Departing passengers are given coils of paper ribbon confetti, to throw to their friends ashore, so that each may hold an end until the wall of steel parts from the wall of stone, and the paper strand strains and breaks. There is something poignant and poetic in that breaking, symbolizing the vastness of the world, the littleness of men and ships, the fragility of human contacts. The last face I recognized, back there across the water, in Japan, was Yuki’s. She was standing on the dock with the end of a broken paper ribbon in her hand. The other end trailed down into the water. She was weeping bitterly. Wishing to be sure that my wife and daughter had not failed to discover her in the crowd, I turned to them. But I did not have to point her out. Their faces told me that they saw her. They too were weeping. So it is with women. They weep. As for a man, he merely waves his hat. I waved mine. “Sayonara!” I turned away. There were things I had to see to in my cabin. Besides, the wind on deck was freshening. It hurt my eyes. Julian Street, _Mysterious Japan_. Doubleday, Page & Company, Publishers. By the kind permission of the author. UP THE WISSAHICKON CHRISTOPHER MORLEY The Soothsayer is a fanatical lover of Fairmount Park. His chief delight is to send his car spinning along the Lincoln Drive about the time the sun drops toward setting; to halt at a certain hostelry (if the afternoon be chilly) for what Charles Lamb so winningly describes as “hot water and its better adjuncts”; and then, his stormy soul for the moment at armistice with life, to roll in a gentle simmer down gracious byways while the Park gathers her mantle of dusk about her. Sometimes he halts his curricle in some favorite nook, climbs back into the broad, well-cushioned tonneau seat and lies there smoking a cigarette and watching the lights along the river. The Park is his favorite relaxation. He carries its contours and colors and sunsets in the spare locker of his brain, and even on the most trying day at his office he is a little happier because he knows the Wissahickon Drive is but a few miles away. Wise Soothsayer! He should have been one of the hermits who came from Germany with Kelpius in 1694 and lived bleakly on the hillsides of that fairest of streams, waiting the millennium they expected in 1700.