The bathroom had a grey stone floor and walls of wooden _shōji_; at one end stood the high barrel-bath, and wooden buckets, pails and dippers lay all around. A three-foot-high platform ran all down one side and adjoined the passage-way by which we had entered; from it one stepped into the bath, on it one washed and dried oneself. A bath in Japan, which is used by all the family or hotel in succession, is not intended for washing--that is done outside. The two _shōji_ walls, just sliding panels of wood, opened, one on to the passage-way, the other into the front court, and had no fastenings. The Japanese have attained to that sense of modesty which we still feel immodest. They say to bathe is necessary; you cannot take a bath with your clothes on; a necessary action is never immodest, neither has it any prurient attractions for healthy minds. But a Japanese cannot see the low-necked dresses of western women or the pictures of Modern France without a blush. To him a bathing woman is neither modest nor immodest, but simply indifferent; while exposure, merely to attract, is indecency itself. Obscenity exists in grosser minds as in every country in the world; but the people of Japan have a moral simplicity of thought and action that is at one with the conclusions of abstract ethical philosophy. Like lobsters going to be cooked, we bathed, and got out swiftly but not silently. A yard of cotton towel, where a bank of purple iris grew out of a pale blue stream, was all the towel we had. It would have adequately dried our finger-nails, but the design was comforting if the towel was not. At last, in grey crêpe _kimono_ and straw sandals, clothes as naturally a growth of the climate and the country as its trees or people, we went back to our wall-less room and sat in peace. The heat of the day was passing, and the colours of the sky and trees deepened before they died. For light in this land of sunshine can hide as well as darkness; it covers the land as a pall, all white and glittering, which blinds as surely as the night. But in that half-hour which comes before the swift descending twilight of the East, all the colours deepen and intensify; they take a strange opaque lustre which makes the thinnest leaf look solid. Mere colour seems thick, almost as though distinct from what it colours and the colours deepen, deepen, till, emerging from a glittering pall of white, they sink beneath the grey-black pall of night. It is the intensest hour of all the day. The world is not working as at the dawn, nor sleeping as in the heat, but strong with the beating pulse of Life that fills even the stillness. So we sat and watched the deepening glowing earth glow and deepen, and heard the throb of life grow ever louder, till from the streets came up the sound of children’s laughter, and from the town the stir of men.