Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese _sayonara_. I looked back one last time--and Arabella’s nosegay vanished. IV GOD’S MESSENGER The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the Iris, _Hana-shōbu_, and along the raised causeway, between the fields, the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the _kurumaya_, silhouette against the blue sky. You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden, and they are an hour’s _’ricksha_ ride from the city, so that the _fête_ is select. In the covered court of the entrance the _kuruma_ are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while the _kurumaya_, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the slender shafts and smoke their pipes--three whiffs from the metal thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp _tink_, _tink_, as the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long _kuruma_ ride proving prohibitive; but the grey _kimono_ of the classes, Tokyo shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack of the wooden _gheta_ on the earthen pathway, as the little _musmé_ carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed summer-houses, is incessant. We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit _on_ the cushions, with our feet on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous to see the _Ijin San_ sitting on the tables with their legs hanging uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each little white _tabi_ sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea, inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the _Ijin San’s_ legs are not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized boot could only have been invented by people without toes?