A Japanese room is measured, not by feet and inches, but by the number of mats it contains. A mat consists of a straw mattress, about an inch and a half thick, with a covering of fine matting which is sewn on at the edges of the mattress either by itself or with a border, usually dark-blue and an inch wide, of coarse hempen cloth. It is six feet long by three wide; this measure is not always exact, but may vary by an inch or more in either direction. When a house is newly built, the mat-maker comes to make mats to fit the rooms in it. But in spite of the variation, the size of a room is always given in the number of mats it holds, so that we never know the exact dimensions of a room. The smallest room has two mats, that is, is about six feet square; the next smallest is three-matted, or three yards by two. Four-matted rooms are sometimes to be found; but such rooms are unshapely, being four yards long by two wide. A room with four and a half mats is three yards square and has the half mat, which is a yard square, in the centre. The next size is six-matted, or four yards by three and is followed by the eight-matted, or four yards square. The ten-matted room is five yards by four and the twelve-matted is six yards by four. It is only in large houses that there are rooms with fifteen or more mats. In some restaurants and story-tellers’ halls we come upon rooms with a hundred mats. Some rooms have five or seven mats; but they are really of six or eight mats with the space of one mat occupied by a closet or an alcove. It will thus be seen that in most rooms the length is either equal to the breadth or at most only half as much again. This tends to make the proportion between the two somewhat monotonous. [Illustration: A SIX-MATTED ROOM AND VERANDAH.]