Poor Atlas! I came to be sorry for Atlas when I took his place. For my infantile wish came true. The time The time came when I took up and carried on the burdens of the world. So I understood, and I was sorry for Atlas. Not at first.

It was pleasant for a while, that sense of power, of virtue, of capable responsibility; that fine, uplifting feeling that the world had need of me and that I was up to the requirements. I worried some. I trembled often at the thought of what would happen if I should weaken, stumble, fall! And I grew weary now and then, oh, so tired! I suffered secretly from the indifference, the ingratitude, of the world, and especially of those whom it was my duty to scold or punish. The world seemed to doubt me, my motives, my fitness for my task. And then, worst of all, sometimes I doubted myself. That was awful. But I stuck.

I stuck to the world till

One day, when my vanity was low, my horse-sense high, and something else was a-borning, I declared (to myself) that I was through. I would carry the whole load no longer. It was too much. It was n't fair. Let others bear their share. I would stand from under and let the darned thing go to the deuce. And I acted upon that immoral impulse. I stepped down and out and stood on one side to see what would happen.

And nothing happened!

That's what I would like to tell all the Atlases I know. And I know a good many now. After I got out from under, I saw that I was mistaken on another point: I was not the only one that carried the whole load alone. Statesmen, generals, and peace dele

gates, reformers, business men, and labor leaders-everybody bears all the burdens of this whole old world.

And everybody needs to know, and I yearn to tell him, how, when I, even I, quit the job, nothing happened. Nothing, you understand; not a thing. The world went right on whirling along its own accustomed way; all up in the air, of course, and wrong, all wrong. But it went on. It did not fall. It did not fall!

It hurts, this discovery. I admit that it is astonishing and, at first blush, humiliating. The observation that I was not indispensable was a blow to me, as it might be to others. I felt as a great business man must feel who, having built up, singlehanded, a great business and run it, with all its hundreds or thousands of employees, all alone all his life, retires or is retired, and then sees the business go right on as before; better, perhaps; expanding, branching out, improving. I felt, as a statesman feels who, thrown out of power, has to stand by and see his country prosper and grow and rejoice despite the idiotic policies of his successor, just as it did under his. It is pretty bad.

But think of it. That's what I did. And when I thought a moment; when I sat me down to reflect; when I put aside the pain and considered what it meant to me and, therefore, to all lesser men; when I realized that it meant that I did not have to shoulder all these white men's burdens all the time, but might, when I liked, lift on my end of a part of some one of the many, many loads, or not, I found that it was a relief to my back and a release of my capacity for amusement, both at home and abroad, both with myself and my fellow-men.

unchecked through several of its paper walls, the while clamorously demanding his overdue bath, board, and bed in a manner not customarily used toward a chance host.

Things move with a certain Oriental leisure even in Japan, but the time came when, after a meal which might have been less deliberately an attempt to be European, and a bath which was not particularly noted for its privacy, the piles of quilts were at last spread upon the spotless straw matting of our capacious second-story chamber, and the cylindrical bean-bags lay ready to receive our weary heads. Beyond a miniature gorge the darkness was sprinkled with hundreds of the lights of Tokio; to our ears came across the intervening gardens the mild night noises of Ushigome-ku, one of the most populous wards of the densely populated Japanese capital, the subdued scraping of wooden scraping of wooden getas most conspicuous among them. Surely we could not complain of delay or of lack of thoroughness in the granting of our wish for a glimpse of home life in Japan.

§ 2

As a matter of fact, while it is picturesque at a distance of space or time, actual living in the flimsy toy houses of Japan is far from convenient to one reared in Western fashion. It is glorious to be able to nudge one's neighbor during a performance of "Madame Butterfly" and hoarsely to boast, "I once lived like that,"-I am, of course, speaking of the scenery, not of the story, but it is quite as inglorious to forget for a moment the frailty of paper walls and thrust one's head through those same sliding shoji. To be able, and expected, to run about

on bare or stockinged feet indoors, leaving all the dust and mud of the street-and from Tokio down, one or both are rarely lacking in Japanat the threshold, has an Elysian sound, a suggestion of speckless golden stairs and noiselessly flitting angels. It is an unusual Westerner, however, who does not feel his dignity swiftly evaporate when deprived of his customary underpinnings. And it is not merely his shoes which are de trop in a Japanese house; for ideal convenience he should leave his legs, too, at the door. The awkward school-boy's difficulty in disposing of his hands and arms is mild indeed beside that of the Occidental guest faced with the problem of what to do with his lower members on the cushion-scattered matting of a Japanese room. In flowing kimono it is bad enough; in trousers, which custom decrees shall retain the suggestion of a crease, it is disheartening. It is all very well, too, to be able to tuck beds away in a closet during the day, to have a room uncluttered by furniture; but what of the total lack of hooks, drawers, shelves, or storingplaces? Japan is the original land for hanging things on the floor.

More painful still to us of an ungregarious race is the utter lack of seclusion in Japanese buildings. Since that initiation in Tokio we have inhabited a dozen of them, mainly inns and public hostelries. And of the many petty annoyances of life, of which Japan has her share, even as other lands, perhaps the most exasperating, the most wearying, is the impossibility of sometimes being alone. No wonder so many Japanese turn Shinto or Buddhist recluses and retire to shrine or temple, though even for those there is little genuine seclusion.

The romantic paper walls have slight ability indeed in deflecting sound. Let the man four rooms removed in a native inn turn over in his sleep, and you spring awake, ready to do battle with an intruder. Let a pair of fellowguests engage in one of those interminable conversations which seem to be most frequent toward midnight and beyond, and a megaphone could not increase the din. The Japanese are not a noisy race. Verbal strife is rare, domestic quarrels unknown, or at least inaudible; the streets, habitually innocent of paving, give back dust rather than uproar; the gentle-voiced temple bells of all Japan could not equal the din of a single belfry-hung copper kettle of South America. Yet if all else fails, at least the omnipresent servant can be relied upon to shorten one's springless sleep. Besides the paper-covered shoji forming the walls of the room proper, there are the heavier sliding-walls of the house itself, usually of solid boards, occasionally of glass. No human power can induce house or inn servant to close these before one has fallen asleep; all the studied cruelties of the Orient could not coax her to leave one of them ajar during the night, nor to refrain from opening them with a mighty slamming and stowing them away in their day-time box at the house corners at the first peep of dawn. From that moment on, if not, indeed, during the brief night itself, one's most private chamber is never one's own. On every possible provocation, often with none at all, the soft-footed servantgirls patter in and out, shoving aside the semi-transparent shoji not only without a "by your leave," but without a suggestion of warning, magnificently oblivious to the even complete

state of nudity of the helpless inmate. Would one bathe? A maid will make every effort to assist at the disrobing; a "bath-boy," if not an assistant of the just then still less welcome gender, must needs force his way in to lend a helping hand during the ablutions, while the common tub is almost certain to hold already a denizen or two, smiling a welcome to the hesitating new-comer. Fortunately, the temperature of a Japanese bath, as unendurable to the Occidental as the quilt of arctic thickness with which he is expected to cover himself on the most breathless summer night, furnishes an inoffensive excuse for preferring a spigot and one of the wooden halfbuckets scattered about the flooded floor.

Though dining-rooms are not included in the equipment of a Japanese hostelry, let not the humanity-weary guest fancy that his meals at least may be taken in delicious solitude. A serving-maid or two will always be with him, now touching face to mat as she places a more or less edible dish before him, the rest of the time sitting on her heels within arm'slength, watching with the inscrutable face of a bronze Buddha, yet with eyes which catch every faintest suggestion of a faux pas, his inexperienced wielding of the intractable chop-sticks. Constantly on every side he has the sense of being but a thin paper sheet removed from other beings, those ubiquitous human beings with which all Japan teems, so that in street or train, on country roads or mountain trails, nowhere can he escape for a brief moment, when the mood is upon him, from his fellow-mortals. And through it all lurks that burden of his superfluous legs, the necessity of

squatting when he would sit, and the subconscious worry as to where shoes should be worn and where removed, intensified rather than lightened in those scattered establishments ranked as "semi-foreign." Our Japanese stay, to be sure, we shall never regret, but we are often thankful it is only a brief stepping-stone to China, where tables and chairs and beds and hooks and less ephemeral foot-wear will again be found among the properties of life.

& 3

I ought really not to say a word about Japan, with only one long month of scurrying to and fro in it. "Oldtimers" of the treaty ports, who have spent at least half a lifetime in the country, would be scathing at the suggestion of so brief a stay giving the slightest food for thought. But "oldtimers" the world over rarely deign to pour out on paper their own distilled wisdom, and such bits as they drop conversationally usually suggest that their few immediate trees have long since cut off their view of the woods. At any rate, though China was our real goal, there seemed no good reason to dash blindly past the still interesting, if better known, lands which bound it on the east, and once here, there can be no serious harm in recording fleeting impressions.

And I am quite willing that there be charged to the brevity of my sojourn the notion that Japan is overratedthat Matsushima and Toba are pretty, pine-clad clusters of islands, to be sure, but in no way superior to scores of similar, but rarely mentioned, scenes in our own capacious land; that the Inland Sea is beautiful, yet no more so than many a stretch of water along our Northern border which has not

had its tithe of publicity; that Enoshima is, after all, a commonplace handful of land with some trees and caves and shrines; that Miyajima really consists of a single torii picturesquely set below high tide, and of atrociously high prices; that many a sea-flanked strip of sand, viewed undignifiedly through the outspread legs, is as genuine a "bridge of heaven" as Ama-no-hashidate. Yet to say that and cease would be to leave the falsest of impressions. A wrathful Englishman we ran across within the shadow of the giant Buddha of Kamakura voiced the conviction, born of a two-months' commercial struggle with its often exasperating people, that Japan is nothing more than camouflage, clever publicity, and the deliberate spreading abroad of false notions. In certain moods it would be easy to agree with him. With the exception of France, and perhaps of Italy, Japan is, partly by chance, partly by design, the most advertised country on the globe, and much preinformation leads inevitably to swollen anticipations. But once the heat of experience has shrunken these to normal size, once the traveler realizes that it is delicacy of detail which he must look for, that intensive cultivation of all they have is natural and inevitable to the crowding people of this little island nation, his disappointments will lessen and perhaps disappear. It is surely to his credit rather than otherwise that the little brown Nihon-jin has made the most of his opportunities, and not particularly reprehensible to have sung, or caused to be sung, to the world praises of what to him are genuinely beloved scenes. For the Japanese truly and frankly loves the beauties of nature. He has a