Page:Madame Butterfly; Purple eyes; A gentleman of Japan and a lady; Kito; Glory (1904).djvu/178

 his appearance only, he was quite a patriarch among his short-lived fellows. If you pressed him to tell his age and not lie,—for it is a very gentle infamy of the Japanese to add other years to their own,—he would confess, with such shamefacedness as disarmed your just indignation, that he was but little more than thirty—how much more he would leave you to guess, hoping you would fix it near forty. Again, you would be surprised to see him, now and then, straighten up into a man tall enough to do credit to his Satsuma ancestry, while you had settled it irrevocably that he was below even the medium Japanese stature. And, once more: maybe you had fancied from his humility that his extraction was humble. Not so. He was a samurai. The sole adornment of his severe physiognomy (and perhaps you did not regard it as an adornment at all, nor his physiognomy worth adorning) was the queue which was the badge of his caste. Part of his small earnings went for the regular shaving of his head and the care of this excrescence upon it. He might have worn two swords! He had them at home—wherever that was—to wear. But then he could not have been your