houses as closely as possible. Many of them keep standing in the local papers such announcements as this:

"We will duplicate the price of any article advertised in a mail-order catalogue."

Such a statement does not secure all the trade, but it goes a long way to convince the buyers of the value of their home store.

The vividness of the illustrated advertising done by the mail-order houses, compared with that done by the country merchants, is held by many to be responsible for the success attained in securing trade, and it is probably a most important factor. The bulky catalogue introduces its readers to hundreds of articles never before dreamed of as possibilities of the home; it pictures these goods in all their imagined beauty and describes them in terms of eulogy. The reader sees therein an opportunity for supplying a want never before suspected, the country merchant had never suggested this line of thought to him.

Herein lies a lesson for the country merchant of to-day. The latter, with his proximity to the buyer, his acquaintance with the community needs and abilities, his weekly access to the homes through the country paper which is read from first to last column by every member of the family, his lessened freight rates. on large quantities instead of single orders, has an advantage over the city merchant which he ought to utilize, and which, in many places, he is seizing as a lever for trade-bringing.

The country papers which get no local advertising from the mail-order houses (many will not admit it to their columns) help along this home buying sentiment by vigorous sermons on the value of standing up for home industries. Here is a sample of their argument:

"When your baby died, did the mailorder house send its sympathy? When your crop failed, did it offer to carry you a while? When your daughter was married, did it send a present? Has it helped build

the churches, the schoolhouses, or the bridges of the community? Stand by your home merchant who has done all of these things. Help home industries and home people."

The country department store that uses modern methods in trade and advertising cannot be broken up. Its business is so interwoven with the industry of the people that it grows as the community grows; but there is not room for many such stores in a given town, not so many as there would be if the mail-order house and the city department house with its mail-order division did not exist.

Then there is the grocery store, no mail-order house can destroy that. It is true that the master of the household may order sugar, coffee, prunes, canned goods, and oatmeal sent by freight; but the majority of the eatables must be seen by the mistress of the home before being paid for. Likewise the men's clothing store,―little that men and boys wear can be bought satisfactorily at a distance of five hundred miles. So with the hardware and implement house; the farmer may order a windmill or a lot of binding twine by mail, but he gets his nails, stoves, building hardware, and implements at home. So with drugs, millinery, harness, and furniture stores,

there is

a local demand for them because their articles are such that most people want to examine the goods before the order is given.

But all these lose some trade to the city. In every community many people visit the nearest big town once or twice during the year, - and those who go oftenest are usually the most generous spenders. On every trip some purchases are made, often the principal ones of the family or individual for the season.

This city buying is naturally most common in towns within short distances of the metropolis. With the frequent train service that enters the city depots the temptation to buy in the greater markets is irresistible. For fifty miles outside of St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and other

large cities, there is little life visible in the business streets of the towns. Deserted store buildings are common, paint is needed, many of the towns look as if the very life-blood had been sapped out of them. There may be beautiful residence streets and fine homes, but prosperous stores are few.

It is, naturally, impossible to put a stop to personal expenditures in the city by those who visit trade centres, except as public opinion may discourage it; but the country merchants through their business organizations endeavor to compel jobbing houses to cooperate with them in the protection of trade.

If the purchase be made of a firm that has also a wholesale department serving a merchant in the buyer's town, that home merchant is not worrying; he will get a check for the amount of his margin on the goods sold. The profit comes as surely as if he had made the sale. A good deal of public sentiment exists in the small town against city purchasing trips, and very little publicity is sought by the buyers concerning them. Everybody likes to keep up an appearance of loyalty to the home merchants, whether it be practiced or not. In one western town the leading daily paper undertook a movement to compel home buying by publishing each day the names of shoppers who went to the large city forty miles away. It was an heroic measure, and the paper soon discontinued it because of the enemies it made among subscribers, — but while the tactics continued they kept many a buyer from leaving town.

The retail trade associations—and the country merchant generally agrees with them-look with great disfavor on the parcels post, considering the scheme as another menace to their trade. "If," say they, “the rural delivery carrier is to become a hauler of express, we may as well go out of business, the farmer now is compelled to come to town after most goods he orders by mail; then he may remain on his farm and have them brought to his door." The up-to-date country

VOL. 95- NO. 1

merchant, like his competitor, is utilizing the rural delivery. In many counties half the people can be reached by it. Being nearer to the people, he is finding ways to combat the foreigner, and is including modern methods and better system as prominent features in his campaign.

If a wholesale dealer sells ploughs to a grocer who proposes to put in these as a side line, the officers of an association, with a thousand or more retail implement dealers as members, ask him for an explanation. If he does not wish to be blacklisted by the legitimate trade, he must regain good standing. Such is the country merchant's protest against the transference of trade from himself to the city dealer and for the specialization of business within certain bounds.

So the country merchant has friends left, and while he finds his trade curtailed and his business lessened by the widereaching mail-order house, he fills a place in the economy of the rural portions of the nation that cannot be taken from him. He is close to the heart of the neighborhood. He may be harassed by rivalries and annoyed by the freight shipments from the city, but he is certain to be a factor in the community life, and it is probable that he will, as he accepts the new conditions and learns how to adapt his business to the modern ways, become even more influential. There is more business to be done now than of old, and he can spare a large portion of it and yet have in his hands the making of a comfortable living. His success depends on his own aggressiveness and his own grasp of modern conditions.

Vivid in the memory of the passing generation is the old-fashioned country store. To-day, though 56,000,000 of the 84,000,000 people of this nation live outside towns of 8000 population and over, and hence are more or less patrons of country stores, they find these business houses influenced by the advancement of the times and despoiled of much of the picturesque individuality that formerly made them such cheerful resorts,

such sympathetic features of the village. The country store we shall have always with us. Though the old-time variety is found only here and there, and has for its keeper some aged gentleman or curlwearing gentlewoman who seems a ghost of the past among the flesh and blood of the present, the type remains. The country store shares the development of the times; it sells syrup in bottles instead of from a keg; it disposes of butter in paper packages, and of dried beef in tin cans;

the cracker barrel and the open coffee sack are seldom seen; breakfast-food boxes succeed the bulk oatmeal supply. It encounters the perils of city competition and combats new business conditions, but it is yet the nearest and most intimate commercial affair for hundreds of thousands of homes. It may not be so great a factor in the life of the people as it once was, but the country store is certain to remain an essential element in our existence.

IN the town of Uji, in the province of Yamashiro, there lived, about six hundred years ago, a young samurai named Itō Tatéwaki Norisuké, whose ancestors were of the Heïké clan. Itō was of handsome person and amiable character, a good scholar and apt at arms. But his family were poor; and he had no patron among the military nobility, so that his prospects were small. He lived in a very quiet way, devoting himself to the study of literature, and having (says the Japanese story-teller) "only the Moon and the Wind for friends."

One autumn evening, as he was taking a solitary walk in the neighborhood of the hill called Kotobikiyama, he happened to overtake a young girl who was following the same path. She was richly dressed, and seemed to be about eleven or twelve years old. Itō greeted her, and said, "The sun will soon be setting, damsel, and this is rather a lonesome place. May I ask if you have lost your way?" She . looked up at him with a bright smile, and answered deprecatingly: "Nay! I am a miya-dzukai, serving in this neighborhood; and I have only a little way to go."

1 August-residence servant.

By her use of the term miya-dzukai, Itō knew that the girl must be in the service of persons of rank; and her statement surprised him, because he had never heard of any family of distinction residing in that vicinity. But he only said: "I am returning to Uji, where my home is. Perhaps you will allow me to accompany you on the way, as this is a very lonesome place." She thanked him gracefully, seeming pleased by his offer; and they walked on together, chatting as they went. She talked about the weather, the flowers, the butterflies, and the birds; about a visit that she had once made to Uji; about the famous sights of the capital, where she had been born; and the moments passed pleasantly for Itō, as he listened to her fresh prattle. Presently, at a turn in the road, they entered a hamlet, densely shadowed by a grove of young

trees.

[Here I must interrupt the story to tell you that, without having actually seen them, you cannot imagine how dark some Japanese country villages remain even in the brightest and hottest weather. In the neighborhood of Tokyō itself there are many villages of this kind. At a short dis

tance from such a settlement you see no houses: nothing is visible but a dense grove of evergreen trees. The grove, which is usually composed of young cedars and bamboos, serves to shelter the village from storms, and also to supply timber for various purposes. So closely are the trees planted that there is no room to pass between the trunks of them: they stand straight as masts, and mingle their crests so as to form a roof that excludes the sun. Each thatched cottage occupies a clear space in the plantation, the trees forming a fence about it, double the height of the building. Under the trees it is always twilight, even at high noon; and the houses, morning or evening, are half in shadow. What makes the first impression of such a village almost disquieting is, not the transparent gloom, which has a certain weird charm of its own, but the stillness. There may be fifty or a hundred dwellings; but you see nobody; and you hear no sound but the twitter of invisible birds, the occasional crowing of cocks, and the shrilling of cicada. Even the cicada, however, find these groves too dim, and sing faintly; being sun-lovers, they prefer the trees outside the village. I forgot to say that you may sometimes hear a viewless shuttle -chaka-ton, chaka-ton; — but that familiar sound, in the great green silence, seems an elfish happening. The reason of the hush is simply that the people are not at home. All the adults, excepting some feeble elders, have gone to the neighboring fields, the women carrying their babies on their backs; and most of the children have gone to the nearest school, perhaps not less than a mile away. Verily, in these dim hushed villages, one seems to behold the mysterious perpetuation of conditions recorded in the texts of Kwang-Tze:

"The ancients who had the nourishment of the world wished for nothing, and the world had enough;-they did nothing, and all things were transformed; their stillness was abysmal, and the people were all composed."]

The village was very dark when Itō reached it; for the sun had set, and the after-glow made no twilight in the shadowing of the trees. "Now, kind sir," the child said, pointing to a narrow lane opening upon the main road, "I have to go this way." "Permit me, then, to see you home," Ito responded; and he turned into the lane with her, feeling rather than seeing his way. But the girl soon stopped before a small gate, dimly visible in the gloom, a gate of trelliswork, beyond which the lights of a dwelling could be seen. "Here," she said, "is the honorable residence in which I serve. As you have come thus far out of your way, kind sir, will you not deign to enter and to rest a while?" Itō assented. He was pleased by the informal invitation; and he wished to learn what persons of superior condition had chosen to reside in so lonesome a village. He knew that sometimes a family of rank would retire in this manner from public life, by reason of government displeasure or political trouble; and he imagined that such might be the history of the occupants of the dwelling before him. Passing the gate, which his young guide opened for him, he found himself in a large quaint garden. A miniature landscape, traversed by a winding stream, was faintly distinguishable. "Deign for one little moment to wait," the child said; "I go to announce the honorable coming;" and she hurried toward the house. It was a spacious house, but seemed very old, and built in the fashion of another time. The sliding doors were not closed; but the lighted interior was concealed by a beautiful bamboo curtain extending along the gallery-front. Behind it shadows were moving-shadows of women; and suddenly the music of a koto rippled into the night. So light and sweet was the playing that Itō could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. A slumbrous feeling of delight stole over him as he listened, a delight strangely mingled with sadness. He wondered how any woman could have learned to play thus,

won

dered whether the player could be a woman, - wondered even whether he was hearing earthly music; for enchantment seemed to have entered into his blood with the sound of it.

The soft music ceased; and almost at the same moment Itō found the little miya-dzukai beside him. "Sir," she said, "it is requested that you will honorably enter." She conducted him to the entrance, where he removed his sandals; and an aged woman, whom he thought to be the Rōjo, or matron of the household, came to welcome him at the threshold. The old woman then led him through many apartments to a large and welllighted room in the rear of the house, and with many respectful salutations requested him to take the place of honor accorded to guests of distinction. He was surprised by the stateliness of the chamber, and the curious beauty of its decorations. Presently some maid - servants brought refreshments; and he noticed that the cups and other vessels set before him were of rare and costly workmanship, and ornamented with a design indicating the high rank of the possessor. More and more he wondered what noble person had chosen this lonely retreat, and what happening could have inspired the wish for such solitude. But the aged attendant suddenly interrupted his reflections with the question:

"Am I wrong in supposing that you are Itō Sama, of Uji,-Itō Tatéwaki Norisuké?"

Itō bowed in assent. He had not told his name to the little miya-dzukai, and the manner of the inquiry startled him.

"Please do not think my question rude," continued the attendant. "An old woman like myself may ask questions without improper curiosity. When you came to the house, I thought that I knew your face; and I asked your name only to clear away all doubt, before speaking of other matters. I have something of moment to tell you. You often pass

through this village; and our young Himégimi - Sama1 happened one morning to see you going by; and ever since that moment she has been thinking about you, day and night. Indeed, she thought so much that she became ill; and we have been very uneasy about her. For that reason I took means to find out your name and residence; and I was on the point of sending you a letter when — so unexpectedly! - you came to our gate with the little attendant. Now, to say how happy I am to see you is not possible; it seems almost too fortunate a happening to be true! Really I think that this meeting must have been brought about by the favor of Enmusubi-no-Kami,- that great God of Izumo who ties the knots of fortunate union. And now that so lucky a destiny has led you hither, perhaps you will not refuse if there be no obstacle in the way of such a union - to make happy the heart of our Himégimi-Sama ?”

For the moment Itō did not know how to reply. If the old woman had spoken the truth, an extraordinary chance was being offered to him. Only a great passion could impel the daughter of a noble house to seek, of her own will, the affection of an obscure and masterless samurai, possessing neither wealth nor any sort of prospects. On the other hand, it was not in the honorable nature of the man to further his own interests by taking advantage of a feminine weakness. Moreover, the circumstances were disquietingly mysterious. Yet how to decline the proposal, so unexpectedly made, troubled him not a little. After a short silence, he replied:

"There would be no obstacle, as I have no wife, and no betrothed, and no

relation with any woman. Until now I have lived with my parents; and the matter of my marriage was never discussed by them. You must know that I am a poor samurai, without any patron among

1 A scarcely translatable honorific title compounded of the word himé (princess) and kimi (sovereign, master or mistress, lord or lady, etc.).