But the lust of the eye! Well, the eye is all the stranger has. The work his brain does has little value. No matter what he may learn one day, that thing next day he may have to unlearn. The eye alone gives pleasure--to the color-loving, picture-loving brain--delight unmeasurable: but the eye does not understand. The ear hears strange new calls and sounds--unmusical except in the xylophonic click of wooden getas, the plaintive cry of the blind masseur, and in the national anthem, which is moving beyond words; and the ear, too, does not understand. But the nose--"that despised poet of the senses"--his faculty holds firm the world over. In Tokio he puts on sable trappings at sunset that would gloom the dark hour before dawn. You will get used to it, you are told, and that frightens you, for you don't want to get used to it. You should go to China, is the comfort you get, and in that suggestion is no comfort. Straightway you swear, and boldly: No call of the East for me, Till the stink of the East be dead. That is why a man who comes from a land where he can fill both lungs fearlessly and stoop to drink from any stream that his feet may cross must go down now and then to the sea or turn his face firmly to the hills. From Yokohama the little coaches start slowly for the country--so slowly that, like Artemus Ward, you wonder if it wouldn't be wise sometimes to put the cow-catcher on behind. There is the charm of thatched cottage, green squares of wind-shaken barley, long waving grass and little hills, pine-crowned; but by and by your heart gets wrung with sympathy for Mother Nature. Every blade of grass, every rush, every little tree seems to have been let grow only through human sufferance. It is as though a solemn court-martial had been held on the life of everything that grew not to make feed for man and man alone, for nowhere are there sheep, cattle, horses, and rarely even a dog. Here and there the little hills have been cut down sheer, that the rice squares might burrow under them. The face of the earth looked terribly man-handled, but the effect was still lovely. The little rows of pines on the hills seemed to have been so left that no rearrangement would have been necessary to transfer them to canvas, and even the crown of a pine sloping from a group of its fellows seemed to have been spared for no other reason than picturesque effect. Perhaps for that reason Nature herself seemed to enter no protest. It was as though she said: "I know your needs, my children, you do only what you must; you know just what you do, and I forgive you, for you rob me with loving hands. A little farther on is my refuge."