the ambition
to erect some system of Eastern civilisation. It is possible that we
may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe 'half
civilised.' Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than
ourselves. When the townsman goes to the country he says the people
are savages. But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent
people."

"Some time ago," broke in a professor, "I read a novel by Rene Bazin
and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the
peasants of the West."

The previous speaker resumed: "The other day a foreigner laughed in my
presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we
were deficient in the sense of smell. I told him that fifty years ago
our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations,
said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this
day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, 'They smell;
they smell of butter and fat.'"

In the city of Nagano early in the morning I went to a large Buddhist
temple where the authorities had kindly given me special facilities to
see the treasures--alas! all in a wooden structure. A strange thing
was the preservation untouched of the room in which the Emperor Meiji
rested thirty years ago. May oblivion be one day granted to that awful
chenille table cover and those appalling chairs which outrage the
beautiful woodwork and the golden _tatami_ of a great building! At the
entrance of the temple priests in a kind of open office were reading
the newspaper, playing _go_ or smoking. More pleasing was the sight of
matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that
weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained
women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine
itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor
round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made
and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure
be fortunately touched on the way, paradise, peasants believe, is
assured. I made the circuit a few moments after an old woman and found
the lock, and on returning to the temple with the rustic dame knelt
with her before the shrine as the curtain which veils the big Buddha
was withdrawn. The face of one wooden figure in the temple had been
worn, like that of many another in Japan, with the stroking that it
had received from the ailing faithful.