It was an English school, where she sat with hands folded through the long mornings, passively permitting the lessons to filter through her brain, and listening in smiling patience while the kind foreign ladies spoke incomprehensible things.  Sometimes she helped pass the hours by watching the shadows of the dancing leaves outside; sometimes she told herself stories about “The Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom,” or about “Momotaro, the Little Peach Boy.”  Again she would repeat the strange English words and phrases that she heard, and would puzzle out their meaning.

But the sum of her lore consisted in being happy; and when the shadow of the mountains began to slip across the valley, she would dance back along the homeward way, singing with the birds, laughing with the rippling water, and adding her share of brightness to the sunshine of the world.

As she stood on this particular morning with her net poised over a butterfly, she heard the tramping of many feet.  A slow cavalcade was coming around the road,—­a long line of coolies bearing bamboo stretchers,—­and in the rear, in a jinrikisha, was a foreign man with a red cross on his sleeve.

O Sana San scrambled up the bank and watched with smiling curiosity as the men halted to rest.  On the stretcher nearest her lay a young Russian prisoner with the fair skin and blond hair that are so unfamiliar to Japanese eyes.  His blanket was drawn tight around his shoulders, and he lay very still, with lips set, gazing straight up through the bamboo leaves to the blue beyond.

Then it was that O Sana San, gazing in frank inquisitiveness at the soldier, saw a strange thing happen.  A tear formed on his lashes and trickled slowly across his temple; then another and another, until they formed a tiny rivulet.  More and more curious, she drew yet nearer, and watched the tears creep unheeded down the man’s face.  She was sure he was not crying, because soldiers never cry; it could not be the pain, because his face was very smooth and calm.  What made the tears drop, drop on the hard pillow, and why did he not brush them away?

A vague trouble dawned in the breast of O Sana San.  Running back to the field, she gathered a handful of wild flowers and returned to the soldier.  The tears no longer fell, but his lips quivered and his face was distorted with pain.  She looked about her in dismay.  The coolies were down by the river, drinking from their hands and calling to one another; the only person to whom she could appeal was the foreigner with the red cross on his arm who was adjusting a bandage for a patient at the end of the line.

With halting steps and many misgivings, she timidly made her way to his side; then placing her hands on her knees, she bowed low before him.  The embarrassment of speaking to a stranger and a foreigner almost overwhelmed her, but she mustered her bravest array of English, and pointing to the stretcher, faltered out her message: