g, which was done by little boys in
spectacles. With a pair of tiniest steel chopsticks they filled from
bowls at their sides each compartment of the pattern with its proper hue
of paste. There is not much room allowed for error in filling the spots
on a butterfly's wing with avanturine enamel when the said wings are
less than an inch across. I watched the delicate play of wrist and hand
till I was wearied, and the manager showed me his patterns--terrible
dragons, clustered chrysanthemums, butterflies, and diapers as fine as
frost on a window-pane--all drawn in unerring line. "Those things are
our subjects. I compile from them, and when I want some new colours I go
and look at those dead butterflies," said he. After the enamel has been
filled in, the pot or plate goes to be fired, and the enamel bubbles all
over the boundary lines of wires, and the whole comes from the furnace
looking like delicate majolica. It may take a month to put a pattern on
the plate in outline, another month to fill in the enamel, but the real
expenditure of time does not commence till the polishing. A man sits
down with the rough article, all his tea-things, a tub of water, a
flannel, and two or three saucers full of assorted pebbles from the
brook. He does not get a wheel with tripoli, or emery, or buff. He sits
down and rubs. He rubs for a month, three months, or a year. He rubs
lovingly, with his soul in his finger ends, and little by little the
efflorescence of the fired enamel gives way, and he comes down to the
lines of silver, and the pattern in all its glory is there waiting for
him. I saw a man who had only been a month over the polishing of one
little vase five inches high. He would go on for two months. When I am
in America he will be rubbing still, and the ruby-coloured dragon that
romped on a field of lazuli, each tiny scale and whisker a separate
compartment of enamel, will be growing more lovely.

"There is also cheap _cloissonnee_ to be bought," said the manager, with
a smile. "We cannot make that. The vase will be seventy dollars."

I respected him for saying "cannot" instead of "do not." There spoke the
artist.

Our last visit was paid to the largest establishment in Kioto, where
boys made gold inlay on iron, sitting in camphor-wood verandahs
overlooking a garden lovelier than any that had gone before. They had
been caught young, even as is the custom in India. A real grown-up man
was employed on the horrible story, in iron,