Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/26



It is of no importance where and how I came to know Kumamoto, a young business-clerk of Tokyo. In our becoming acquainted there was nothing that is not the every-day experience of any and every white person living and travelling in Japan. From every outing I would return to my rooms in Yokohama in the dreary certainty that in a few days I would begin to receive touching postal cards, and pathetic epistles from some half-dozen, or perhaps even a full dozen young Japanese who in the praiseworthy effort to practice their English had very adroitly made my acquaintance at different points of my last trip. Because almost always such an enthusiast had proved himself at least for some time a welcome adviser, an interpreter or a moral support in the face of attempts to overcharge in some country inn, politeness required my answering at least the first letter, usually conceived in problematic English as impressively as if a correspondence were being inaugurated which could be cut short only by the death of one of us. If after half a year I had wished to keep in contact with all those who seemed to be passionately desirous of my so doing, it certainly would have been the death of me within a very short time, and my benefactors would have lost their correspondent just the same.

This argument pleased me so much with its adamantine logic that after some time I ceased to answer the letters of my travelling acquaintances altogether. But Kumamoto was a man of enterprise and unusual loyalty. The friedshipfriendship [sic] which he formed for me and the desire to perfect his English led him, after three unanswered letters and postal-cards, to come from Tokyo to Yokohama and hunt me up in my lodgings. He also brought me handsome presents, and offered his services as a guide in Tokyo on days when he could absent himself from his work. They were far apart, and I accepted his friendship the more readily that he wore dark glasses. It is hard