There comes to my mind now a case illustrating this point, which I think I may cite without betraying confidence. It is that of a most attractive young woman who was married to a worthless husband, but lived faithfully with him for several years, and became the mother of three children. The husband, who seemed at first merely good-for-nothing, became worse as the years went by, drank himself out of situation after situation procured for him by powerful relatives, and at last became so violent that he even beat his wife and threatened his children, a proceeding most unusual on the part of a Japanese husband and father. The poor wife was at last obliged to flee from her husband's house to her mother's, taking her children with her. She sued for a divorce and obtained it, and is now married again; her youth, good looks, and high connections procuring her a very good catch for her second venture in matrimony; but her children are lost to her, and belong wholly to their worthless, drunken father. Of the lack of permanence in the marriage relation among the lower classes, the domestic changes of one of my servants in Tōkyō afford an amusing illustration. The man, whom I had hired in the double capacity of _jinrikisha_ man and _bettō_ or groom, was a strong, faithful, pleasant-faced fellow, recently come to Tōkyō from the country. I inquired, when I engaged him, whether he had a wife, as I wanted some one who could remain in his room in the stable in care of the horse when he was pulling me about in the _jinrikisha_. He replied that he had a wife, but she was now at Utsunomiya, the country town from which he had come, but he would send for her at once, and she would be in Tōkyō in the course of a week or two. Two or three weeks passed and no wife appeared, so I inquired of my cook and head servant what had become of Yasaku's wife. He replied, with a twinkle in his eye, that she had found work in Utsunomiya and did not wish to come. A week more passed, and still no wife, and further inquiries elicited from the cook the information that Yasaku had divorced her for disobedience, and was on the lookout for a new and more docile helpmate. His first thought was of the maidservant of the Japanese family who lived in the same house with me, a broad-faced, red-cheeked country girl, of a very low grade of intelligence. He gave this up, however, because he thought it would not be polite to put my friends to inconvenience by taking away their servant. His next effort was by negotiation through a Tōkyō friend; but apparently Yasaku's country manners were not to the taste of the Tōkyō damsels, for he met with no success, and was at last driven to write to his father in Utsunomiya asking him to select him a wife and bring her down to Tōkyō.