to cold, was considered a highly efficacious test for inuring them to endurance.  Children of tender age were sent among utter strangers with some message to deliver, were made to rise before the sun, and before breakfast attend to their reading exercises, walking to their teacher with bare feet in the cold of winter; they frequently—­once or twice a month, as on the festival of a god of learning,—­came together in small groups and passed the night without sleep, in reading aloud by turns.  Pilgrimages to all sorts of uncanny places—­to execution grounds, to graveyards, to houses reputed to be haunted, were favorite pastimes of the young.  In the days when decapitation was public, not only were small boys sent to witness the ghastly scene, but they were made to visit alone the place in the darkness of night and there to leave a mark of their visit on the trunkless head.

Does this ultra-Spartan system of “drilling the nerves” strike the modern pedagogist with horror and doubt—­doubt whether the tendency would not be brutalizing, nipping in the bud the tender emotions of the heart?  Let us see what other concepts Bushido had of Valor.

The spiritual aspect of valor is evidenced by composure—­calm presence of mind.  Tranquillity is courage in repose.  It is a statical manifestation of valor, as daring deeds are a dynamical.  A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit.  In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind.  Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms.  We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death.  Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—­of what we call a capacious mind (yoy[=u]), which, for from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.

It passes current among us as a piece of authentic history, that as [=O]ta Dokan, the great builder of the castle of Tokyo, was pierced through with a spear, his assassin, knowing the poetical predilection of his victim, accompanied his thrust with this couplet—­

    “Ah! how in moments like these
     Our heart doth grudge the light of life;”

whereupon the expiring hero, not one whit daunted by the mortal wound in his side, added the lines—­

    “Had not in hours of peace,
     It learned to lightly look on life.”

There is even a sportive element in a courageous nature.  Things which are serious to ordinary people, may be but play to the valiant.  Hence in old warfare it was not at all rare for the parties to a conflict to exchange repartee or to begin a rhetorical contest.  Combat was not solely a matter of brute force; it was, as, well, an intellectual engagement.