THE new life which opened up for June was brimming over with interest.
Seki San lived in a regular toy house, which was like a lot of little
boxes fitted into one big one. One whole side was open to the garden and
a tiny railed balcony ran around outside the rooms. The walls were made
of white paper, and when the sun shone all sorts of pretty shadows
danced on them, and when it rained everybody ran about to put up the
wooden screens, and fasten the house up snug and tight until the shower
was over. A flight of low steps cut in the rock led down to a bamboo
wicker, and here green lizards sunned themselves all day and blinked in
friendly fashion at the passer-by.
The night June arrived he had looked about blankly and said:
"But Seki, there isn't any furniture in your house; haven't you got any
bed, or chairs or table?"
And Seki had laughed and told the others and everybody laughed until
June thought he had been impolite.
"I like it," he hastened to add, "it's the nicest house I ever was in,
'cause, don't you see, there isn't anything to break."
It was quite wonderful to see how easily one can get along without
furniture. After one has sat on his heels, and slept on the floor and
eaten off a tiny table no bigger than a footstool, it seems the most
sensible thing in the world. June did hang up one picture and that was a
photograph of his mother. She had left him two, but one was taken with
her hat on.
"I don't like for her always to look as if she was going away!" he said
to Seki San when she wanted to put them both up.
The life, interesting as it was, might have proven lonely, had it not
been for Seki's younger brother, Toro, who was two years older than
June. Although neither could understand a word the other said, yet a
very great friendship had sprung up between them. "We understand just
like dogs," June explained to Seki San.
All day long the two boys played down by the river bank, paddling about
in the shallow shimmering water, building boats and putting them out to
sea, sailing their kites from the hill top, or best of all, sitting long
hours on the parade grounds watching the drilling of the soldiers.
Sometimes when they were very good, Seki San would get permission for
them to play in the daimyo's garden and those days were red-letter days
for June. The garden was very old and very sacred to the Japanese, for
in long years past it had belonged to an old feudal lord, and now it was
the property of the Emperor.
From the first June had cherished a secret belief that somewhere in its
leafy bowers he would come across the Sleeping Beauty. It was all so old
and so still that even the breezes whispered as they softly stirred the
tree-tops. In the very heart of the garden a little blue lake smiled up
at the sky above, and all about its edges tall flags of blue and gold
threw their bright reflections in the water below. A high-arched bridge
all gray with moss, led from one tiny island to another, while along the
shore old stone lanterns, very stiff and stern, stood sentinel over the
quiet of the place. Here and there a tempting little path led back into
mysterious deeps of green, and June followed each one with the half
expectancy of finding the cobwebby old place, and the vine-grown steps,
and the Sleeping Beauty within.
One day when they were there, Toro became absorbed in a little house he
was building for the old stork who stood hour after hour under the cool
shadow of the arching bridge. June, getting tired of the work, wandered
off alone, and as he went deeper into the tangle of green, he thought
more and more of the Sleeping Beauty.
It was cool and mysterious under the close hanging boughs, and the
sunshine fell in white patches on the head of an old stone Buddha, whose
nose was chipped off, and whose forefinger was raised in a perpetual
admonition to all little boys to be good. Just ahead a low flight of
stairs led up to a dark recess where a shrine was half concealed by a
tangle of vines and underbrush. June cautiously mounted the steps; he
was making believe that he was the prince in the fairy-tale, and that
when he should push through the barrier of brier roses he would find the
Sleeping Beauty within the shrine.
As he reached the top step, a sound made him pause and catch his breath.
It was not the ripple of the falling water that danced past him down the
hillside, it was not the murmur of the wind in the bamboos overhead; it
was the deep regular breathing very close to him of some one asleep. For
a moment June wanted to run away, but then he remembered the golden hair
and blue eyes of the princess and with heart beating very fast, he
pushed through the underbrush and stumbled over some one lying in the
grass.