That afternoon, as we lay upon our matting in our wall-less room, fanned by the plain daughter, our landlady brought in the local newspaper, and sitting down on her heels she read to us a long account of the arrival in Matsué of the “distinguished strangers from England,” and a kind of “Stop Press telegram” announcing their gracious purchase of matting at the exhibition that morning, besides an editorial advertisement of a description of their visit to the exhibition for the next issue. Our rooms at the inn were described at length, our appearance “with faces white as milk”--the foreign simile showing great learning on the part of the reporter--our ages politely overstated, for the young here, women as well as men, desire to be old so that to be thought older than one’s age is the greatest of compliments; the paper therefore called us most politely “upwards of forty,” causing our dear landlady to beam with delight, and the plain daughter to utter a long series of those curious strangled “h’s” by which the Japanese express intense admiration, as she fanned us more vigorously. Then, _à propos_ of our “milk-white faces,” the landlady, with much hesitation, asked a favour “so great that to speak unable am.” Might she have our soap? Japanese soap they had, but somehow, possibly, that “foreign” soap of ours might account for some of our strange whiteness. So she and the plain daughter retired with the soap; and for the rest of the afternoon they scrubbed diligently in the bathroom. * * * * * And we sat quiet upon our matting in the heat, while the green hills and the rice-fields, the pebbled pathway of our garden bridge, and all the wide still spaces of the lake hung as frescoes round our room. The hot blue sky burned fiercely, the blue of a heated brick-kiln, and our living frescoes hung motionless as the work of man. There was neither change nor shadow. Hills and lake and rice-fields lay still against the sky--flat as it were upon a flattened background, and in that light which did not shine but suffused itself through all things, there were no shadows, a deepened blueness here and there, but neither shadow nor perspective. The sense of distance, as the sense of shade, was quite annihilated. Those old Japanese artists saw truly, despite our western dictums, light does not lie here as we see it, still less as it lies in the actual tropics; it has effects of light and distance which are all its own, and the Japanese, seeing them, reproduced them, not because there are no others, but because these are so truly Japanese. And we, knowing neither the country nor the climate, but strong in our arrogance of “laws,” called it “false, a childlike art ignorant of science.” In the Land of the Gods we sat and learnt wisdom, and Japan and its people, its life and its pictures took a new meaning in our eyes, and the false became true. * * * * *