.

The roof is flat, its brick pavement smooth and lustrous from wind and rain and sun, and from its chinks grow

delicate flowers and fine grasses. It once had arches and vaulted roof of its own, and from the stumps of its broken columns I swung my hammocks and awnings. The night-hammock I hung in the dome that stands over the place of the high altar.

A perfect sleeping place, the dome. From the Calle Real - Royal Road it seems entire, because the western wall and the rounding roof are entire; but from the side that gives upon the inner patio everything has been torn away, leaving it open to sun and air, but not to the rain, nor to the passer-by.

There are deep window-places here and there, massive as portals, with colossal stucco angels standing above them. The floor is of square bricks and, like that of the corridor outside, is grass-and-flower-grown.

My dining-room was a tower by the southern wall. I had a native carpenter make for it table and benches of mahogany, about the cheapest wood, and upon the walls I draped savannas of the rich cloth these people weave. But I did not cover the stucco angels, and the broken-toed creatures became a sort of company for me.

From the wide, arched doorway of my dining-room I had the whole southern sweep of the valley, with its miles of glistening coffee-bushes growing under the shade of quinine and lotus trees, its breadths of sugar-cane sweeping down the volcano from the woods above, and in the valley-centre fields of alfalfa and corn.

From the north corridor, where my day-hammocks hung, I had the tileroofed adobe city, the volcanoes, and coming down from a ring of far-away hills, the old stone aqueduct that God may have made when he made the valley.

On the morning we took possession, I stood with Innocente Bolanos in the doorway of the monastery kitchen and

asked her if it could ever be made fit to cook our food in. And Innocente, as though challenged, set to work with shovel and brooms. For two days and far into two nights she toiled, until the brown ceiling-beams, the brown walltiles, the brown floor-bricks were shiny. Then with twenty pesos - about two dollars she bought innumerable jars and ollas of buff and red and brown loza, the native ware, which she set on the deep brick ledges; and about the walls she hung woven fire-fans, carved molinillos for stirring chocolate, strings of peppers, bunches of plantains.

On the evening of the third day candles were placed about in corners and on ledges, wherever there happened to be an old stone socket; fires were lighted in the square, shallow holes of the mediæval range; dinner was put to cook in the odd utensils of Indian make, and the big kitchen was athrob again; probably as full of old Spanish charm as before the night of Santa Marta.

In the spacious kitchen patio we found, half-hidden by vines, three pilas -fountains. One was tree-shaded and sunken, one was out in the sun, one was in the shade of the wall. Square brick-walled things, the pilas, each with its moss-grown tower and its idiotic stone face for the spewing of the water. They had been dry since the night of Santa Marta, and we found them full of stones and shrubs and poisonous spiders. But Innocente brought Indian workmen; the Doñas Quevedo brought a government permit; there were a few days of clearing, retubing, scraping, polishing; and once more through the thick stone lips came pouring water from the old aqueduct. La Recoleccion is a wondrous and beautiful place at sunrise, at noon, at sunset. In its patios are columns and arches that lie as they fell on the night of Santa Marta; vines and crimson flowers grow upon them, and upon the

standing gates grow wheat and cactus plants.

But columns and vines can take malevolent shapes by night. During the first week in the monastery I saw thieves and murderers of nights, and Innocente saw ghosts and devils. We needed more humans about. I told Innocente that if she could find a native family, the members of which would be willing to bathe at the pila every day, she might bring them to live in her patio.

In a trice she found just the people: a ladino woman, who fashioned for sale little figures of wax and straw, her halfgrown daughters, and her awful grandmother.

Innocente said these people would be only too happy to bathe instead of paying rent. But she did not let them have the liberty of her kitchen; they were given a half-dozen cells farther the corridor, and they cooked out in the open on a portable brazier.

up

In the early morning they would go down to the sunken pila and throw calabashfuls of water over their shoulders; then all day and until far into the night the woman and her daughters would sit on the damp bricks in the doorway of a dreadful cell, intent on their absurd craft; and all day the grandmother would kneel, bent into unhuman shape, grinding corn on a stone, or washing cacao beans on a stone, or toasting tortillas on a stone

the soles of her terrible feet showing, from under the dull skirt, like lumps of baked mud.

Of evenings, after I had watched the sun go down behind the pale volcano Acatenango, watched the fading of the after-colors on the hills at the east, watched the coming of the stars,-they never failed me, I would turn from the great things of the valley and look down upon the ladino-life in the kitchen patio.

The cell-bond, strangely-treed gar

den would be dark but for the splotch of strong flickering light in the corner where the native women were: Innocente at the pila washing dishes by the light of pitch-sticks; the woman and her daughters by their black doorway, moulding pink wax by the light of pitch-sticks; and, well out on the patio bricks, the old woman stirring a witch's cauldron, their evening meal, over the charcoal brazier.

Hours later, in what they call the richness of the night, maybe eleven o'clock, they would put aside their work and huddle over the nightly cups of hot chocolate; huddle in a circle about the burning sticks, their faces showing red, coppery, bright yellow, in the peculiar changing light.

Nor was I without the companionship of my equals. The Doñas Quevedo visited me; at first from frank curiosity, with almost unbelieving wonderment; but later, satisfied that I was safe and sane, they came every second day, and sat with me in the hammocks, or upon the broken brick and stone work of the northern roof. They dressed in black, with Early Victorian collars and brooches, and with heavy silk shawls about their heads. They were kind and formal, women with whom one might have long friendship untainted by familiarity. They always smoked as they talked; immediately the old-fashioned salutations were over, they would open little silver boxes and take therefrom the cigarettes, the bits of flint and steel, the pieces of tow. They could remember their greatgrandparents, in whose house they still lived; and, with here and there an artful question from me, they would keep for hours on the phases of old Spanish and Indian life.

The rains broke in April. The mountains and valley became a-wash with every shade of green, and the rough volcano, Fuego, stood out like a tur