page, "Seest thou those tiny sparrows in the nest, how their yellow
bills are opened wide, and now see! there comes their mother with worms
to feed them. How eagerly and happily the little ones eat! but for a
samurai, when his stomach is empty, it is a disgrace to feel hunger."
Anecdotes of fortitude and bravery abound in nursery tales, though
stories of this kind are not by any means the only method of early
imbuing the spirit with daring and fearlessness. Parents, with sternness
sometimes verging on cruelty, set their children to tasks that called
forth all the pluck that was in them. "Bears hurl their cubs down the
gorge," they said. Samurai's sons were let down the steep valleys of
hardship, and spurred to Sisyphus-like tasks. Occasional deprivation of
food or exposure to cold, was considered a highly efficacious test for
inuring them to endurance. Children of tender age were sent among utter
strangers with some message to deliver, were made to rise before the
sun, and before breakfast attend to their reading exercises, walking to
their teacher with bare feet in the cold of winter; they
frequently--once or twice a month, as on the festival of a god of
learning,--came together in small groups and passed the night without
sleep, in reading aloud by turns. Pilgrimages to all sorts of uncanny
places--to execution grounds, to graveyards, to houses reputed to be
haunted, were favorite pastimes of the young. In the days when
decapitation was public, not only were small boys sent to witness the
ghastly scene, but they were made to visit alone the place in the
darkness of night and there to leave a mark of their visit on the
trunkless head.

Does this ultra-Spartan system of "drilling the nerves" strike the
modern pedagogist with horror and doubt--doubt whether the tendency
would not be brutalizing, nipping in the bud the tender emotions of the
heart? Let us see what other concepts Bushido had of Valor.