The carpeted saloon was reasonably filled with half a dozen passengers; the deck overflowed with the rest. The brown-skinned, bullet-headed, ugly, good-natured Japanese peasant, sitting on his heels with his dark blue _kimono_ tucked up above his brown legs, and his fan in his hand; or his little wife, wrinkled and meek, her white cotton towel, with its bamboo design in blue, folded round her head and tucked up under her hair behind in something between a night-cap and a sun-bonnet; quiet and sweet, but never abject, and always respected. Here and there a shopkeeper or a clerk, or some one from the town in a grey _kimono_, with a face pale yellow against the other’s brown. We all sat bare-footed on the matting to keep it clean, with our _gheta_ in our hands, fanning ourselves with rice-paper fans decorated with storks flying across the moon, or sprays of plum-blossom or pine-trees, each man of us showing his well-turned leg and thigh, with all the muscles brought into strong relief by the weight of the body on the toes. All polite, all amused, all conversational. After a great deal of snorting on the part of our very small steamer, we casually left the wharf and shot into the lagoon. Matsué, hidden by the sunlight, disappeared; and even the wide sweep of waters wavered indistinct beneath the hard glitter of the morning light. It was not yet nine o’clock, and already the distant blue shore was blurred with the shimmering heat, and the near green one fitful with the scissor-grinding of the _semmi_. The heat was dropping down on the world with the swiftness of a tropical night and the glitter of it hurt. Away over the surface of the waters a red-brown head floated, lazy, the nimbus of straw hat against the light glowing yellow as a halo. Slowly, idly, the head moved over the water, suspended between blue and blue. Too hot to doubt or question or deny, I accepted the head and shut my eyes, only to find on opening them again two, three, a dozen heads strolling slowly over the lagoon. “Honourably please to understand, dredging for mussels,” said a voice at my elbow. And the passengers repeated the information in a sort of Greek chorus with many bows. Matsué’s only representative of the vast world of the _Ijin San_ is one missionary; but these peasants, with the refinement of true breeding, accepted our outlandish dress and faces, our boots on their matting too, without a stare of curiosity, although when our attention was apparently absorbed elsewhere, the whiteness of our skins, the aristocratic bridge of our noses (it is only the _noblesse_ in Japan, and not all of them, who possess an aquiline nose), were commented on with interest and admiration. * * * * *