en
die _nayboen_--that is, a man lies unburied, and is said to be alive,
when his death otherwise would lead to disagreeable results. Here, as
elsewhere, when rules are made intolerably strict, evasion is habitual.
The amount that cannot be evaded is astonishing enough, as we shall see
ere we return to England. Now we are in the house of this gentleman at
Nagasaki. His wife enters, and by their mutual behavior it is evident
that ladies in Japan are to their husbands very much what ladies are in
England. This lady passes to the garden; the room ends with a projecting
angle open to the garden on each side, a sort of bay, which every house
has; and if there be no more ground than just the supplementary
triangles on each side to complete the square, still there is always
that, and that is always quite enough, for want of more. It is enough to
spend a fortune upon, in dwarf trees and vegetable curiosities. The
Japanese shine like the Chinese in monstrosities. They can dwarf trees
so well, that in a little box four inches square, President Meylan saw
growing a fir, a bamboo, and a plum-tree, in full blossom. Or they
hypertrophy plants if they please, until a radish is produced as large
as a boy six years old. Their gardens, however small, are always laid
out in landscape style, and each is adorned with a temple, not a mere
ornamental summerhouse, but the real shrine of a household god. Into
this garden walks the lady, and returns with a few flowers. She takes
these to an elegant shelf fixed in a recess of the apartment, upon which
a bouquet stands, and is engaged upon her nosegay. An act of taste? O
dear, no; every drawing-room in Japan has such a shelf, with flowers
placed upon it; every lady entering who found her husband there, and
meant to talk with him, would in the first place make the nosegay talk,
and say, "The wife and husband are alone together." If company arrive,
the flowers must be otherwise adjusted; the position of every flower,
and even of green leaves in that bouquet, is fixed by custom, which is
law, to vary with the use to which the room is put. One of the most
difficult and necessary parts of female education in Japan is to acquire
a perfect knowledge of the rules laid down in a large book on the
arrangements of the drawing-room nosegay, in a manner suitable to every
case. It is the Japanese "use of the globes" to ladies' schools. To boys
and girls, after reading and writing, which are taught (hear, England!