The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-12-10

master, kindly, to his shivering pupil, until you will be quite warm" Under the busy barefoot tread of the child was the sound of the breaking of fro zen snow. A few minutes later the child was pulling and perspiring like a wrestler in summer. That was the be- ginning of the training of his mucles. In his ripe days he was sent to the master of jiujitsu.
 And the stomach is the first, natur- ally, that would feel the hastening eff feet of the athletic training of the Nip- pon soldier. Always they have been fed upon simple food, rice and the products of the fields, fishes and not much meat. One day the father of my friend, whose history am trying to tell came to him and said: What would you do if your castle were besieged, and you had no food to eat and no water to drink?'' The child's lips were to young to frome a steady answer to this question of his father. His father went on: Days of starvation might come to the fighting men of Nippon any day and the time to prepare for the days of want is in the days of plenty and peace" The child found that this was. not an idle threat. His rations were suddenly cut down. For weeks he was allotted a few bowlsof rice anda fewpieces of pickled daikon Ca kind of radish). Moreover, in the days of this made-to-oder star vation siege his father had him climb a mountain, chop wood, roll the logs, and subjected him to all manner of physi- cal exertion. The days of siege are not likely to be idle, said his father by way of explanation One daywhen he was 15 years of age, he was sent out upon a long journey. His servant accompanied him, and was allowed to have two bowls of rice and a dried piece of fish and two cups of water per day to sustain himself. At one time he was sent to Mount Atago, which is a historic moun- tain standing between the castle and town of Kameyama and the ancient flower capital of Kyoto. He was told to spend 15 days in the mountain and sustain himself on what he could find with his own hands. These are some of the reasons why the Nippon soldier is able to cover over 15 miles of the Ko- rean road per day.
 Much more essential, however, than the training of the muscle and of the stomach is the education of the nerve and of the soul. As if it were an in- cident of yesterday, I recall how we used to go to an old deserted house which stood on the outskirts of the castled town of Kameyama. There was a genial gathering of small boys, rang ing from z to 16 years of age. An old man presided over the gathering. Be- yond all cavil he was the most wonder ful story-teller I have ever seen;, espec- ially in his fund of ghost stories was he rich beyond expression. I fancy your Edgar Allan Poe would turn green with envy had he had the fortune of making his acquaintance with one of 10000 ghost stories which used to ooze out, so to speak, from the aged lips of this wonderful story teller of ours. The diiapidated house in question stood with it's back against thick bamboo grove, which was about 300 yards wide. The bamboo grove stretched away in the direction of a moss-covered grave yard of an ancient temple of the castl- ca town. On the night of our gathering the old man counted the number of his boy guests. He took out as many can dies and went into the graveyard. There he lit them and hid them in all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable corners of the silent city so thickly peopled with tombstones, Then this old man used ito tell his famous ghost stories, the more horrible 1t is difficult for me to conceive. When the midnight hour came we drew lots, and the boy who drew out No went through the S00-yard stretch of the thick bamboo grove in the thick darkness of naid- night into the graveyard to find one of the candles and bring it back to the old man. Now, the patch that led through the bamboo grove to the graveyard was remarkable enough to