Slowly the deeper shadows receded, and in their place came the dim forms of houses. Then a sharp turn and we were walking along a real road with the familiar knitting-needles of the Japanese tramway shining in the twilight. After a while the houses grew denser, and some of them had lights; but the contrast only made the pale dark of the open roadway seem still blacker. Large trucks, like kitchen-tables with their legs cut short, came sliding past us as we stumbled on, gliding slowly down the road alone and unattached. Parties of pilgrims in white, with white staves in their hands, came unexpectedly out of the darkness, and the lighted paper lanterns in their hands warmed their white clothes into a rich cream-yellow, precipitating them into solid bodies from the waist downward, while their heads and shoulders drifted slowly on through the pale night like impalpable ghosts. We had reached the top of the hill, and the road, in a sudden turn, ran sharply away from us. The houses were on both sides now in one continuous line, and the shock of meeting trucks jarred through the street. There was a flare of orange light where the knitting-needles became a shunting-yard. This was Yoshida. Our landlady was aristocratic to her finger-tips. She had the long slim neck, the long thin face, with its pure outlines, the long narrow eyes, the long graceful body, and the delicate poise which is the ideal type of the aristocrat--and rare even among them. When she knelt on the matting to receive us, she did it with the distinction of a queen, and all her movements showed that clean-cut grace, that courtesy without effort, that refinement of pose and gesture which only the continued culture of long generations can produce, and which is to mere politeness or mere beauty as the subtle music of the poet to Monsieur Jourdain’s prose. Her husband was a bullet-headed man of the people, stubby and plebeian. His manners, like his Japanese, were polite of course, but undistinguished, while our hostess spoke a language as courtly as her ways. When she glided over the matting, her long sleeves swaying, or stretched out her thin slim-fingered hand to take our tea-cups, we felt like beings of a lower evolution, and this higher product, evolved by centuries of self-control and a living love of beauty, was the human form made perfect, to which we might, perhaps, one day attain.