Once outside you see another crowd and as curiosity is in the air, you
crane your neck and try to get closer. The center of attraction is a
man in spotless white cooking bean cake on a little hibachi. The air
is cold and crisp, and the smell of the savory bean paste, piping hot,
makes you hungry.

Next comes the fish man with a big flat basket on each end of a pole,
and offers you a choice lot; long slippery eels, beautiful shrimp, as
pink as the sunset, and juicy oysters whose shells have been scrubbed
until they are gleaming white. Around the baskets are garlands of
paper roses to hide from view the ugly rough edges of the straw.

The candy shops tempt you to the last sen, and the toy shops are a
perfect joy. Funny fat Japanese dolls and stuffed rabbits and
cross-eyed, tailless cats demand attention. Perhaps you will see a
cheap American doll with blue eyes and yellow hair carefully exhibited
under a glass case, and when you are wondering why they treasure this
cheap toy, you happen to glance down and catch the worshipping gaze of
a wistful, half starved child, and your point of view changes at once
and you begin to understand the value of it, and to wish with all your
heart that you could put an American dolly in the hands of every
little Japanese girl on the Island!

It is getting almost time to open my box and I am right childish over
it. It has been here for two days, and I have slipped in a dozen times
to look at it and touch it. Oh! Mate, the time has been so long, so
cruelly long! I wake myself up in the night some time sobbing. One
year and a half behind me, and two and a half ahead! I remember mother
telling about the day I started to school, how I came home and said
triumphantly, "Just think I've only got ten more years to go to