Page:A Daughter of the Samurai.pdf/261

Rh “Again she smiles upon us! After a storm she is always doubly beautiful, and all the world is doubly glad!”

“That’s a very moral story,” said Hanano thoughtfully. “I feel kind of sorry for Mr. Wind and Mrs. Rain, but I love Lady Moon. Let us fix a table like they have in Japan. Clara will give us the things and the moonshine is beautiful on our porch edge.”

“I have something just as good,” said Matsuo, starting for the stairway. “Wait a moment.”

He brought a small wooden box and put it on the table. It was a phonograph with records on spools of wax and with a little horn attached, into which we could talk and make records of our own voices. Matsuo was to start to Japan in a few days on a business trip and he had selected the phonograph as a gift for my mother, that it might carry to her the voice of her little granddaughter. We called Mother, and all of us had quite an exciting time watching Matsuo arrange the machine. Then he took his seat before it, with Hanano on his lap, and they had a rehearsal. Not until she began to prattle away in her sweet, childish English did it dawn upon us that her puzzled grandmother would not be able to understand a word that she said.

This made us realize what a little American we had in our Japanese nest, and brought directly before us one of the great problems of Japan.

“If our daughter were a boy,” Matsuo said that night, “we might have reason to look serious. I should not want to prepare my son to live in a country where, if capable, he would not be welcome to occupy the highest position his country has to offer its citizens.”

“Even for our daughter,” I replied, “there is no permanent place in this country; nor in Japan either, with only an American education.”