s veils a room floored with pale
gold and roofed with panels of grained cedar. There is nothing in the
room save a blood-red blanket laid out smoothly as a sheet of paper.
Beyond the room is a passage of polished wood, so polished that it gives
back the reflections of the white paper wall. At the end of the passage
and clearly visible to this unique _bunnia_ is a dwarfed pine two feet
high in a green glazed pot, and by its side is a branch of azalea, blood
red as the blanket, set in a pale grey crackle-pot. The _bunnia_ has put
it there for his own pleasure, for the delight of his eyes, because he
loves it. The white man has nothing whatever to do with his tastes, and
he keeps his house specklessly pure because he likes cleanliness and
knows it is artistic. What shall we say to such a _bunnia_?

[9] grain-dealer's.

His brother in Northern India may live behind a front of time-blackened
open-work wood, but ... I do not think he would grow anything save
_tulsi_[10] in a pot, and that only to please the Gods and his
womenfolk.

[10] A sacred herb of the Hindus.

Let us not compare the two men, but go on through Nagasaki.

Except for the horrible policemen who insist on being Continental, the
people--the common people, that is--do not run after unseemly costumes
of the West. The young men wear round felt hats, occasionally coats and
trousers, and semi-occasionally boots. All these are vile. In the more
metropolitan towns men say Western dress is rather the rule than the
exception. If this be so, I am disposed to conclude that the sins of
their forefathers in making enterprising Jesuit missionaries into
beefsteak have been visited on the Japanese in the shape of a partial
obscuration of their artistic instincts. Yet the punishment seems rather
too heavy for the offence.

Then I fell admiring the bloom on the people's cheeks, the
three-cornered smiles of the fat babes, and the surpassing "otherness"
of everything round me. It is so strange to be in a clean land, and
stranger to walk among doll's houses. Japan is a soothing place for a
small man. Nobody comes to tower over him, and he looks down upon all
the women, as is right and proper. A dealer in curiosities bent himself
double on his own door-mat, and I passed in, feeling for the first time
that I was a barbarian, and no true Sahib. The slush of the streets was
thick on my boots, and he, the immaculate owner, asked me to walk across
a polished floor and white mats