V.

It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to
that of the half-caste heroine of "A Japanese Nightingale" and
the young American whom she marries in one of those marriages
which neither the Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last
till death parts them. It is far, and all is very strange under
that remote sky; but what is true to humanity anywhere is true
everywhere; and the story of Yuki and Bigelow, as the Japanese
author tells it in very choice English, is of as palpitant
actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door. If I
have ever read any record of young married love that was so
frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki,
though she loves Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves
him, but because she wishes with the money he gives her to help
her brother through college in America. When this brother comes
back to Japan--he is the touch of melodrama in the pretty
idyl--he is maddened by an acquired Occidental sense of his
sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever and
dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of
the young wife and husband. There is enough incident, but of the
kind that is characterized and does not characterize. The charm,
the delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki.
Her father was an Englishman who had married her mother in the
same sort of marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his
wife till he dies, and possibly something of the English
constancy which is not always so evident as in his case qualifies
the daughter's nature. Her mother was, of course, constant, and