A volume of this little lady’s work with her round, generous hand-writing, is one of my treasures, as she stands first among the “singing birds” among the women of her land.
Her tastes are as varied as her life, with always that passionate love of nature in the foreground.
The heroic, as is natural in a Japanese woman, comes next, and the late war comes often into the short simple lines, where self-poise is again so marked.
Her fondness for youth and the sentiments of youth come into play on every other page.
I had spent a number of hours in the school which is her greatest monument, the “Peeress school,” where the daughters of the nobility are educated, and found there a duplicate of a first class European institution, from the kindergarten to the graduating class.
I had listened to the eloquence of the teachers as they spoke of the French Revolution, and watched the faces of the English class, as they went over the ever imperial verses of Tennyson.
In those pretty, demure eyes, there was just the passion for the “good, the true and beautiful,” which all fine youth has, the same we know so well, before the Dawn has left them.
We passed a group in the hall and there was the daughter of the greatest admiral of modern times, Miss Togo!
We saw them in the cooking school and heard their bursts of laughter as they made the interesting and doubtless indigestible dishes they were soon to partake of.
From the Auditorium to the garden, where the children play and make those queer shapes and forms in the sand which latter are enlarged in the vaster designs of manhood and womanhood, we found everywhere the mark of this woman, her care and her genius.