The paint is laid on less thickly as the girl grows up; and though many women, especially those from the country, make a liberal use of it, the custom in Tokyo is to apply a dilute solution lightly so that one can hardly tell at a distance whether the face is painted or not. The neck, however, is more thickly painted. Vermilion is applied to the lips in degrees varying with the age. The blackening of the teeth is fast going out of fashion; nowadays in Tokyo, only middle-aged women and their seniors take to it, though young married women among the lower classes are sometimes to be seen with blackened teeth. In ancient times men of rank and position blackened their teeth; it was a sign of good birth, and the expression “white teeth” was synonymous with plebeianism. This custom was subsequently confined to court nobles, and was later still adopted by married women. The idea seems to be that as black is the only colour that remains unchanged, the teeth were blackened in token of their owner’s constancy and fidelity. The eyebrows are shaven in infants and little children, especially girls, with the object of making them grow thick. Women touch them up with Indian ink or burnt-cork powder. They used to shave them off upon marriage at the same time as the first blackening of the teeth; but this custom is, like the other, dying out. Many women, however, shave off their eyebrows when they reach the age of forty or thereabouts, as they prefer to have none at all to having them thin and irregular. Before they commence their toilet, women take a bath or wash their faces, necks, and shoulders over a tub unless it is early morning in cold weather. Soap is a foreign innovation; and the same purpose was served by the use of fine bran powder obtained by sifting rice after its final cleaning in a mortar. A handful of this powder is put into a little cloth bag, which is then wetted and rubbed against the skin; and the turbid water which exudes through the texture of the bag is very efficacious in cleaning the skin. It is now used together with soap. Young women sometimes put other substances with the bran into the bag, such as pulverised egg-shells which are said to remove stains from the skin and the powered bark of a species of magnolia. Our women, squatting as they do at their toilet, do not need a dressing-table, instead of which they set before them a small wooden box with three or four drawers and surmounted with a square looking-glass hinged on two supports which stand on the box. In the old days when glass was unknown or at least very rare, a metal disk highly polished on one face and with a handle was set on a stand. Now, however, sheet-glass mirrors are very common, though those of plate-glass are less used owing to their higher prices as they have, unlike the sheet-glass, to be imported from abroad. CHAPTER X. OUTDOOR GEAR.