to an inner chamber. He brought me a
foot-mat, which only made matters worse, for a pretty girl giggled round
the corner as I toiled at it. Japanese shopkeepers ought not to be so
clean. I went into a boarded passage about two feet wide, found a gem of
a garden of dwarfed trees, in the space of half a tennis court, whacked
my head on a fragile lintel, and arrived at a four-walled daintiness
where I involuntarily lowered my voice. Do you recollect Mrs.
Molesworth's _Cuckoo Clock_, and the big cabinet that Griselda entered
with the cuckoo? I was not Griselda, but my low-voiced friend, in his
long, soft wraps, was the cuckoo, and the room was the cabinet. Again I
tried to console myself with the thought that I could kick the place to
pieces; but this only made me feel large and coarse and dirty,--a most
unfavourable mood for bargaining. The cuckoo-man caused pale tea to be
brought,--just such tea as you read of in books of travel,--and the tea
completed my embarrassment. What I wanted to say was, "Look here, you
person. You're much too clean and refined for this life here below, and
your house is unfit for a man to live in until he has been taught a lot
of things which I have never learned. Consequently I hate you because I
feel myself your inferior, and you despise me and my boots because you
know me for a savage. Let me go, or I'll pull your house of cedar-wood
over your ears." What I really said was, "Oh, ah yes. Awf'ly pretty.
Awful queer way of doing business."

The cuckoo-man proved to be a horrid extortioner; but I was hot and
uncomfortable till I got outside, and was a bog-trotting Briton once
more. You have never blundered into the inside of a three-hundred-dollar
cabinet, therefore you will not understand me.

We came to the foot of a hill, as it might have been the hill on which
the Shway Dagon stands, and up that hill ran a mighty flight of grey,
weather-darkened steps, spanned here and there by monolithic _torii_.
Every one knows what a _torii_ is. They have them in Southern India. A
great King makes a note of the place where he intends to build a huge
arch, but being a King does so in stone, not ink--sketches in the air
two beams and a cross-bar, forty or sixty feet high, and twenty or
thirty wide. In Southern India the cross-bar is humped in the middle. In
the Further East it flares up at the ends. This description is hardly
according to the books, but if a man begins by consulting books in a new
country h