im from death and that it was now through
her sole influence his reputation as an artist grew. Noble patrons
came to the little cottage bearing rolls of white silk, upon which they
entreated humbly, "That the illustrious and honorable young painter,
Kano Tatsu, would some day, when he might not be augustly
inconvenienced by so doing, trace a leaf or a cloud,--anything, in
fact, that fancy could suggest, so that it was the work of his own
inimitable hand. For the condescension they trusted that he would
allow them to give a present of money,--as large a sum as he was
willing to name."

"A second Sesshu! A second Sesshu!" old Kano would murmur to himself,
in subdued ecstacy. "So did they load his ship with silk, four
centuries ago!"

Of most of these commissions, Tatsu never heard. Kano did not wish the
boy's work to be blown wide over the great city as it had been blown
along the mountain slopes of Kiu Shiu. Nor did he wish the thought of
gain or of personal ambition to creep into Tatsu's heart. Now he spent
most of the day-lit hours secluded in his little study, painting those
scenes and motives suggested by the keynote of his mood. Of late he
had begun to read, with deep interest, the various essays on art,
gathered in Kano's small, choice library. He would sometimes talk with
his father about art, and let the eager old man demonstrate to him the
different brush-strokes of different masters. The widely diversified
schools of painting as they had flourished throughout the centuries of
his country's social and religious life aroused in him an impersonal
curiosity. He began to try experiments, realizing, perhaps, that to a
genius strong and sane as his even fantastic ventures in technique were
little more than bright images flecking, for an instant, the immutable
surface of a mirror.

All methods were essayed,--the liquid, flowing line of the Chinese
classics, Tosa's nervous, shattered lightning-strokes of painted
motion, the soft, gray reveries of the great Kano school of three
centuries before, when, to the contemplative mind all forms of nature,
whether of the outer universe or in the soul of man, were but
reflecting mirrors of a single faith; the heaped-up gold and malachite
of Korin's decoration, sweet realistic studies of the Shijo school,
even down to the horrors of "abura-ye," oil-painting, as it is
practised in the Yeddo of to-day, each had for him its special interest
and its inspiration. He lean