stone-paved streets of Nagasaki. But if you desire details of house
construction, glimpses of perfect cleanliness, rare taste, and perfect
subordination of the thing made to the needs of the maker, you shall
find all you seek and more. All the roofs are dull lead colour, being
shingled or tiled, and all the house fronts are of the colour of the
wood as God made it. There is neither smoke nor haze, and in the clear
light of a clouded sky I could see down the narrowest alleyway as into
the interior of a cabinet.

The books have long ago told you how a Japanese house is constructed,
chiefly of sliding screens and paper partitions, and everybody knows the
story of the burglar of Tokio who burgled with a pair of scissors for
jimmy and centrebit and stole the Consul's trousers. But all the telling
in print will never make you understand the exquisite finish of a
tenement that you could kick in with your foot and pound to match-wood
with your fists. Behold a _bunnia's_[9] shop. He sells rice and chillies
and dried fish and wooden scoops made of bamboo. The front of his shop
is very solid. It is made of half-inch battens nailed side by side. Not
one of the battens is broken; and each one is foursquare perfectly.
Feeling ashamed of himself for this surly barring up of his house, he
fills one-half the frontage with oiled paper stretched upon quarter-inch
framing. Not a single square of oil paper has a hole in it, and not one
of the squares, which in more uncivilised countries would hold a pane of
glass if strong enough, is out of line. And the _bunnia_, clothed in a
blue dressing-gown, with thick white stockings on his feet, sits behind,
not among his wares, on a pale gold-coloured mat of soft rice straw
bound with black list at the edges. This mat is two inches thick, three
feet wide and six long. You might, if you were a sufficient pig, eat
your dinner off any portion of it. The _bunnia_ lies with one wadded
blue arm round a big brazier of hammered brass on which is faintly
delineated in incised lines a very terrible dragon. The brazier is full
of charcoal ash, but there is no ash on the mat. By the _bunnia's_ side
is a pouch of green leather tied with a red silk cord, holding tobacco
cut fine as cotton. He fills a long black and red lacquered pipe, lights
it at the charcoal in the brazier, takes two whiffs, and the pipe is
empty. Still there is no speck on the mat. Behind the _bunnia_ is a
shadow-screen of bead and bamboo. Thi