Letters from China and Japan

								

urged us to eat special cakes and we left stuffed. One kind is in the
form of a beautiful pink leaf wrapped in a cherry leaf which has been
preserved from last year. The leaf gives the cake a delicious flavor and
also a cover to protect the fingers from its stickiness. Then three
little round brown cakes looking some like chocolate--on a skewer. You
bite off the first one whole, then slip the other two as you eat them.
Those alone are enough for a meal and very nourishing. All cakes are
made from bean paste or like our richest pastries. When that second meal
was finished, we said good-bye. The Baroness and her three pretty
daughters and her sister all followed us to the outer door and when our
auto drove off the last thing we saw were the bows of the butlers and
these pretty ladies, all saying one more harmonious good-bye. The young
girls dress in kimonos of wool muslin of the brightest colors and
designs which are conceivable even to the Japanese imagination. They
look like a very profusely blooming garden of old fashioned perennials.
The garden is indescribable. I had some fancy of what a Japanese garden
would look like, but find it is nothing at all beside the reality. This
place is big and the grass is now brown. Most of the grass is covered
with a thick carpet of pine needles and at the edge of the pine needle
carpet a rope of twisted straw outlines graceful curves. The use of the
big stones is the most surprising part of the whole. They are very old
and weather-stained, of many shades of gray and blue-gray, with the
short shrubs for a background, and the severity and simplicity of the
result has a classic beauty which we may attain in centuries, and only
after we have consumed our abundance of things material.
Then we went to dinner at the house of Professor M----. There are six
children in his family, the oldest a man of about twenty-five, a
graduate of the Imperial University, now a factory inspector for the
government; he speaks eight languages. One of these is Esperanto, which
is his hobby. The French Professors were there also, two of them, a
clever and amusing pair, who did their duty in talking, and the young
man spoke better than any of us and with an excellent pronunciation. He
has never been out of Japan. Two little girls and a young boy appeared
after dinner and made their pretty bows to the floor, and then went to a
low table and squatted and played Go the rest of the evening. Go is the
famous shell game. Go means five and it is a game of fives, but ask me
no more, except that the men are 364 in number and you play it on an
expanded checker board. There was an endless succession of food and
drinks and we did not leave till nearly eleven. Japanese families have
many nice drinks which we do not. Theirs are perhaps no better than our
best ones, but they add to the pleasant variety of non-alcoholic drinks.
Besides those we had two wines.
This was the dinner as near as I can remember. A menu card was at each