, artistic, fantastic, with signs on
which Ah Sing and Ah Tong have mingled Chinese characters and English,
and which inform you that the proprietors can furnish you with the
_sake_ of Japan or the gasoline of the Standard Oil Company; these
things convince you that you are in the midst of a crowded population
struggling for subsistence and ready to work, a population of
inexhaustible vitality and enterprise.

Our first rainy day was distinguished by a visit to the palatial mansion
of a Japanese millionaire. Mr. Asano, the President of the Steamship
Company that brought us thither, had invited the whole lot of
first-class passengers to afternoon tea at his house in Tokyo. That
house is a veritable museum of Japanese art. It reminded us of the
collections of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. There was a great retinue of
servants, and we were escorted upon arrival to one of the topmost rooms,
where we were served with tea and presented with symbolic cakes by a
dozen gorgeously bedecked young girls, who proved to be the children and
grandchildren of our host. This, however, was only a preparatory
welcome, for it was followed by the real reception in a great
audience-room below, where Mr. and Mrs. Asano, together with their
eldest son and daughter, gave us cordial greetings. A couple of hundred
of our fellow passengers were gathered there and were partaking of light
refreshments, with claret, tea, and mineral waters, while an expert
Japanese juggler amused them with his feats of sleight of hand. The
tapestries and paintings of this house were exquisite products of taste
and skill, and the total effect was that of great wealth accompanied by
true love for the beautiful. But it was the mansion of an orthodox
Shinto and Buddhist, for in every large room there was an alcove with
the sitting figure of a bronze Buddha.

A more distinctly Christian entertainment for that same rainy day was
our reception by the Conference of Baptist missionaries and workers at
the new Tabernacle in Tokyo. They had been called to meet Doctor
Franklin and Doctor Anderson, who had been sent by our Foreign
Missionary Society to consult with them as to our educational policy in
Japan. We reached the Conference on its last day of meeting, and we had
a most valued opportunity of observing its method of procedure. Half of
those present were Japanese workers who did not understand English, and
it was a new experience to address them when every word had to be
interp