loud. It was a curious expiation and a touching one, but one
not in the least exceptional or uncharacteristic of the spirit of duty
that actuates the best women of the samurai class.

Here is another instance which illustrates this sense of duty, and
desire of atoning for past mistakes or sins. At the time of the
overthrow of the feudal system, the samurai, bred to loyalty to their
own feudal superiors as their highest duty, found themselves ranged on
different sides in the struggle, according to the positions in which
their lords placed themselves. At the end of the struggle, those who had
followed their daimi[=o]s to the field, in defense of the Sh[=o]gunate,
found that they had been fighting against the Emperor, the Son of
Heaven himself, who had at last emerged from the seclusion of centuries
to govern his own empire. Thus the supporters of the Sh[=o]gunate, while
absolutely loyal to their daimi[=o]s, had been disloyal to the higher
power of the Emperor; and had put themselves in the position of traitors
to their country. There was a conflict of principles there somewhat
similar to that which took place in our Civil War, when, in the South,
he who was true to his State became a traitor to his country, and he who
was true to his country became a traitor to his State. Two ladies of the
finest samurai type had, with absolute loyalty to a lost cause, aided by
every means in their power in the defense of the city of Wakamatsu
against the victorious forces of the Emperor. They had held on to the
bitter end, and had been banished, with others of their family and clan,
to a remote province, for some years after the end of the war. In 1877,
eleven years after the close of the War of the Restoration, a rebellion
broke out in the south which required a considerable expenditure of
blood and money for its suppression. When the new war began, these two
ladies presented a petition to the government, in which they begged
that they might be allowed to make amends for their former position of
opposition to the Emperor, by going with the army to the field as
hospital nurses. At that time, no lady in Japan had ever gone to the
front to nurse the wounded soldiers; but to those two brave women was
granted the privilege of making atonement for past disloyalty, by the
exercise of the skill and nerve that they had gained in their experience
of war against the Emperor, in the nursing of soldiers wounded in his
defense.[*223]

In the old day