That was the beginning of as pleasant a week as Bob had ever spent. He grew accustomed to the simple ways of the house: took off his boots instinctively on entering; learnt to squat more comfortably on the floor, and to enjoy the novel fare; even to tolerate the plunky-plunketing of the koto when O Toyo San played to him, and sang strange songs which she tried in her pretty broken English to translate. On some days Bob was left much to himself; Kobo received many letters and telegrams which kept him busy for long hours in his own room, and at such times Bob would chat with Taru, the servant, who gave him many precious bits of information about his master’s family, always with infinite discretion. Kobo was the descendant of a long line of samurai, who had themselves been the vassals of a daimio or great baronial family illustrious in the history of Japan. Taru himself remembered the time when Kobo’s family had fought in the great civil war from which dates the wonderful advance of modern Japan. Previous to that time, foreigners and all things foreign had been regarded with the intensest hatred by the Japanese; Kobo’s father had been among those who fired on the foreign settlement at Hiogo in 1868, and had been condemned to hara-kiri by the Mikado. Bob learnt the terrible details of that mode of execution, when the condemned man, without a murmur or a sign of reluctance or fear, deliberately took his own life at the bidding of his lord. Kobo was a boy of nine when his father thus died; he had grown up under the new system; he had played a considerable part in the Japanese Diet, and had won great honour in the war with China; and he now enjoyed the peculiar confidence of the Mikado’s government. Taru did not explain what position he held, and Bob, for all his curiosity, did not care to ask; it was evident that the man held the master in boundless veneration.