ates the room where you are dining, just as a flower or a picture
would decorate our dining-rooms at home, only better. And there is
nothing more typical of the decorative sense innate in the Japanese than
the little garden of geisha girls, which almost invariably forms the
background of every tea-house dinner. The dinner itself, with its pretty
doll-tables, its curious assortment of dainty viands set in red lacquer
bowls, its quaint formalities, and the magnificent ceremonial costumes
of its hosts, is an artistic scheme, elaborately thought out and
prepared. But when, at the close, the troupe of geishas and maikos
appears, forming (as it were) a pattern of gorgeous tropical flowers,
the scene becomes a bit of decoration as daring, original, and
whimsically beautiful as any to be seen in the land of natural "placing"
and artistic design and effect. The colours of kimonos, obis, fans, and
head-ornaments blend, contrast, and produce a carefully-arranged
harmony, the whole converging to a centre of attraction, a grotesque,
fascinating, exotic figure, the geisha of geishas--that
vermilion-and-gold girl who especially seizes me. She is a bewildering
symphony in vermilion, orange, and gold. Her kimono is vermilion
embroidered in great dragons; her obi is cloth of gold; her long hanging
sleeves are lined with orange. Just one little slim slip of apple-green
appears above the golden fold of the obi and accentuates the harmony; it
is the crape cord of the knapsack which bulges the loops at the back and
gives the Japanese curve of grace. The little apple-green cord keeps the
obi in its place, and is the discord which makes the melody.

[Illustration: BY THE LIGHT OF THE LANTERNS]

My vermilion girl's hair is brilliant black with blue lights, and
shining where it is stiffened and gummed in loops and bands till they
seem to reflect the gold lacquer and coral-tipped pins that bristle
round her head. Yes, she is like some wonderful fantastical tropical
blossom, that vermilion geisha-girl, or like some hitherto unknown and
gorgeous dragon-fly. And she is charming; so sweetly, simply, candidly
alluring. Every movement and gesture, each rippling laugh, each
fan-flutter, each wave of her rice-powdered arms from out of their
wing-like sleeves, is a joyous and naive appeal for admiration and
sympathy. How impossible to withhold either! The geisha-girl is an
artist: I am an artist: we understand each other.

My geisha-girl brings out her