among the great common people, who represent in Japan, as in all
countries, the national virtues, and who still cling to their delightful
old customs, their picturesque dresses, their Buddhist images, their
household shrines, their beautiful and touching worship of ancestors.
This is the life of which a foreign observer can never weary, if
fortunate and sympathetic enough to enter into it--the life that forces
him sometimes to doubt whether the course of our boasted Western
progress is really in the direction of moral development. Each day,
while the years pass, there will be revealed to him some strange and
unsuspected beauty in it. Like other life, it has its darker side; yet
even this is brightness compared with the darker side of Western
existence. It has its foibles, its follies, its vices, its cruelties;
yet the more one sees of it, the more one marvels at its extraordinary
goodness, its miraculous patience, its never-failing courtesy, its
simplicity of heart, its intuitive charity. And to our own larger
Occidental comprehension, its commonest superstitions, however condemned
at Tokyo have rarest value as fragments of the unwritten literature of
its hopes, its fears, its experience with right and wrong--its
primitive efforts to find solutions for the riddle of the Unseen flow
much the lighter and kindlier superstitions of the people add to the
charm of Japanese life can, indeed, be understood only by one who has
long resided in the interior. A few of their beliefs are sinister--such
as that in demon-foxes, which public education is rapidly dissipating;
but a large number are comparable for beauty of fancy even to those
Greek myths in which our noblest poets of today still find inspiration;
while many others, which encourage kindness to the unfortunate and
kindness to animals, can never have produced any but the happiest moral
results. The amusing presumption of domestic animals, and the
comparative fearlessness of many wild creatures in the presence of man;
the white clouds of gulls that hover about each incoming steamer in