Having chosen a good site in a corner less draughty than the rest of the enclosure, we proceeded to unpack and wash. Just outside the middle of the open wall of the house, and full on the pathway of Fuji, stood a large waterbutt. Having been directed by the family--an amiable man, an indifferent wife, and an inquisitive boy--to wash outside, I stepped on to the pathway. The tub was half full of water and looked very like the ordinary bath-tub of Japan. It was the first time I had seen a bath out of doors, though they figure so largely in travellers’ tales; still there was nothing else, so boldly I plunged the top half of myself into the water. A simultaneous scream from the man, the wife and the boy, brought me up dripping and bewildered. What had I done? Not sinned against their moral code, surely. No--worse. Washed in the drinking-water! Luckily there was more, enough for endless tea that night, and to-morrow fresh water could be fetched. But my wash came to an abrupt end. Of course what I ought to have done was to unearth a brass pan tucked away behind the tub, take down a bamboo dipper from a lava-block, dip out water from the tub into the pan and wash in that. Quite simple, naturally, when it was all explained and the pan and the dipper produced, but all problems always are simple after the explanation. The amiable man remained amiable even after this catastrophe, and the indifferent wife had not been shaken from her indifference save for the space of one brief scream, while the small boy, at such an exhibition of curious manners on the part of the _Ijin San_, grew more inquisitive than ever, and we fried ham, ate tinned tongue, cut slices of bread, and drank foreign wine under a close and exhaustive series of comments which were questions. It grew dark rapidly as we ate. And as relays of pilgrims came in out of the night to fling themselves down on the matting, swallow cupfuls of hot tea and exchange long compliments with the man, the wife, and the guide, and disappear again into the night, we congratulated ourselves. No. 4 must have been very full. At eight o’clock, when the _amado_ were drawn and the tea-house became a compact box, No. 2 had no guests but the _Ijin San_. It was time to go to bed. The man put out the one smoking lamp by the fire-pit which had cast such lurid yellow lights on the white clothes of the pilgrims as they sat and drank, and such murky, gigantic shadows on the rest of the room; the boy went to bed in a corner, and we rolled ourselves up in our carefully Keatinged _futon_ and tried to sleep. It was cold. There were fleas. And Fuji sent us down a draught which simply whistled through the wooden walls, the folded _futon_ and the lava-blocks. And the sense of the unusual, of the rest-house, the cinder-path and of Fuji, crept into our slumbers, holding back sleep. * * * * *