ed, one could see by the rolling walk and the
fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking. Such a person would
be removed out of sight by his friends. The Japanese generally go
sight-seeing and merry-making in friendships and companies; and the
_Verein_, which in Japan is called the _Kwai_, flourishes here as in
Germany.

Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons' window. They too
had been drinking. They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen,
but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and
indistinguishable grunts and snorts.

"_Baka! Chikushome! Kuso_! (Fool! Beast! Dung!)"

These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at
each other's coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs.
This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police
intervened. Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions
into opposite byways.

With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and
pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring.
Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd
that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.

"But where is the Yoshiwara?" Geoffrey asked at last. "Where are these
wretched women kept?"

Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.

"Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high
houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are
two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here.
But, of course, the night time is the time to see them."

"I suppose so," said Geoffrey vaguely.

"They sit in shop windows, one might say," Reggie went on, "only with
bars in front like cages in the Zoo. And they wear gorgeous kimonos,
red and gold and blue, and embroidered with flowers and dragons. It
is like nothing I can think of, except aviaries full of wonderful
parrakeets and humming-birds."

"Are they pretty?" Asako asked.

"No, I can't say they are pretty; and they all seem very much alike to
the mere Westerner. I can't imagine any body picking out one of them
and saying, 'I love her'--'she is the loveliest.' There is a fat,
impassive type like Buddha. There is a foxy animated type which
exchanges _badinage_ with the young nuts through the bars of her cage;
and there is a merely ugly lumpy type, a kind of cloddish country-girl
who exists in all countries. But the more exclusive ho