of a peasant, and a blue towel tied round her head. She was ugly;
and her natural ugliness had been increased by a cruel attack of
smallpox. The child carried a bundle of printed ballads.

Neighbors then began to crowd into my front yard,--mostly young
mothers and nurse girls with babies on their backs, but old women
and men likewise--the inkyo of the vicinity. Also the
jinrikisha-men came from their stand at the next street-corner;
and presently there was no more room within the gate.


The woman sat down on my doorstep, tuned her samisen, played a
bar of accompaniment,--and a spell descended upon the people; and
they stared at each other in smiling amazement.

For out of those ugly disfigured lips there gushed and rippled a
miracle of a voice--young, deep, unutterably touching in its
penetrating sweetness. "Woman or wood-fairy?" queried a
bystander. Woman only,--but a very, very great artist. The way
she handled her instrument might have astounded the most skillful
geisha; but no such voice had ever been heard from any geisha,
and no such song. She sang as only a peasant can sing,--with
vocal rhythms learned, perhaps, from the cicada and the wild
nightingales,--and with fractions and semi-fractions and
demi-semi-fractions of tones never written down in the musical
language of the West.

And as she sang, those who listened began to weep silently. I did
not distinguish the words; but I felt the sorrow and the
sweetness and the patience of the life of Japan pass with her