ay work representing two white
cranes feeding on fish. The whole was about three inches square and in
the ordinary course of events would never be looked at. The screens hid
a cupboard in which all the lamps and candlesticks and pillows and
sleeping-bags of the household seemed to be stored. An Oriental nation
that can fill a cupboard tidily is a nation to bow down to. Upstairs I
went by a staircase of grained wood and lacquer, into rooms of rarest
device with circular windows that opened on nothing, and so were filled
with bamboo tracery for the delight of the eye. The passages floored
with dark wood shone like ice, and I was ashamed.

"Professor," said I, "they don't spit; they don't eat like pigs; they
can't quarrel, and a drunken man would reel straight through every
portion in the house and roll down the hill into Nagasaki. They can't
have any children." Here I stopped. Downstairs was full of babies.

The maidens came in with tea in blue china and cake in a red lacquered
bowl--such cake as one gets at one or two houses in Simla. We sprawled
ungracefully on red rugs over the mats, and they gave us chopsticks to
separate the cake with. It was a long task.

"Is that all?" growled the Professor. "I'm hungry, and cake and tea
oughtn't to come till four o'clock." Here he took a wedge of cake
furtively with his hands.

They returned--five of them this time--with black lacquer stands a foot
square and four inches high. Those were our tables. They bore a red
lacquered bowlful of fish boiled in brine, and sea-anemones. At least
they were not mushrooms. A paper napkin tied with gold thread enclosed
our chopsticks; and in a little flat saucer lay a smoked crayfish, a
slice of a compromise that looked like Yorkshire pudding and tasted like
sweet omelette, and a twisted fragment of some translucent thing that
had once been alive but was now pickled. They went away, but not empty
handed, for thou, oh, O-Toyo, didst take away my heart--same which I
gave to the Burmese girl in the Shway Dagon pagoda!

The Professor opened his eyes a little, but said no word. The chopsticks
demanded all his attention, and the return of the girls took up the
rest. O-Toyo, ebon-haired, rosy-cheeked, and made throughout of delicate
porcelain, laughed at me because I devoured all the mustard sauce that
had been served with my raw fish, and wept copiously till she gave me
_saki_ from a lordly bottle about four inches high. If you took some
very thin