Page:A Daughter of the Samurai.pdf/329

Rh ,” chirped Chiyo, from behind the stairs; “only this one hasn’t any doors.”

“''Maa! Maa!''” laughed Sister, going over to her. “This is not to ride in, little Chiyo. It’s for a swim!” and she lifted her into an enormous bathtub of red lacquer which from my earliest recollection had stood in a corner of our godown. We used it for holding the cocoons, until the maids were ready to put them on the spindle to twist the silk threads off the poor, little, cooked inhabitants. The tub was marred on the edge, but not chipped anywhere, for the lacquer was of olden time. It still held the deep softness of velvet, and the band of braided bamboo showed beneath the polished surface like water weeds in a clear stream. It must have been very old, for it had been brought into our family as a part of the wedding dowry of my three-times-great-grandmother, the daughter of Yodo daimio, Inaba-no-kami.

“Climb out, Chiyo! Climb out and come here!” called Hanano. “I’ve found a wooden stove-pipe hat—only,” she added, peering into it, “it has a funny inside.”

She was standing in a shadowy corner where a number of miscellaneous articles were gathered on a crowded shelf, and had just lifted the tall cover from a shallow bucket of whitewood, the bottom having in its centre, rising sharp and strong, a short hardwood spike. It was Father’s head-bucket that always had been kept in the closed shelf-closet above our parlour tokonoma.

“Let us go upstairs now,” I said quickly. “Sister, won’t you show the children your wedding cap of silk floss? They have never seen an old-fashioned wedding, where the bride’s cap comes down to the chin.”

I hurried them up the narrow stairs to the room above. I did not want to explain to the children the use of the head-bucket. Their modern, practical education held nothing that would enable them to understand the deep sentiment