r mats were very fine and white. There
were large gardens at the back with fountains and flowers, and
streams, crossed by light stone bridges, sometimes flowed through the
houses. The lady, who was on the look-out for a resting-place, not
unnaturally expressed a desire to put up at one of these delightful
sylvan retreats, but her native attendant informed her that was
impossible, as they were kashitsukeyas, or tea-houses of a
disreputable character. Miss Bird, on the strength of this
information, thought it incumbent upon herself to pronounce the
somewhat sweeping judgment that "there is much even on the surface to
indicate vices which degrade and enslave the manhood of Japan." Such a
statement is, of course, the merest clap-trap, but even were it true,
it might be permissible to remark that if vice exists it is surely
better for it to be on than beneath the surface. Such vice as does
exist in Japan is, in my opinion, distinctly on the surface, and I
have no hesitation in describing the morals of the Japanese people to
be, on the whole, greatly superior to those of Western nations.

There can, I think, be no question that a large number of European
people have formed their estimate of Japanese women either from a
visit to a comic opera such as "The Geisha," or from a perusal of a
book like Pierre Loti's fascinating work, "Madame Chrysantheme." This
is in effect the story of a _liaison_ between a man and a Japanese
girl of the lower classes, with, of course, a large amount of local
colouring, and rendered generally charming by the writer's brilliant
literary style. Unfortunately, that large number of Europeans who have
never visited Japan have taken the French academician's study of a
girl of a certain class as a life picture of the typical Japanese
woman who is, accordingly, deemed to be more or less, to use an
accepted euphemism, a person of easy virtue. Nothing could, of course,
be more erroneous, no conclusion further from the truth. The remarks
of Mr. Arthur Diosy in his book, "The New Far East," on this head are
so much to the point in reference to the utter misconception of even
many visitors to Japan in the matter of the chastity of the average
Japanese women that I venture to transcribe them: "Has it not been
repeated to him (the globe-trotter) that these people have no
conception of virtue or of modesty? So he frequently treats the maids
at the inn, the charming human humming-birds who wait upon him at the
tea