the drinks and the rice
which always comes at the end of such feasts. The little eleven-year-old
gave a dance called "Climbing Fuji." Wonderful flat-footed movements
that make you feel exactly as if you were climbing with her. In the
middle part she puts on a mask which is puffy in the cheeks, and then
she wipes the perspiration and washes her little face and fans herself
and goes on again, flatfooted. All the motions are most elegant and
graceful and subtle and serpentine, never an abrupt or sudden gesture,
and never quite literal in any sense. After the dance was finished she
came and sat by me and her skin was hot as if she had a fever. All the
men were older and I must say they treated her very nicely.

This is the way those feasts go. We enter the restaurant in stocking
feet, and are usually shown to a small room where we kneel on the
cushions and take tea while waiting for all the guests to assemble.
About six this time, we were shown to the large room, which is always
surrounded by gold screens and shoji, which slide back before the
windows. Cushions are placed about three feet apart on three sides of
the long and beautifully shaped room. In the middle of one side they are
piled up so the foreign guests of honor may sit instead of kneeling
Japanese fashion. We place ourselves after having all the guests one
after another brought up. We shake hands because their bows are rather
impossible and they have adapted themselves to our way. Then we all
squat again. Then the pretty waitresses come slithering across the
floor, each with a tiny table in her hands. The first is for Papa, the
second for me, then the mayor, and so on. The mayor is down at the end
of the line. After each one has his table before him the mayor comes to
the center of the hollow square and makes a little speech of welcome. He
always tells you how sorry he is he has such a poor entertainment and
that he could not do better for these distinguished guests who do him so
much honor by coming, and how this is the first time the city has ever
honored a foreign scholar by this kind of entertainment. Then Papa does
his best to make a reply, and after he sits down we lift the cover of a
lovely lacquer soup bowl and lift the chop sticks. You take a drink of
soup, lift a thin slippery slice of raw fish from its little dish, dip
it in the sauce and put it in your mouth. To-night this first soup is a
rich and rare green turtle, delicious. So you drink it all and