“No, not yet. I’ve just come, you know. And you?”
“N-no. But—”
I could not say the rest as my father and aunt parted and the crowd was pushing between us, and so I waved my hand to say good-by to Tomo-chan.
We soon came almost to the end of the gay portion of the street, and after a few booths a touch of festival air would be gone, when my father halted before a molasses candy booth, and, to my great joy, bought a nickel’s worth of cake. We got a big, swollen bagful; this was for me and for our stay-at-home folks. I wished that I had met Tomo-chan once more.
CHAPTER VIII
SUMMER DAYS
A Swimming School—How I Was Taught to Swim—Diving—The Old Home Week—Return of the Departed Souls—Visiting the Ancestral Graves—The Memorable Night—A Village Dance.
The third summer in Tokyo had come. The air was fresh and cool, while the morning-glories in our back yard were blooming lavishly, and the Ainu chrysanthemums in white, pink, and purple, and the late irises were seen carried round the street in flower-venders’ baskets. But it soon got warmer as they vanished from the sight till I found it hot even in one piece of a thin garment over my body, though my mother starched it for me just stiff enough for the air to pass through from one sleeve to the other.
In one of the canals near by, an annual swimming-school was opened. The place was inviting in hot weather, besides, it was such fun to bathe with hosts of boys, and to learn how to swim. I must confess that I could not swim yet. I thought at first that it was quite an easy thing, because I often saw a man swimming with his feet and performing such a trick with his hands as peeling a pear with a knife and eating it. But after a few trials I was obliged to correct my notion to such a degree as to consider swimming an extremely difficult as well as dangerous undertaking. Not only my body was found to be something between a block of hard wood and a stone, and much nearer to the latter, but once it stayed so long in the water, head and all, that I experienced pretty nearly what it was to get drowned. But all this I did in secret and did not tell to any of my folks. Indeed my mother was keeping my younger brother from the water by telling him about the story of a sea-monkey who would stretch his exceptionally long arm and drag people into the depths, especially boys who went swimming against their mother’s remonstrance. As an elder brother, I was bound to set a good example.