Tokyo is beautiful--brunette and beautiful. This first day of June she has risen past the cherry blossom, past the wistaria, through the freshness of spring to the full radiance of summer. Pink, like the fleece of clouds in the sky, and heliotrope, like the first flush of sunrise, are past. Now green, rich and deep from a soil of winnowed sustenance, mantles her in Oriental splendor--a splendor simple and elegant with the wealth of the east, shadowy and sunny with the blow of Japan. It folds her about with the assuring clasp of a lover, and she responds with the shy, voluptuous acceptance of a maid o’erwon. This is a summer of content, a dream of gayety, of insouciance. A million babies gurgle with the baby glory of it. A million mothers coo and coddle at the eternal freshness of it. But here, to-day, in this wilderness of terraced garden, in this bouquet of smiling East, have assembled the daintiest mothers in the land--the peeresses. The son of one is a major-general. Others have captains, colonels, aides-de-camp to tug their heartstrings with fear, to inflate their pulses with pride. Have we not penetrated to the very viscera of war’s nature when we find the mothers of its heroes thus assembled? One of these mothers, a Princess, passes. Should she buy that delicate lace and lingerie, so charming with all that’s feminine, from boxes labeled and graded, she would choose misses’ sizes, so tiny is she. A toy of a woman, demure and pretty; yet put up by the finest of Parisian makers. The dotted mulle of her veil sweeps slightly away, scallop-like, from a face thin with aristocratic aquilinity. Behind that face, with wax complexion and eyes of bead-like purity, scintillates a mind bred on intellectual fashions. She speaks with the cultured English of Vassar. She knows Omar Khayyam as well as any. The major-general is her son. Beside her walks another son, his gold-rimmed spectacles completing a fine picture of esthetic pride. His silk tie is the envy of every Japanese not bred abroad, for his clothes are from Piccadilly. The garden is full of these and such as these. They are giving a concert for the relief fund. The music! It is the choicest that the sensuous imagination of man has built out of rules and dreams. “William Tell” thunders its diapason from the hid footholds of the earth. The audacious march of Leroul spits out its song of triumph. “America” murmurs a swelling hymn. A Weber overture sparkles, ascends, leaping crags, whirling diaphanous gayety through cloud and shadow. Then a Japanese aria, weird with the rapt genius of the land, molten with Malay poise, floats a mystery of ancient longing through the broad day’s haze. It weaves through fir and cryptomeria, assaults the hearts of thousands, and, triumphant, storms the heavens; is lost in the faint sky, a sky blue with the dreaminess Whistler would have etched in immortal phantasy.