Matsué’s castle is beyond and above the town, and the _daimyō_ who built it and the warriors who guarded it looked down on this side over the grey roofs of the houses to the wide blue waters of the still lagoon, on that side over the grey roofs of the houses and the sweep of the quiet rice-fields where the river, like a broad path of steel wanders through the bright green fields; and further round they looked to where the tall trees climb the steep hillsides, and further still to the great blue lines of the hills themselves shutting in the sky. And the old warriors in their watch-tower looked out over this wide fair world which lay so still around them. They guarded the castle and they kept it, and the light that was set in that tower was the light of courage and of duty. Over the world beneath their feet it shone out clear and bright, but the world was wider than their horizon. After many years they learned that lesson, and then they came down from their watch-tower, and the light which once burned there in the castle is gone to-day through all the land. Then the Spirit of Beauty, the soul of that world which lay so still beneath the tower, went up to the castle, where with courage and duty the love of battle and of death had ruled so long, to possess it. And in the waters of the moat the lotus is blooming. * * * * * With its roots in the mud, say the Japanese Buddhists, the lotus flower is an emblem of man, of a good man in this wicked world. From among the sins and the passions of life Buddha himself rose perfect, pure as the lotus, and perfect. So for a sign and a comfort to all men, Lord Buddha himself sits throned on the lotus, showing how Goodness Eternal came, not from good, but from the midst of things evil. In the moat of the castle the people of Matsué have planted whole fields of the lotus, that the flower which is perfect might grow from the sins of the past, grow with each cycle of Life ever more perfect. THE HEART OF THE PEOPLE “Shakspeare would have us know that there is no devotion to truth, to justice, to charity, more intense and real than that of the man who is faithful to them out of the sheer spirit of loyalty, unstimulated and unsupported by any faith which can be called theological.” DOWDEN, “Shakspeare, his Mind and Art.” I TOKYO Tokyo is a city of one million five hundred thousand souls, and in its heart of hearts stands the Palace of the Son of Heaven.