before the shrine, Taki and Sudzu sitting just within the doorway.
How familiar, and yet how strange! The chanting, the soft sound of the little bronze gong, Mother’s voice reading the sacred Buddhist scriptures that so often I had heard from the lips of the dear one who long ago had passed away—oh, how quiet and safe it all seemed! The anxious loneliness of months was gone, and there crept into my heart a peace that had not been mine since the protected days when my little family were all together in the dear, dear home of our kind, beloved American mother.
“How alike are the two sides of the world!” I thought. “Both have many gods of little worth, but with one wise, loving, understanding Power over all, the time must surely come when we shall all understand.”
The weeks following were filled with new and unexpected lessons. I had had no thought but that family loyalty and natural affection were the only requisites necessary to draw together my mother and my children. But I soon discovered that, though neither loyalty nor affection was lacking, mutual interests were only possibilities of the future.
My attempts to combine the old and the new frequently resulted in my having to give up the combination and decide wholly in favour of one or the other. With material things this was only an inconvenience; but a puzzling problem, indeed, when it came to Mother’s old-fashioned ideas clashing with the advanced training of modern schools. Mother never criticized. She met all situations with a smile or some pleasant remark about the “new ways of the world”; but it was evident that she greatly distrusted the wisdom of spending so much time on boys’ studies and so little on flower-arranging, tea-serving, koto music, and other womanly accomplishments. And the gymnastic exercises which the children enthusiasti-
