Tales out of school

by Frank R. Stockton

There these two boys became great friends. Moriyama was a very quick, bright youth. He could speak English very well, and he was rather better at English grammar than most of the other fellows in that school. The other fellows explained this by saying that Moriyama didn’t know anything about our grammar except what he had learned from books, and of course the books were right. But they had learned their grammar from all sorts of people, ever since they were little bits of chaps. And so they had learned all sorts of grammar, and had a good deal to unlearn when they came to the school.

But the fact was that Moriyama was as thoroughly in earnest about his studies as most boys are about base-ball. So it was no wonder that he succeeded.

He was not a large boy nor was he very young. As Tom put it, he was a good deal smaller than he was young. There were plenty of fellows in the school who could have whipped him, if they had wanted to, but they didn’t want to, for two reasons. He was a quiet, obliging boy, who seldom offended any one, and if any one had tried to whip him they would first have had to whip Tom Reynolds, which was no easy job. Tom had a fist as heavy as one end of a dumb-bell, and the muscles on his arms swelled up a good deal like the other end of a dumb-bell.

FUSI-YAMA.

Moriyama’s time at school was up, and he had to go to Japan. Tom’s time wasn’t up, but he promised to study ever so hard when he came back—with his mind improved by travel—and so the three of them, Tom, Tom’s father, and Moriyama, sailed for Yokohama.

This story will not be long enough for me to tell anything about the journey—how they sailed from New York to Aspinwall, and went across the Isthmus of Panama by railroad, and then took another steamship and crossed the Pacific Ocean; and how, at last they steamed up the bay of Yedo, and saw towering up to the sky, the great extinct volcano, Fusi-yama, the sacred mountain of Japan.

I cannot even tell about their landing at Yokohama, nor even very much about Tom’s adventures in Japan, but I can give you some of his experiences, and if you ever meet him, he can tell you the rest. And he will be very apt to do it, too, if you are the right kind of a boy or girl, for Tom is a great talker, and very sociable.

When they arrived at Yokohama Tom’s father took lodgings for himself and his son at the house of an American merchant in the town, but Moriyama went into the country where his family lived.

Of course it was very natural that he should want to see his father and mother, and brothers and sisters, but Tom could not help feeling sorry about it. It would have been such a capital thing to have had Moriyama to take him around at the very beginning of his visit, and tell him about all the curious things he saw.