"The plum branch which your august father brought home only a week ago is full of blossoms," she said, as she led the child back into the house.
It was true. In a beautiful vase on the floor of the honorable alcove stood a spray of white plum blossoms. Umé's mother pushed the sliding walls of the room wide open so that the morning sun might shine full upon the flowers.
The little girl ran across the matted floor and knelt joyously before them. "They are most honorably welcome!" she cried, and bent her forehead to the floor in salutation.
She forgot at once her disappointment in the garden and her resolve not to practise. She touched the sweet blossoms with loving fingers and called her brother to look at the beautiful things.
"Come Tara San! Come and look at the eldest brother of a hundred flowers!" she called.
Not only Tara, her brother, but Yuki, her baby sister, also came to bend over the blossoms in delight.
The spray stood in a brown jar filled with moist earth; here and there the brown color of the jar was flecked with drifts of white to represent the snow on bare earth, and the branch looked like a tiny tree growing out of the ground.
The plum is the first of all the trees to blossom in Japan, and for that reason it is called "eldest brother" to the flowers.
While the children touched the blossoms gently and chattered their delight, their mother was busy, waking the servants, sliding back all the wooden shutters of the house, folding the bedding and putting it away in the closets.
Umé left her flower-gazing and sprang to her own puffs before her mother could touch them. "I will put them away," she said, and folded them carefully as she had been taught to do. After breakfast they would have to be taken out and aired; but the room must first be put in order for the morning meal.