The illusions are forever over; but the memory of many pleasant things remains.  I know much more about the Japanese than I did a year ago; and still I am far from understanding them well.  Even my own little wife is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way.  Of course a man and woman know each other’s hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand.  Let me tell one.  In Oki we fell in love with a little Samurai boy, who was having a hard time of it, and we took him with us.  He is now like an adopted son,—­goes to school and all that.  Well, I wished at first to pet him a little, but I found that was not in accordance with custom, and that even the boy did not understand it.  At home, I therefore scarcely spoke to him at all; he remained under the control of the women of the house.  They treated him kindly,—­though I thought coldly.  The relationship I could not quite understand.  He was never praised and rarely scolded.  A perfect code of etiquette was established between him and all the other persons in the house, according to degree and rank.  He seemed extremely cold-mannered, and perhaps not even grateful, that was, so far as I could see.  Nothing seemed to move his young placidity,—­whether happy or unhappy his mien was exactly that of a stone Jizo.  One day he let fall a little cup and broke it.  According to custom, no one noticed the mistake, for fear of giving him pain.  Suddenly I saw tears streaming down his face.  The muscles of the face remained quite smilingly placid as usual, but even the will could not control tears.  They came freely.  Then everybody laughed, and said kind things to him, till he began to laugh too.  Yet that delicate sensitiveness no one like me could have guessed the existence of.

But what followed surprised me more.  As I said, he had been (in my idea) distantly treated.  One day he did not return from school for three hours after the usual time.  Then to my great surprise, the women began to cry,—­to cry passionately.  I had never been able to imagine alarm for the boy could have affected them so.  And the servants ran over town in real, not pretended, anxiety to find him.  He had been taken to a teacher’s house for something relating to school matters.  As soon as his voice was heard at the door, everything was quiet, cold, and amiably polite again.  And I marvelled exceedingly.

Sensitiveness exists in the Japanese to an extent never supposed by the foreigners who treat them harshly at the open ports....  The Japanese master is never brutal or cruel.  How Japanese can serve a certain class of foreigners at all, I can’t understand....

This Orient knows not our deeper pains, nor can it even rise to our larger joys; but it has its pains.  Its life is not so sunny as might be fancied from its happy aspect.  Under the smile of its toiling millions there is suffering bravely hidden and unselfishly borne; and a lower intellectual range is counterbalanced by a childish sensitiveness to make the suffering balance evenly in the eternal order of things.