This ceremony over, the Dutch were invited to stay to dinner, which was served up in another room. Before each was placed a small table or salver, on which lay five fresh, hot, white cakes, as tough as glue, and two hollow cakes of two spans in circumference, made of flour and sprinkled with sesamum seeds. A small porcelain cup contained some bits of pickled salmon in a brown sauce, by the side of which lay two wooden chopsticks. Tea also was served up, but in “poor and sorry” brown dishes, and the tea itself proved to be little better than hot water. Fortunately the Dutch, seldom caught napping upon that point, had provided themselves, before leaving home in the morning, with “a good substantial breakfast”; and, besides, they had been treated in the guard-room with fresh _manjū_, and with sweet brown cakes of sugar and bean flour. While they were eating this dinner, “so far from answering to the majesty and magnificence of so powerful a monarch, that a worse one could not have been had at any private man’s house,” several young noblemen busied themselves in examining their hats, coats, dress, etc. Dinner over, after half an hour in the waiting-room, they were conducted, through passages and galleries which they did not remember to have seen before, to the hall of audience, which, by a change in the position of some of the screens, presented quite a new appearance. They were put in the very same uncarpeted spot as at their first audience, and were again called upon, as then, to answer questions, dance, sing songs, and exhibit themselves. Among the persons called in were two physicians, with whom Kämpfer had some professional conversation; also several shaven priests, one of whom had an ulcer on his shin, as to which Kämpfer’s opinion was asked. As it was a fresh sore, and the inflammation about it slight, he judged it to be of no great consequence. At the same time he advised the patient not to be too familiar with sake, pretending to guess by his wound, what was obvious enough from his red face and nose, that he was given to drinking,—a shrewd piece of professional stratagem, which occasioned much laughter at the patient’s expense.