has a small hollow handle, a few feet from the floor, which is sometimes highly ornamented. The verandah is also usually three feet wide. It consists generally of long narrow planks ranged parallel to the grooves of the sliding-doors, though it is sometimes made up of wider pieces set at right angles to them. In the former case the planks, as they age, shrink and leave cracks between, which admit light when the outer doors or shutters are closed in the daytime. Bamboos are sometimes laid between the pieces to cover the shrinkage. The shutters run in grooves on the outer edge of the verandah. They are also three feet wide and kept in a receptacle at the end of the groove. The last one only is usually bolted. There are similar shutters at all the windows, which are also provided with paper sliding-doors and lattices or bars as precautions against house-breaking. When a verandah runs along more than one room, there are pillars on its outer edge just inside the groove of the shutters and opposite the pillars dividing the rooms. All sets of sliding-doors need a pillar to close against at either end. The smallest houses are those in the slums which have only three yards’ frontage and a depth of four yards. The entrance, the space for kitchen utensils and the sink, and perhaps a closet or cupboard would leave room for little more than three mats, on which the whole family live; but as children spend all their playtime outside and come in only for meals, it is at night that the house is crowded, and even then as they sleep higgledy-piggledy, a couple or so of children do not inconvenience their parents to any appreciable extent. A two-roomed house is common enough and is not confined to the slums. A childless old couple, when the wife has to do the household work, find such a house large enough for them. Artisans also live in them. Three-roomed houses, too, are very common. Houses built in blocks are oftenest of this size. They are made up of the porch, the sitting-room, and the parlour or drawing-room. These three rooms are the essential portions of a house; and larger houses merely add to them. A visitor calls at the porch, the paper sliding-door is opened, he is invited to come in, he leaves his hat and greatcoat in the porch, and enters the parlour. The master, or in his absence his wife, entertains him there, while the rest of the family remain in the sitting-room. In cold weather the sliding-doors between the two rooms are closed; but in summer they are kept open, or frequently doors with reed screens within the frames are used. These admit the breeze and let the people in the other room be seen; but the fiction of their invisibility is kept up and those in the inner room are not obliged to greet the visitor.