As for me, I have become stronger than I have been for years. All my clothes, even my Japanese kimono, have become too small!! But I cannot say whether this be the climate or the diet or what. Setsu says it is because I have a good wife;—but she might be prejudiced, you know! My lungs are sound as a bell; I never cough at all. This is all that I can tell you at present.
No: O-Yone came with us. She took O-Yoshi’s place, when O-Yoshi went back to live with her mother. I am sorry to say I had to send the kurumaya away. He abandoned his wife in Matsue, and she went to the house of the Inagaki, crying and telling a very pitiful story. When I heard this, I told the man he must go back. But on the same days later, I found he had been doing very wrong things,—trying to make trouble among the other servants, and playing tricks upon us by making secret arrangements with the shopkeepers. I had bought him clothes, and given him altogether 14 yen and 50 sen, besides his board and lodging—including 5 yen to go back with. But he had squandered his little money and how he managed afterward I don’t know. I could not help him any more; for his cunningness and foolishness together made it impossible to keep him a day longer in the house. The cook is from the Nisho-tei,—to which you first introduced me. The kurumaya’s place would have been a nice place for a good man. I shall be very careful about employing another kurumaya by the month.
Now about the question you asked me. The words you underlined are from the Jewish Bible. The ideas of value and of weight were closely connected in the minds of the old Semites, as they are still, to some extent, in our own. Everything was sold by weight, and according to the weight was the value. The weighing was done with the scales or balance, of which there were several kinds. The balancing was done by suspending a weight at one end of the “balance,” or scales, as in Japan, and the article to be sold in the other. If too light, the article was “found wanting”—(i. e.: in weight). So in such English expressions as “to make light of” (to ridicule, to belittle, to speak contemptuously of)—the idea of weight thus estimated survives. Now, in the mythology of the Jews God is represented as one who weighs, in a scale or balance, the good that is in a man—(his moral weight or value)—and sends him to hell if he proves too light. Public opinion is now the God with the scales. If I am an author, for example, I (that is, my work) will be weighed in the balance (of public or of literary opinion) and found perhaps wanting. Poor Ito was weighed many, many times, and found wanting—before being expelled. I am afraid he will be found wanting also by the world into which he must enter.
As for the phrase, “not a hair of their head,” the singular is often used for the plural in the old English of the Bible, and other books. (To-day, we should use only the plural,—as a general rule.)
Examples from the Bible:
1. “The fire had no power upon their bodies, nor
was the hair of their
singular
HEAD singed.”
—Daniel, 3d Chap. 27th verse.