The old women of Japan,--how their withered faces, bent frames, and shrunken, yellow hands abide in one's memory! One seldom sees among them what we would call beauty, for the almost universal shrinking with age that takes place among the Japanese covers the face with multitudinous wrinkles, and produces the effect of a withered russet apple; for the skin, which in youth is usually brightened by red cheeks and glossy black hair, in old age, when color leaves cheek and hair, has a curiously yellow and parchment-like look. But with all their wrinkles and ugliness, there is a peculiar charm about the old women of Japan. In Tōkyō, when the grass grows long upon your lawn, and you send to the gardener to come and cut it, no boy with patent lawn-mower, nor stalwart countryman with scythe and sickle, answers your summons, but some morning you awake to find your lawn covered with old women. The much-washed cotton garments are faded to a light blue, the exact match of the light blue cotton towels in which their heads are swathed, and on hands and knees, each armed with an enormous pair of shears, the old ladies clip and chatter cheerfully all day long, until the lawn is as smooth as velvet under their careful cutting. An occasional rest under a tree, for pipes and tea, is the time for much cheerful talk and gossip; but the work, though done slowly and with due attention to the comfort of the worker, is well done, and certainly accomplished as rapidly as any one could expect of laborers who earn only from eight to twelve cents a day. Another employment for this same class of laborers is the picking of moss and grass from the crevices of the great walls that inclose the moats and embankments of the capital. Mounted on little ladders, they pick and scrape with knives until the wall is clear and fresh, with no insidious growth to push the great uncemented stones out of their places. In contrast with these humble but cheerful toilers may be mentioned another class of women, often met with in the great cities. Dressed in rags and with covered heads and faces, they wander about the streets playing the _samisen_ outside the latticed windows, and singing with cracked voices some wailing melody. As they go from house to house, gaining a miserable pittance by their weird music, they seem the embodiment of all that is hopeless and broken-hearted. What they are or whence they come, I know not, but they always remind me of the grasshopper in the fable, who danced and sang through the brief summer, to come, wailing and wretched, seeking aid from her thriftier neighbor when at last the winter closed in upon her.