ittle pair of
vases wuz fifteen hundred dollars and you couldn't get 'em for less.
But why shouldn't there be beautiful things in a country where every
one is a artist?

We stopped at a tea house and had a cup of tea, delicious as I never
spozed tea could be and served by pretty young girls with gay colored,
loose silk suits and hair elaborately dressed up with chains and
ornaments; their feet and legs wuz bare, but they wuz covered with
ornaments of brass and jade. Afterwards we passed fields of rice where
men and wimmen wuz working, the men enrobed in their skin toilette of
dragons and other figures and loin cloth and the wimmen in little
scanty skirts comin' from the waist to the knees. Their wages are
eight cents a day. I wondered what some of our haughty kitchen rulers,
who demand a dollar a day and the richest of viands would say if they
wuz put down on a basis of eight cents a day and water and rice diet.

The little bamboo cottages are lovely lookin' from the outside with
their thatched roofs, some on 'em with little bushes growin' out on
the thatch and little bunches of grass growin' out under the eaves.
The children of the poor are entirely naked and don't have a rag on
'em until they're ten or twelve. A lot of 'em come up to the
jinrikishas and called out "oh-hi-o" to Josiah, and he shook his head
and sez affably:

"No, bub, I'm from Jonesville."

But the interpreter explained oh-hi-o means good mornin'; and after
that for days Josiah would say to me as soon as I waked up, "Ohio,"
and wanted to say it to the rest, but I broke it up.

One thing Josiah thought wuz wicked: a Japanese is not allowed to wear
whiskers till he is a grandpa, so old bachelors have to go with smooth
faces.

Sez Josiah, "What if Cousin Zebedee Allen couldn't wear whiskers?
Why," sez he, "his whiskers are his main beauty, and naterally Zeb is
more particular about his looks than if he wuz married. Such laws are
wicked and arbitrary. Why, when I courted my first wife, Samantha, my
whiskers and my dressy looks wuz what won the day. And I d'no," sez he
inquiringly, "but they won your heart."

"No," sez I, "it wuzn't them, and heaven only knows what it wuz; I
never could tell. I've wondered about it a sight."

"Well," sez he, "I didn't know but it wuz my whiskers."

We passed a number of temples where the people worship. The two
principal religions are the Shinto and the Buddhist. The Shinto means,
"The way of the gods," and they