Four hours a week are given to foreign languages, and French or English may be selected. German is not taught to the girls. We were particularly entertained in the history class. The young ladies were as intent as their master, who told them in impassioned language of that impassioned epoch of the French revolution. “Danton and Robespierre,” how strange those names sounded so far away, mingled with the hurrying voice of the speaker! The revenge of the years on evil, how far-reaching! In the English class we heard some very creditable rendering of English verse by the girls, and the charm of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” lost nothing on those pretty lips. The Knight Sir Lancelot and the maid Elaine and all their chivalric woes and their exquisite love story was dainty enough in its new setting. We saw the cooking class at work and the little maids frying fish and preparing the lunch that was to be served at the long table in the airy dining-room which opens into the garden. For myself I was willing to try the cooking, however indigestible, after seeing the cooks. The teacher was an old Japanese gentleman who was as cool, apparently, with these too many “cooks spoiling the broth” as a young chef would not be, patience being the supreme qualification for a cook, as for a Cabinet Minister.
We found the kindergarten department, after all, the most alluring, for the rooms here were more attractive and the little pupils passingly dear. They sang so sweetly and played so charmingly in the wee garden and came running about us with all the abandonment of childhood and the laughter of fairies that we were captives to education at once.
If we could have one of those baby companions as a seat mate we would be willing to go over the whole course again, beset with the terrors of examinations and failure marks as it was.
The teachers of the Peeress’ School are specialists and have received the training of many lands. We had a cosy chat in the director’s study, and he amusingly informed us in very idiomatic English as a beginning “that as he had arrived only a day before us he did not know much more than we about the school.” This admission was certainly promising of great good to the school, as wisdom is not hasty in its judgments, nor rash in its methods.
Looking into that face which bears the beauty of refinement and culture to an eminent degree, as well as that soul light, without which all education is vain and all teachers worse than vain, we felt that in the hands of a man associated for more than twenty years with the education of the youth of Japan, Mr. Gentaro Matsumoto, the future of the Peeress’ School might be even brighter than its past.
KANEKO
The subject of this chapter is one of the forces,—which unobtrusively and unostentatiously is not only felt in Japan, but in the world. He is a world man. In order to pass into this category of world men, a great deal is required, and process is always of intense interest to humanity,—which from the lowest to the highest is aspiring to be felt.
Chosen to represent in the Great Exposition the country of which his proudest boast is to be a son, he combines those distinguished attainments, which a long past of services well rendered have given in turn, and is not only a fine example of Modern Japan at its present moment of leadership, but is also a man of the world,—moulded by the best scholarship of the last century, and while working to-day in the formation and perfecting of his own government, his thought has the catholicity of a statesman and embraces the interests of every land as well.