To the American mind this method of terminating relations is always irritating and frequently embarrassing, but in Japan any discomfort is to be endured rather than the slightest suspicion of bad manners. If the foreign visitor is trying to learn to be a good Japanese, she must submit patiently when the servant solemnly engaged fails to appear at the appointed hour, sending a letter instead to say that she is ill; or when the woman upon whom she is depending to travel with her the next day to the country receives a telegram calling her to the bedside of a mythical son, and departs, bag and baggage, at a moment's notice, leaving her quondam mistress to shift for herself as best she may. _Page 318._ Among the many changes that have come over Japan in the transition from feudalism to the conditions of modern life, there is none that Japanese ladies regard with greater regret than the change in the servant question. As the years go by and new employments open to women, it becomes increasingly difficult to engage and keep servants of the old-time, faithful, intelligent sort. Notwithstanding increased pay, and the still existing conditions of considerate treatment, comfortable homes, and light work, it is hard to fill places vacated, even in noble households: and there is almost as much shaking of heads and despondent talk over the servant question in Japan to-day as there is in America. _Page 322._ It is interesting to note that it is to the quickness and courage of a jinrikisha man who interposed between him and his would-be assassin that the present Czar of Russia owes his escape from death at Otsu, near Kyōtō, in 1891. EPILOGUE. My task is ended. One half of Japan, with its virtues and its frailties, its privileges and its wrongs, has been brought, so far as my pen can bring it, within the knowledge of the American public. If, through this work, one person setting forth for the Land of the Rising Sun goes better prepared to comprehend the thoughts, the needs, and the virtues of the noble, gentle, self-sacrificing women who make up one half the population of the Island Empire, my labor will not have been in vain. INDEX. Adoption, 103, 112, 187. Agility of Japanese, 13. Ai, love, 415. Amado, sliding wooden shutters used to inclose a Japanese house at night, 23. Amulets, 329. Andon, a standing lamp inclosed in a paper case, 89. Ané San, or Né San, elder sister (_San_ the honorific), a title used by the younger children in a family in speaking to their eldest sister, 20. Aoyama, 131. Apprentices, 309, 310. Art in common things, 237-239, 462, 463. Artisans, 235-239, 270. Babies, 1-17; bathing, 10; conditions of life, 6, 7; dress, 6, 15; food, 10, 11; imperial babies, 8, 9; learning to talk, 16; learning to walk, 13, 14; of lower classes, 7; of middle classes, 8; of nobility, 8; skin troubles, 11; teething, 12; tied to the back, 7, 8, 12. Baby carriages, 424. Baths, public, 10.