sents an officer's cap and sword; and the best of all is
surmounted by a tiny metal model of a battleship. The battleship-pin
is not merely fantastic: it is actually pretty!

As might have been expected, military and naval subjects occupy a
large place among the year's designs for toweling. The towel designs
celebrating naval victories have been particularly successful: they
are mostly in white, on a blue ground; or in black, on a white ground.
One of the best--blue and white--represented only a flock of gulls
wheeling about the masthead of a sunken iron-clad, and, far away, the
silhouettes of Japanese battleships passing to the horizon.... What
especially struck me in this, and in several other designs, was the
original manner in which the Japanese artist had seized upon the
traits of the modern battleship,--the powerful and sinister lines of
its shape,--just as he would have caught for us the typical character
of a beetle or a lobster. The lines have been just enough exaggerated
to convey, at one glance, the real impression made by the aspect of
these iron monsters,--vague impression of bulk and force and menace,
very difficult to express by ordinary methods of drawing.

Besides towels decorated with artistic sketches of this sort, there
have been placed upon the market many kinds of towels bearing comic
war pictures,--caricatures or cartoons which are amusing without being
malignant. It will be remembered that at the time of the first attack
made upon the Port Arthur squadron, several of the Russian officers
were in the Dalny theatre,--never dreaming that the Japanese would
dare to strike the first blow. This incident has been made the subject
of a towel design. At one end of the towel is a comic study of the
faces of the Russians, delightedly watching the gyrations of a
ballet dancer. At the other end is a study of the faces of the same
commanders when they find, on returning to the port, only the masts
of their battleships above water. Another towel shows a procession
of fish in front of a surgeon's office--waiting their turns to be
relieved of sundry bayonets, swords, revolvers, and rifles, which have
stuck in their throats. A third towel picture represents a Russian
diver examining, with a prodigious magnifying-glass, the holes made by
torpedoes in the hull of a sunken cruiser. Comic verses or legends, in
cursive text, are printed beside these pictures.

The great house of Mitsui, which placed the best of these