Outside of the three classes of commoners, and hopelessly below the lowest of them, large classes of persons existed who were not reckoned as Japanese, and scarcely accounted human beings. Officially they were mentioned generically as chori, and were counted with the peculiar numerals used in counting animals: ippiki, nihiki, sambiki, etc. Even to-day they are commonly referred to, not as persons (hito), but as "things" (mono). To English readers (chiefly through Mr. Mitford's yet unrivalled Tales of Old [248] Japan) they are known as Eta; but their appellations varied according to their callings. They were pariah-people: Japanese writers have denied, upon apparently good grounds, that the chori belong to the Japanese race. Various tribes of these outcasts followed occupations in the monopoly of which they were legally confirmed: they were well-diggers, garden-sweepers, straw-workers, sandal-makers, according to local privileges. One class was employed officially in the capacity of torturers and executioners; another was employed as night-watchmen; a third as grave-makers. But most of the Eta followed the business of tanners and leather-dressers. They alone had the right to slaughter and flay animals, to prepare various kinds of leather, and to manufacture leather sandals, stirrup-straps, and drumheads,--the making of drumheads being a lucrative occupation in a country where drums were used in a hundred thousand temples. The Eta had their own laws, and their own chiefs, who exercised powers of life and death. They lived always in the suburbs or immediate neighbourhood of towns, but only in separate settlements of their own. They could enter the town to sell their wares, or to make purchases; but they could not enter any shop, except the shop of a dealer in footgear.* [*This is still the rule in certain parts of the country.] As professional singers they were tolerated; but they were forbidden to enter any house--so they could perform their music or sing [249] their songs only in the street, or in a garden. Any occupations other than their hereditary callings were strictly forbidden to them. Between the lowest of the commercial classes and the Eta, the barrier was impassable as any created by caste-tradition in India; and never was Ghetto more separated from the rest of a European city by walls and gates, than an Eta settlement from the rest of a Japanese town by social prejudice. No Japanese would dream of entering an Eta settlement unless obliged to do so in some official capacity.... At the pretty little seaport of Mionoseki, I saw an Eta settlement, forming one termination of the crescent of streets extending round the bay. Mionoseki is certainly one of the most ancient towns in Japan; and the Eta village attached to it must be very old. Even to-day, no Japanese habitant of Mionoseki would think of walking through that settlement, though its streets are continuations of the other streets: children never pass the unmarked boundary; and the