Now breakfast is ready. Before, however, the family sit down to it, the first offerings of the morning’s rice and tea are set before the family shrine, in which are recorded on tablets or in a book the names of the ancestors and other deceased members of the family. If the children go to school early, they sometimes have breakfast before the rest of the family; but as the father, if a government official or a man of business, has also to leave home, the whole family generally take their morning meal together. Breakfast over, the children are packed off to school, and their father, after looking through the papers, also makes for his place of business. When he gets up, he always wears Japanese clothes; and when leaving for his office, he puts on a _hakama_ if he goes in the same clothes; but if he prefers European clothes, he has to dress over again. Before he leaves home, he is given a cup of tea, as it is said to protect him from accidents abroad. His wife and servants see him to the front door and speed him. The wife who has been getting the children ready for school and helping her husband to dress, has now a little respite, during which she may glance through the papers and take a few whiffs of tobacco. Smoking is a general custom among Japanese women; but tobacco is smoked in homœopathic doses in tiny bowls. The Japanese pipe consists of a bowl, about a quarter of an inch in diameter and depth, bent into a tube, and a mouthpiece, both of metal, which are connected by a bamboo stem. The metal is brass for common pipes, while better sorts are of nickel, silver, or gold. The bamboo stem is five or six inches between the metal ends for pipes which are taken abroad, and not unfrequently a foot or more for those used at home. Among the lower classes the wife uses the long-stemmed pipe to emphasise her speech by beating the mat with it when she gives a piece of her mind to her truant husband; and a blow with it is pretty painful, as many an idle apprentice knows to his cost. A small pinch of tobacco is put into the bowl, and two or three whiffs are all that can be got from it. A Japanese does not merely smoke, that is, get the smoke into his mouth only, but actually swallows it and then slowly emits it from his mouth or nostrils. Women generally emit it from their mouths only. The tobacco smoked is dried leaves cut into fine slices. The filling and emptying of the bowl takes about as much time as the smoking of it, so that one cannot smoke while doing something else; but it is an excellent time-killer, as day-labourers will testify. [Illustration: A WOMAN SMOKING.]