made for another woman who has appealed to
his fancy.

Japan may not need missionaries, but, by all the Mikados that ever
were or will be, her divorce laws need a few revisions more than
the nation needs battleships. You might run a country without
gunboats, but never without women.

This case of Hara is neither extreme nor unusual. I have been face
to face in this flowery kingdom with tragedies of this kind when a
woman was the blameless victim of a man's caprice, and he was
upheld by a law that would shame any country the sun shines on. By
a single stroke of a pen through her name, on the records at the
courthouse, the woman is divorced--sometimes before she knows it.
Then she goes away to hide her disgrace and her broken heart--not
broken because of her love for the man who has cast her off, but
because, from the time she is invited to go home on a visit and her
clothes are sent after her, on through life, she is marked. If she
has children, the chances are that the husband retains possession
of them, and she is seldom, if ever, permitted to see them.

I know your words of caution would be, Mate, not to be rash in my
condemnations, to remember the defects of my own land. I am
neither forgetful nor rash. I do not expect to reform the country,
neither am I arguing. I am simply telling you facts.

I know, too, that some Fountain Head of knowledge will rise from
the back seat and beg to state that the new civil code contains
many revisions and regulates divorce. The only trouble with the
new civil code is that it keeps on containing the revisions and
only in theory do they get beyond the books in which they are
written.

Next to my own, in my affections, stands this sunlit,
flower-covered land which has given the world men and women
unselfishly brave and noble. But there are a few deformities in
the country's law system that need the knife of a skilled surgeon,
amputating right up to the last joint; among these the divorce laws
made in ancient times by the gone-to-dust but still sacred and
revered ancestors. Who would give a hang for any old ancestor so
cut on the bias?

I cannot write any more. I am too agitated to be entertaining.

I wrote Sada a revised version of Blue Beard that would turn that
venerable gentleman gray, could he read it. Uncle will be sure to.
I dare him to solve the puzzle of my fancy writing. But I made
Sada San know the Prince Red Head was coming to her rescue, if the
engin