consultation around a little table, and mixing medicines to secure the health and strength of both mother and baby. The fall of the Shōgunate, and the abolition of castle and _yashiki_, have made a radical change in the fashions of dress in Japan. One sees no longer the beautiful embroidered robes, except upon the stage, for the abolition of the great leisure class has put the flowered _kimono_ out of fashion. There are no courts, small and great, scattered all through the country, where the ladies must be dressed in changing styles for the changing seasons, and where the embroideries that imitate most closely the natural flowers are sure of a market. When one asks, as every foreigner is likely to ask, the Japanese ladies of one's acquaintance, "Why have you given up the beautiful embroideries and gorgeous colors that you used to wear?" the answer always is, "There are no daimiōs' houses now." And this is regarded as a sufficient explanation of the change.[*192] I have in my possession to-day two dainty bits of the silk mosaic work before mentioned, the work of the sixteen-year-old wife of one of the proudest and most conservative of the present generation of nobles. A dainty little creature she was, with a face upon which her two years of wifehood and one year of motherhood had left no trace of care. Living amid her host of ladies and women servants, most of them older and wiser than herself; having no care and no amusements save the easy task of keeping herself pretty and well-dressed, and the amusement of watching her baby grow, and hearing the chance rumors that might come to her from the great new world into which her husband daily went, but with which she herself never mingled,--her days were one pleasant, monotonous round, unawakening alike either to soul or intellect. Into this life of remoteness from all that belongs to the new era, imagine the excitement produced by the advent of a foreign lady, with an educated dog, whose wonderful intelligence had been already related to her by one of her own ladies-in-waiting. I shall always believe that my invitation into that exclusive house was due largely to the reports of my dog, carried to its proprietors by one of the lady servitors who had seen him perform upon one occasion. Certain it is that the first words of the little lady of the house to me were a question about the dog; and her last act of politeness to our party was a warm embrace of the handsome collie, who had given unimpeachable evidence that he understood a great deal of English,--a tongue which the daimiō himself was painfully learning. The dainty child-wife with both arms buried in the heavy ruff of the astonished dog is a picture that comes to me often, and that brings up most pathetically the monotony of an existence into which so small a thing can bring so much. The lifelike black and white silk puppy, the creeping baby doll from Kyōto, the silk mosaic box and chopstick