the same stuff, and both garments, which were washed at least once a week, were admirably fitted to their wearer’s work.  Almost the same rig was worn by our own medieval and pre-medieval workmen.  The carpenter had on the back of his coat the name of his master or guild in decorative Chinese characters in white.  There are nowadays in the cities many inferior workers, but all the men who came to my house worked with rapidity and concentration, hardly ever lifting their eyes from their jobs.  The dexterity of the Japanese workman is seldom exaggerated.  To his dexterity he adds the considerable advantage of having more than two hands, for he uses his feet together or singly.  His supple big toes are a great possession.  We have lost the use of ours, but the Japanese artisan, accustomed from his youth to tabi with a special division for the big toe, and to geta, which can be well managed only when the big toe is lissom, uses his toes as naturally as a monkey, with his paws and mouth full of nuts, gives a few to his feet to hold.  The first sight of a foot holding a tool is uncanny.

The pitiful thing is that a modest, polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system.  It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should be so little conscious of the pace at which her industrial rake’s progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be recovered.  It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were dying we also were insensitive.  But because the Middle Ages in England encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more slowly than Japan is doing.  Because, too, we never had in our bustling history the long periods of immunity from home and foreign strife by which Japanese craftsmanship profited so wonderfully, we may not have had such large stores of precious skill and taste to squander as New Japan, the spendthrift of Old Japan’s riches, is unthinkingly casting away.

It is at Christmas at home that we have in the Christmas tree our reminder of the country.  It is on New Year’s Day that in Japan a pine tree is set up on either side of the front gate, but there are three bamboos with it, and the four trunks are all beautifully bound together with rope.  If the ground be too hard for the trees to be stuck in the ground, they are kept upright by having a dozen heavy pieces of wood, not unlike fire logs, neatly bound round them.  The pines may be about 10 ft. high, the bamboo about 15 ft.  To the trees are affixed the white paper gohei.  Over the doorway itself is an arrangement of straw, an orange, a lobster, dried cuttlefish and more gohei.  A less