Rich in richest colours lay the world, with greens and blues of polished jewellery. And then the hurrying twilight settled like the swooping pinions of a bird. The colours lost themselves in grey, the forms they coloured in a broad, still sweep of darkness. On the white bridge, set between canal and lake, the lanterns were already glowing, and the indistinct brown lines of roof melted from the light into the darkness. For a little while the curved earth-bridge of our miniature garden, the pebbled pathway that in a fragment of a circle led across the winding pond, traced a clear black line against the open sky. Then the children’s laughter in the street grew silent, the stir of men and women stilled. Slowly, among their shadows, the houses each hung out a light and disappeared. The purple darkness grew with each moment deeper and more black. Then in a flash the shadows and the lights themselves went out, for our inn had lit her lamps. * * * * * Then they brought us dinner on black lacquered trays: pink soup and many kinds of fish, and rice with pickled cucumbers, white and brown and purple. And we did eat. And all the time our landlady and her plain daughter, kneeling on the matting, filled up our rice-bowls from the wooden rice-box, or our tea-bowls from the china teapot, and the bronze kettle which filled that teapot itself needed filling many times, for we were thirsty. And the landlady and her daughter sat placidly on their heels, watching our many social crimes, for there is an etiquette of chopsticks, as strict or stricter than ours of knives and forks, and in equivalent terms we probably were eating with our knives, putting our dirty spoons upon the tablecloth and exhibiting the general manners of the stable. As a sign that you have finished in Japan you eat your last bowl of rice flavoured with a bowlful of tea. Hardly had we reached this stage when the bright black squirrel of a landlord arrived to announce a visitor, and “Might he come in?” Considerably surprised we said “Yes,” and who should enter but our amiable Japanese Carker, this time in his own clothes. From an insignificant and somewhat common individual he had, by the mere change from a misfitting yellow suit into a grey silk _kimono_ with striped silk _hakama_, changed from an underbred clerk into a courtly gentlemen. His manners, always the same, were now at ease with himself, and no longer incongruous or even somewhat ridiculous, they became the perfection of grace and breeding. It is a change that one may often see in Japan. * * * * *