Hung Chang had the same room when he came over to make peace terms after the Japanese-Chinese War. We could see the corner of the street near by where a Japanese tried then to assassinate that eminent Chinaman, and in that very room the great Shimonoseki treaty was signed. We had it two nights and a day, and we learned, when we went away, that we were not told the history of that room for nothing. First, our interpreters hinted that great men like Ito and Li Hung Chang and Our Honorable Selves were always expected to make a present to the hotel. It was the custom. We followed the custom to the extent of ten yen each, and an old lady came in and prostrated herself before each of us in turn. Now, when you are clothed only in pajamas, are seated in a chair, and have your bare feet on a balcony in order to miss no vagrant wind, it is somewhat embarrassing to have a woman steal in without warning, smite her forehead to the mat several times, and make many signs and much speech of gratitude. You won't smite yours in turn; you can't bow as you sit, and if you rise, it looks as though you were going to put foot on the neck of a slave. We looked very red and felt very foolish, but we did not exchange confidences. If there was any slumbering supposition in our minds that this was a polite Oriental method of dealing with guests who have doubtful luggage, or a slumbering hope that the "present" might have a dwindling effect on our bill, there needn't have been. We had to pay in addition for that room and those eighty mats and that Fuji landscape of delicate woodwork; we had to pay for all the brilliant moths that fluttered incessantly about, for the chamber-maids and the smiling bronze scullery-girl who looked in on us from the hallway; for the bath-boy and the cook or cooks. Every junk and sampan that passed had apparently sent a toll for collection to that hotel. The gold of the one sunset and the silver of the one dawn were included in the turkey-tracked, serpent-long bill that was unrolled before our wondering eyes. In fact, if Marquis Ito's breakfast and the biggest dinner that Li Hung Chang had there nine years before were not put down therein, it was a strange oversight on the part of the all-seeing eye that had swept the horizon of all creation during the itemization of that bill. That was business--that bill. The present had been custom. I cheerfully recommend the method to highway robbers that captain other palaces of extortion in other parts of the world. Get the present first--it's a pretty custom--and the rest is just as easy as it would have been anyway.