or scroll-picture hanging there is an idyl, Hotei, God of Happiness, drifting in a bark down some shadowy stream into evening mysteries of vapory purple.  Far as this hamlet is from all art-centres, there is no object visible in the house which does not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty in form.  The old gold-flowered lacquer-ware, the astonishing box in which sweetmeats (kwashi) are kept, the diaphanous porcelain wine-cups dashed with a single tiny gold figure of a leaping shrimp, the tea-cup holders which are curled lotus-leaves of bronze, even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions, delight the eye and surprise the fancy.  Indeed, wherever to-day in Japan one sees something totally uninteresting in porcelain or metal, something commonplace and ugly, one may be almost sure that detestable something has been shaped under foreign influence.  But here I am in ancient Japan; probably no European eyes ever looked upon these things before.

A window shaped like a heart peeps out upon the garden, a wonderful little garden with a tiny pond and miniature bridges and dwarf trees, like the landscape of a tea-cup; also some shapely stones of course, and some graceful stone lanterns, or t[=o]r[=o], such as are placed in the courts of temples.  And beyond these, through the warm dusk, I see lights, colored lights, the lanterns of the Bonku, suspended before each home to welcome the coming of beloved ghosts; for by the antique calendar, according to which in this antique place the reckoning of time is still made, this is the first night of the Festival of the Dead.

As in all other little country villages where I have been stopping, I find the people here kind to me with a kindness and a courtesy unimaginable, indescribable, unknown in any other country, and even in Japan itself only in the interior.  Their simple politeness is not an art; their goodness is absolutely unconscious goodness; both come straight from the heart.  And before I have been two hours among these people, their treatment of me, coupled with the sense of my utter inability to repay such kindness, causes a wicked wish to come into my mind.  I wish these charming folk would do me some unexpected wrong, something surprisingly evil, something atrociously unkind, so that I should not be obliged to regret them, which I feel sure I must begin to do as soon as I go away.

While the aged landlord conducts me to the bath, the wife prepares for us a charming little repast of rice, eggs, vegetables, and sweetmeats.  She is painfully in doubt about her ability to please me, even after I have eaten enough for two men, and apologizes too much for not being able to offer me more.

“There is no fish,” she says, “for to-day is the first day of the Bonku, the Festival of the Dead; being the thirteenth day of the month.  On the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth of the month nobody may eat fish.  But on the morning of the sixteenth day, the fishermen go out to catch fish; and everybody who has both parents living may eat of it.  But if one has lost one’s father or mother then one must not eat fish, even upon the sixteenth day.”