in thickness, except at the middle, where it is thicker.[34] We pass on to Japan, and accompany Lady Brassey to a Japanese dinner in a Japanese tea-house. The dinner took place in an apartment which, as an exact type of a room in any Japanese house, may fitly be described. The roof and the screens, which form the sides, are all made of a handsome dark-polished wood resembling walnut. The exterior walls under the verandah, as well as the partitions between the other rooms, are simply screens of wooden lattice-work, covered with white paper, and sliding in grooves; so that a person walks in or out at any part of the wall he thinks proper to select or finds convenient. This arrangement necessarily dispenses with doors and windows. If you wish to look out, you open a little bit of your wall, or a larger bit if you step out. Instead of carpets, the floor is strewn with several thicknesses of very fine mats, each about six feet long by three feet broad, "deliciously soft to walk upon." All Japanese mats are of the same size, and they constitute the standard by which everything connected with house-building or house-furnishing is measured. Once you have prepared your foundations and woodwork of the dimensions of so many mats, you may go to a shop and buy a ready-made house, which you can then set up and furnish in the light Japanese fashion in a couple of days; but then such a house is fitted only for a Japanese climate. In the room into which Lady Brassey was introduced was raised, on one side, a slight dais, about four inches from the floor, as a seat of honour. A stool, a little bronze ornament, and a China vase, in which a branch of cherry-blossom and a few flag-leaves were gracefully arranged, occupied it. On the wall behind hung pictures, which are changed every month, according to the season of the year. Four comely Japanese girls brought thick cotton quilts for the visitors to sit upon, and braziers full of burning charcoal that they might warm themselves. In the centre they placed another brazier, protected by a square wooden grating, with a large silk eider-down quilt laid over it, to keep in the heat. "This is the way in which all the rooms, even bedrooms, are warmed in Japan, and the result is that fires are of very frequent occurrence. The brazier is kicked over by some restless or careless person, and in a moment the whole place is in a blaze."