ed with pottery waiting to
be packed--modern Satsuma for the most part, the sort of thing you get
at an auction.

"This made send Europe--India--America," said the manager, calmly. "You
come to see?"

He took us along a verandah of polished wood to the kilns, to the clay
vats, and the yards where the tiny "saggers" were awaiting their
complement of pottery. There are differences many and technical between
Japanese and Burslem pottery in the making, but these are of no
consequence. In the moulding house, where they were making the bodies of
Satsuma vases, the wheels, all worked by hand, ran true as a hair. The
potter sat on a clean mat with his tea-things at his side. When he had
turned out a vase-body he saw that it was good, nodded appreciatively to
himself, and poured out some tea ere starting the next one. The potters
lived close to the kilns and had nothing pretty to look at. It was
different in the painting rooms. Here in a cabinet-like house sat the
men, women, and boys who painted the designs on the vases after the
first firing. That all their arrangements were scrupulously neat is only
saying that they were Japanese; that their surroundings were fair and
proper is only saying that they were artists. A sprig of a cherry
blossom stood out defiantly against the black of the garden paling; a
gnarled pine cut the blue of the sky with its spiky splinters as it
lifted itself above the paling, and in a little pond the iris and the
horsetail nodded to the wind. The workers when at fault had only to
lift their eyes, and Nature herself would graciously supply the missing
link of a design. Somewhere in dirty England men dream of craftsmen
working under conditions which shall help and not stifle the half-formed
thought. They even form guilds and write semi-rhythmical prayers to Time
and Chance and all the other gods that they worship, to bring about the
desired end. Would they have their dream realised, let them see how they
make pottery in Japan, each man sitting on a snowy mat with loveliness
of line and colour within arm's length of him, while with downcast eyes
he--splashes in the conventional diaper of a Satsuma vase as fast as he
can! The Barbarians want Satsuma and they shall have it, if it has to be
made in Kioto one piece per twenty minutes. So much for the baser forms
of the craft!

The owner of the second establishment lived in a blackwood cabinet--it
was profanation to call it a house--alone with a bronze of p