When our landlady and her daughter came back from the bathroom they brought a small thin oblong of soap, and their hands were all wrinkled with washing. “_Mada kurō gozaimas kara omachi nassatta hō ga yō gozaimas_,” they said in a melancholy, half-laughing voice. “Still brown because, leaving off had best be done,” and they held out their four hands for inspection. The _Ijin San’s_ whiteness was not in the soap. But when we went we left as a present a whole new cake of “foreign” soap; and their supplementary scrubbings must have been many. * * * * * That evening we were entertained by a small boy with the snubbiest of noses, who peeped slyly at us from out of the darkness of the garden. When he was induced to come in he brought all his lesson books, which he turned over for our amusement, and between each page he chuckled, but he never told us why. Whether it was the recollections of his lost lessons or a subtle sense of absurdity that we could not read the Chinese hieroglyphics of his primers we never knew, but his chuckles were deep with joy. Then in the pauses he would count solemnly up to ten, all the English he knew, and chuckle again. Two wide-eyed little maidens were brought in next morning to see the _Ijin San_. In a very awestruck whisper they inquired “if we were real.” These little babies were very solemn and very good, but not one scrap shy or frightened. In all their little lives they had never met a grown-up being who was harsh to them. Though obedience is the first requisite of Japanese children young or old, they give it as the plants their flowers, not from a sense of hard-learned duty, but as a natural product of an eternal law. The babies made the funniest little bows as they touched their little foreheads to the ground. And then they sat and looked at us with wide, wide-opened eyes. To them we belonged to the world of the mythical _Kirin_, and the terrible _Kitsuné_ who takes bad babies away and feeds them on frogs and snails; we belonged to the realm of the sea-goddess who married Urashima, to the land of the fairies. So they asked if we were real. They could not be induced to talk to us, though they were wonderfully polite, and quite knocked their little foreheads on the floor when they said “Good-bye.” Did we figure as goblins or as fairies in their dreams, I wonder? * * * * * That afternoon a stall-owner from the exhibition came to show us Izumo crystals. For two hours he knelt upon the matting opening the beautifully made boxes of white unpainted wood. And we looked at large divining-crystals without fleck or flaw, at the pale clouded crystals shading from mist-white to palest crimson, at the agates and amethysts; and all the time our comely landlady and her plain daughter sat on their heels and admired with taste and great discrimination.