Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration grew deeper and deeper. Her admiration for the _Ijin San’s Bot’chan_ knew no bounds; and then the pride of having a foreign-dressed baby of her own! Why, not one of her acquaintances, not even the rich _saké_ merchant at the corner, dressed their children “foreign fashion.” It was a height beyond their ambition, a dizzy pinnacle only reached by the _samurai_ and the Court! And Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration and her indrawn whistles of politeness knew no bounds. Even the _O Bā San_ in the corner turned her head round and showed some signs of interest. And the baby stopped its feeble cry and lay back on the _Ijin San’s_ lap--and smiled. With a sudden swoop Yoné caught it up. “I take care, I take care,” she said, “let the _Ijin San_ bring the clothes.” And from that day she went about her work with the quaintest little brown morsel in a foreign pelisse and a white bonnet nodding over her shoulder. And neither the _O Bā San_ nor the baby ever went hungry whatever Yoné might do. IV THE GRAVES OF THE RŌNIN The white wing of a blossoming plum-tree casts a pale shadow across the pebbled steps of the causeway, and the spring sunshine is warm. Behind, under the great gate of the temple, is a stall with souvenir tea-bowls of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ and the red blankets of a tiny _chaya_. In front, at the end of the causeway, stands a Japanese father with his little son, buying bundles of incense sticks from the Buddhist sexton. Coming up the path are two peasants with bare, brown legs, one wearing the old-fashioned gunhammer top-knot. And the plum-tree, its scent warm and fragrant, lies a white wing above the path. The Japanese father, _samurai_ from his face, and modern by his clothes, and his son have passed into the graveyard before us. But we all stand together in the little square garden on the side of the hill, with its thickly clustered tombstones, shaped like Moses’ Tables of the Law in the Child’s Bible, set in the flat brown earth. Below, a sharply falling line of dark green shrubs; above, the overhanging trees of the hillside; and the garden is quiet and still, with a little chill of damp and death that sobers and subdues. Before each stone tablet on the earthen path are bamboo vases filled with freshly cut branches of evergreens, and the burning incense sticks trail a thin scarf of smoke along the ground. The two old peasants are busy sticking their thin, brown incense tapers into the little heaps of grey ash--to become grey ashes in their turn. The little son has already lit his before the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké; and the father, gravely feeling in the pocket of his “foreign” coat, takes out a visiting-card, and lays it reverently among the pile of others on the grave.