Captain June

								

himself but he knew a great deal about hooks and eyes and belt pins.
When mother got in a hurry she lost things, and experience had taught
him that it was much easier to fasten the pin where it belonged than to
spend fifteen minutes on the floor looking for it.
At last when all the bags and trunks were ready, and the pilot and the
health officer had come aboard, and everybody had waited until they
could not wait another moment, the passengers were brought ashore in a
wheezy, puffy launch, and were whirled up to the hotel in queer little
buggies drawn by small brown men with bare legs and mushroom hats, and
great sprawling signs on their backs.
Since then June had sat at a front window too engrossed to speak. Just
below him lay the Bund or sea-road, with the wall beyond where the white
waves broke in a merry splash and then fell back to the blue water
below. Out in the harbor there were big black merchant steamers, and
white men-of-war, there were fishing schooners, and sampans with wobbly,
crooked oars. But the street below was too fascinating to see much
beyond it. Jinrikishas were coming and going with passengers from the
steamers and the coolies laughed and shouted to each other in passing.
Women and girls clattered by on wooden shoes with funny bald-headed,
slant-eyed babies strapped on their backs. On the hotel steps, a little
girl in a huge red turban and a gorgeous dress of purple and gold was
doing handsprings, while two boys in fancy dress sang through their
noses and held out fans to catch the pennies that were tossed from the
piazza above.
If Cinderella, and Jack the Giant Killer, and Aladdin and Ali Baba had
suddenly appeared, June would not have been in the least surprised. It
was where they all lived, there could be no possible doubt as to that.
Here was the biggest picture book he had ever seen, the coming true of
all the fairy-tales he had ever heard.
He was dimly conscious that in the room behind him Seki San was
unpacking trunks and boxes, and that his mother was coming and going and
leaving hurried instructions. Once he heard her say, "Don't say anything
to him about it, Seki, I'll tell him when he has to be told." But just
then a man went by with a long pole across his shoulder and round
baskets on each end, and in the baskets were little shining silver
fishes, and June forgot all about what his mother was saying.
June's father was a young army officer stationed in the Philippines.
June was born there but when still a baby he had been desperately ill
and the doctor had sent him back to the States and said he must not
return for many years. It was a great grief to them all that they had to
be separated, but Capt. Royston had gotten two leaves of absence and
come home to them, and now this summer June and his mother had come all
the way from California to meet him in Japan.
June was not his real name. It was Robert Rogers Royston, Junior, but