Even the inn possessed something of her grace: the matting was whiter, the woodwork smoother, the steep stairway--set like a ladder between the walls--more polished than elsewhere. The tiny medallions set deep in the _shōji_, which are as the handles to our doors, were works of art. The miniature garden of the courtyard, with its hills and trees and swift grey stream, was a living landscape, perfect in form and colouring. Even the shallow brass pans in which we washed, the commonest of hotel furniture, had an elegance of their own. And in the refined and beautiful inn our graceful, courtly landlady knelt and offered us platefuls of “mixed biscuits.” They were certainly cheap ones, but never did the utter vulgarity of their shapes, or the crudeness of their colouring, strike so sharply on my senses. If they had tasted like manna from the wilderness I could not have eaten one. They were too ugly. It is vivid still, the bliss of that hot bath in fresh mountain water pumped from a stream which comes from Fuji’s sacred slopes, and the joy of that long dreamless sleep under the green mosquito curtain in our white matted room. Vivid still, the breakfast cooked over the _hibachi_, with our aristocratic landlady, every line of her graceful form looking purer and more refined as she stooped to hold the handle of the frying-pan, while her stolid husband on his knees before his office desk in the corner looked on good-naturedly, and the stout little maid watched the foreign cooking of our ham as though it had been a sacred rite. * * * * * We were to return by the lakes which encircle Fuji, and we set out that morning along a dull dusty road between dull dusty banks. It was but a little way to the first lake, but hot beyond believing, and when we reached it, and pushed out in our boat beyond the narrow inlet which ran deep into the road, the heat settled down like a roof above our heads. The sky was one superb arch of azure blue; the earth in front of us a wide, bare flat, glittering with heat. And from out of that gleaming, quivering mist which hid the level land Great Fuji rose dark blue on blue. Naked and superb he stood against the background of the sky secure in his strength, perfect in his beauty, beyond words, beyond praise, in sober truth--divine. It took an hour and a half to cross the lake, and all the time Fuji San, set in the framework of the turquoise sky, with the gleaming, glittering mist of light sweeping like an iridescent cloud to the edge of his dark blue slope, stayed with us. For an hour and a half we looked, and the form and the soul of the mountain sank deep within our hearts. * * * * * The second lake is divided from the first by a natural wall of hill over which we climbed, the sun striking fiercely on the pathway where one small patch of shade lay black on the thick white dust.