“Do you ever hear a bloody cry at night?” he began his chapter, gathering a medley of gravity on his brow. “Scream? No!” “Never mind!” He turned aside. I thought he was playing a threadbare artifice of a story-teller to tantalise my fancy. “Tell me why!” I knew I became his victim. “I fear I do scare you.” “No! I never——” I leaned forward. “To begin with——” He stopped, looking around. “Your kitchen—don’t be scared—is close by a haunted room of a house on Pine Street. It’s no story. A chorus girl lived—well, some five years ago—in that house with her step-mother. Just think! The old hen of sixty-five fell in love with her daughter’s lover. Do you understand? She saw one morning the young fellow kissing her daughter. She went crazy. She shot him. Isn’t it awful? The murderess leaned against the wall by your kitchen, and cried, ‘I killed him!’ I swear to you that it is all true. So, people say, a wail is heard at night from your side.” “Mah! Mah!” I breathed. “That is all.” He retired heavily. Do I believe it? “No! No!” I denied. But I was thickly swarmed by sickening air. How could I trust me in the kitchen! I closed the store. I pasted up a piece of paper whereon was written: “NO BUSINESS TO-NIGHT.” 16th—I had a stomach-ache this morning. I couldn’t rise. The maid fetched me some toast and a cup of coffee. I think it is very nice to eat in bed. 17th—Mrs. Wistaria and her husband returned from San Jose. She lavished on me her thousand arigatos. She said I sold sixty per cent more than on any previous week. She wished me to condescend to accept a “meagre” fifteen dollars as a share of the profits. I refused it. 18th—My letter to Miss Pine Leaf (who wept with me reading Keats’ love-letters one mournful night) is as follows: “MATSUBA SAN: ‘Hitofude mairase soro. ‘I have the honour to present a brief writing.’ “Let me omit the shopworn form of Japanese letter-writing! Its redundant ‘honourables’ are more cheap than honourable. “Satetoya! “Shall I begin my letter with a deep bow? “Bow? “I use it occasionally before Meriken San for sport’s sake. But it is degenerating, in my opinion, to comic opera, like the tortoise-shell-framed spectacles of a Chinese doctor. “Now I address you with a thousand kisses. “The kiss is the thing to begin with for up-to-date girls. “It is useful, as a poem is useful in filling up space in magazine-making. Woman—even a loftily learned American woman—cannot be ready always with her rhetoric of expression. The kiss comes to her relief in the crisis whenever she fails in speech. “The kiss is everything. “The Jap girl is intimate with the art of crying. “A kiss is as eloquent as a tear. “I suppose the cleverness of American woman is graded by the way she handles it. It strikes me that every white girl is perfectly at home with it. “She is awfully bright.