The old curio vender, with the face and spare figure of Julius Caesar, turned aside from such idle talk with a shrug of hopelessness.  He affected to be more interested in lighting his slender pipe over the chimney of the lamp which hung suspended over his wares.

“Ten yen!  Please see!” said Asako, showing a banknote.  The merchant shook his head and puffed.  Asako turned away into the stream of passers-by.  She had not gone, ten yards, however, before she felt a touch on her kimono sleeve.  It was Julius Caesar with his curio.

“Indeed, okusan, there must be reduction.  Thirty yen; take it, please.”

He pressed the little box into Asako’s hand.

“Twenty yen,” she bargained, holding out two notes.

“It is loss!  It is loss!” he murmured; but he shuffled back to his stall again, very well content.

“I shall send it to Geoffrey,” thought Asako; “it will bring him good luck.  Perhaps he will write to me and thank me.  Then I can write to him.”

The New Year is the greatest of Japanese festivals.  Japanese of the middle and lower classes live all the year round in a thickening web of debt.  But during the last days of the year these complications are supposed to be unraveled and the defaulting debtor must sell some of his family goods, and start the New Year with a clean slate.  These operations swell the stock-in-trade of the yomise.

On New Year’s Day the wife prepares the mochi cakes of ground rice, which are the specialities of the season; and the husband sees to the erection of his door posts of the two kadomatsu (corner pine trees), little Christmas trees planted in a coil of rope.  Then, attired in his frock-coat and top hat, if he be a haikara gentleman, or in his best kimono and haori, if he be an old-fashioned Japanese, he goes round in a rickshaw to pay his complimentary calls, and to exchange o medet[=o] (respectfully lucky!), the New Year wish.  He has presents for his important patrons, and cards for his less influential acquaintances.  For, as the Japanese proverb says, “Gifts preserve friendship.”  At each house, which he visits, he sips a cup of sake, so that his return home is often due to the rickshaw man’s assistance, rather than to his own powers of self-direction.  In fact, as Asako’s maid confided to her mistress, “Japanese wife very happy when New Year time all finish.”

* * * * *

On the night following New Year, snow fell.  It continued to fall all the next morning until Asako’s little garden was as white as a bride-cake.  The irregularities of her river-side lawn were smoothed out under the white carpet.  The straw coverings, which a gardener’s foresight had wrapped round the azalea shrubs and the dwarf conifers, were enfolded in a thick white shroud.  Like tufts of foam on a wave, the snow was tossed on the plumes of the bamboo clump, which hid the neighbour’s dwelling, and made a bird’s nest of Asako’s tiny domain.