Page:Madame Butterfly; Purple eyes; A gentleman of Japan and a lady; Kito; Glory (1904).djvu/179

 riki'-man. They were long Kio blades—not such as the Tokio fops carried, but swords that were heavy enough to cleave a skull if they were but let fall. Old swords. And they had done this grisly office. They were nicked in a way any samurai understood. But of that a little later. At first the queue might have struck you as not only another ambiguity, but an arrogance. There was nothing " military " or stalwart about the poor devil. His calves were knubby and fluctuating. His bowed legs, instead of strength, spoke of feebleness. His coloring was a mere matter of patchwork, from the African blackness of his sunken cheeks to the ivory ghastliness of the frontal bones where the tight-drawn skin outlined the sutures. And he had no pride that thing which no samurai ever before lacked.

Kito's attire (like that of his fellows in those days—I have since seen baggy breeches which make a 'riki'-man look like a Zouave) was just as much as, and no more than, modern Japanese virtue enacted into law (after our Western kind) obliged him to cover his former nakedness with. Heaven be praised! the law was made for the treaty