rson who puts his faith in race-horses and believes nothing except the
Civil Code--was also at Arashima that day. I met him flushed and
excited.

"'Had a lively time," he panted, with a hundred children at his heels.
"There's a sort of roulette table here where you can gamble for cakes. I
bought the owner's stock-in-trade for three dollars and ran the Monte
Carlo for the benefit of the kids--about five thousand of 'em. Never had
such fun in my life. It beats the Simla lotteries hollow. They were
perfectly orderly till they had cleared the tables of everything except
a big sugar-tortoise. Then they rushed the bank, and I ran away."

And he was a hard man who had not played with anything as innocent as
sweetmeats for many years!

When we were all weak with laughing, and the Professor's camera was
mixed up in a tangle of laughing maidens to the confusion of his
pictures, we too ran away from the tea-house and wandered down the river
bank till we found a boat of sewn planks which poled us across the
swollen river, and landed us on a little rocky path overhanging the
water where the iris and the violet ran riot together and jubilant
waterfalls raced through the undergrowth of pine and maple. We were at
the foot of the Arashima rapids, and all the pretty girls of Kioto were
with us looking at the view. Up-stream a lonely black pine stood out
from all its fellows to peer up the bend where the racing water ran
deep in oily swirls. Down-stream the river threshed across the rocks and
troubled the fields of fresh logs on its bosom, while men in blue drove
silver-white boats gunwale-deep into the foam of its onset and hooked
the logs away. Underfoot the rich earth of the hillside sent up the
breath of the turn of the year to the maples that had already caught the
message from the fire-winds of April. Oh! it was good to be alive, to
trample the stalks of the iris, to drag down the cherry-bloom spray in a
wash of dew across the face, and to gather the violets for the mere
pleasure of heaving them into the torrent and reaching out for fairer
flowers.

"What a nuisance it is to be a slave to the camera," said the Professor,
upon whom the dumb influences of the season were working though he knew
it not.

"What a nuisance it is to be a slave to the pen," I answered, for the
spring had come to the land. I had hated the spring for seven years
because to me it meant discomfort.

"Let us go straight home and see the flowers come out i