In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden wall, a pile of _gheta_ lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in _kimono_ and _hakama_ stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting _kimono_ along the three-foot-wide platform. Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden, sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the paper-paned wall the waiting _kimono_ bowed us to enter. “Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken _kimono_ and pleated silken skirts of his _hakama_, as he laughingly bowed us a Japanese welcome. The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until the paper-paned walls closed behind me again. “If you would like a chair, there are just two--” began the professor. But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks, hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick wadded hem of her _kimono_.