The Days of a Man 1900 



he decided to start a reform for the benefit of country 

 children. 



Many well-to-do people spend the summer at 



Our defer- Wakanoura. One boy from the Kyoto High School 

 went about with a volume entitled " Decision' of 



friend Charac'ter," as he accented it, a long-winded moral 

 treatise used as a textbook in English. Some passages, 

 dull enough at the best, he did not understand, 

 and appealed to me for explanation. He was really 

 very bright but exasperatingly deferential. Following 

 me around to pick up crumbs of wisdom and to try 

 out his English, he asked many questions one 

 Japanese way of showing polite interest. But the 

 accent of his native teacher was so different from 

 ours that he understood but little of what we said. 



Leaving Wakanoura with feelings of warm affec- 

 tion and real regret, we hastened northward by way 

 of lovely Kyoto, where we spent an all-too-brief day 

 as ordinary tourists. But eleven years afterward 

 I returned with Mrs. Jordan to that superb ancient 

 capital for a somewhat longer stay, and I therefore 

 pass it by without further notice for the time being. 1 

 At Hikone (on Lake Biwa) we spent a couple of 

 days, gathering a rich harvest of little minnows. 

 There we found shelter in the Raku-raku-tei, "man- 



Garden sion of rest," later Raku-raku-en, "garden of rest," 

 the most charming hostelry of our experience. That 

 fine old palace-villa formerly belonged to the princes 

 of li, the last one of whom played a prominent part 

 as defender of the Shogunate during the struggle 

 subsequent to Perry's arrival in Japan. This famous 

 nobleman, "a man of rare sagacity and favorable 

 to foreign intercourse," was murdered in 1860 by 



1 See Chapter xxxix, page 384. 



n 42 n 



