of rice straw, the outside is of the finest and smoothest matting.
There are no chairs, stools, sofas or anything to sit down upon,
though, having long since forgotten the fact, we find a ready seat on
the floor. On one side of the room, occupying one-half of its space,
is the _tokonoma_, a little platform anciently used for the bed, two
feet wide and five or six inches high. In one corner is a large vase
containing four or five boughs broken from a plum tree crowded with
blossoms, and a large bunch of white, crimson and dappled camellias,
both single and double. In the centre is the sword-rack, found in
every samurai's house, yet now obsolete, since Japan's chivalry have
laid aside their two swords. On the other half of the room, occupying
the same side as the tokonoma, is a series of peculiar shelves like
those of an open Japanese cabinet, though larger; and at the top of
these is a little closet closed by sliding doors. The other three
sides of the room are of sliding partitions six feet high, made of
fine white wood, latticed in small squares and covered with paper,
through which mellow, softened light fills the room. On the plastered
wall above the latticed sliding doors hangs a framed tablet on which
are written Chinese characters, which, having the Japanese letters
at the side, tell in terse and poetical phrase that "This room is the
chamber of peaceful meditation, into which the moonlight streams."
Some of the lattice and other work is handsomely carved and wrought,
and a paper screen along the wall which separates this room from the
next is covered with verses of Japanese poetry. Were it cold weather,
a brazier, with some live coals in it, would be brought for us to
toast our hands and feet and to shiver over, as stoves and hard coal
are not Japanese institutions. First of all, however, at present, one
of the _musumes_ brings me a _tobacco-bon_ or tray, in which is fire
to light my pipe, the Japanese scarcely having a conception of a man
who does not smoke.

My description of a Japanese room will answer, in the main, for any
in Japan _as it was_--from the artisan's to the emperor's. Even
the palaces of the mikado in Kioto never contained tables, chairs,
bedsteads or any such inconvenient and space-robbing thing. The tables
upon which they ate, played chess or wrote were six inches or a foot
high. A Japanese of the old style thinks the cumbrous furniture in our
Western dwellings impertinent and unnecessary. In