sorry. To some remark of Brother’s she replied, “Youth is always listening eagerly for marching orders; but the aged can only look backward to sad memories and hopeless dreams.”
As I mounted my jinrikisha and bowed again to the entire group of family and servants bowing in the doorway, I could not help sending a thought farewell to the busy little boarders. I had learned more about silkworms during that short rustling visit than in my fourteen years of life in a silkworm district. As we rolled along over a smooth, monotonous road my mind was busy, and I believe that then and there I first began to realize—vaguely—that all creatures, however insignificant, were “intelligent about their own affairs—just like people.”
“Dear me!” I finally said to myself. “How much we learn when we travel!” and I pulled the jinrikisha robe over my lap and settled myself for the long ride ahead.
I think I must have gone to sleep, for I found myself crookedly but comfortably snuggled into almost a kinoji when I heard Brother’s voice.
We were entering a good-sized town and he was leaning back and pointing across the tiled roofs to a castle on the hill beyond.
“This is Komoro,” he called, “and there’s where the foot-high dolls came from.”
I smiled as my mind flew back to the Nagaoka home and pictured two enormous dolls of the festival set brought by our Komoro great-great-grandmother with her wedding dowry. In her day the Government permitted only the daughter of a daimio to own dolls a foot high, and her entire set must have been wondrously handsome. But in my time, when our living came principally from the visits of the second-hand man to our godown, the wonderful Komoro dolls, with their miniature furniture of gold and lacquer—the perfection of Japanese art of the Middle
