ought and died for his emperor instead of against him, that
his soul was probably in Buddha's bosom instead of wandering in the
alien dark Meido, unredeemed, that his body had been burned on a pyre
instead of left to rot in that great ditch in Jokoji. This these old
imperialists fancied their duty. The little boy sobbed there behind the
shoji.

"Sh!" whispered the uncle from Osaka.

"Sh!" echoed the uncle from Kobe. "He wakes. If he should hear, all
would be of no avail."

They covered the fire of the hibachi and caused a darkness in which they
stole away.

YET--A LIE LOOSENS FEALTY

IV

YET--A LIE LOOSENS FEALTY

The little boy slept no more. He got forth from his small room and made
the offerings, and lighted the incense which he had forgotten that
tired, joyous day, and then he took down his father's ihai, and touching
to it his forehead, pledged all his lives to make true that which had
been made false. For, yes, their names were the same, his father's and
his, and the gods are easily deceived--Shijiro Arisuga should be upon
the brass of those who had died for the emperor! The gods would attend
to the forgetting which must follow.

But this was not enough. The filial sin they had let him commit vexed
his little soul.

Where he had made a dim wisp of fibre to burn in oil before the tablet
of his father, he rubbed a prayer from between his small pink palms.

"Father and all the augustnesses, I did not know," he said childishly,
"that your spirit waited in the dark Meido for me to set it free. There
were lies!"

Then he stopped and waited, for the tears ran down his face and choked
his voice.

"It would have been better to teach me truth than lies. For they have
not made me wish to fight and die for the emperor--lies. But this, this
that you wait, wait always in the cold dark Meido for me to set you on
your way to the sleep in Buddha's bosom, this it is which makes me
promise, here, now, by all the eight hundred thousand, by my own soul's
reincarnations, all of them, that you shall be free; that your name
shall yet stand among those on the brass who are not forgotten."

"I did not know," he sobbed again. "And so I sang songs and made poems
while you wandered there. I did not know. I was only a little boy. But
now I am at once a man. It is true, august father, I must not lie to
you, that I would rather be at Shiba with Yone; I would rather walk on
the hills with her hand in mine; I would