Fred wanted ever so much to send home a goldfish with a very wide and beautiful tail. The fish didn't seem to be much unlike a common goldfish, except in the tail, which was triple, and looked like a piece of lace. As it swam around in the water, especially when the sun was shining on the globe, its tail seemed to have nearly as many colors as the rainbow, and both the boys were of opinion that no more beautiful fish was ever seen. But the proposal to send it to America was rather dampened by the statement of the Doctor that the experiment had been tried several times, and only succeeded in a very few instances. Almost all the fish died on the voyage over the Pacific; and even when they lived through that part of the trip, the overland journey from San Francisco to the Atlantic coast generally proved too much for them. The Japanese name for this fish is _kin-giyo_, and a pair of them may be bought for ten cents. It is said that a thousand dollars were offered for the first one that ever reached New York alive, which is a large advance on the price in Yokohama. The Japanese dogs were also objects of interest to our young friends, though less so than the cats and the goldfish. They have several varieties of dogs in Japan, some of them being quite without hair, while others have very thick coats. The latter are the most highly prized, and the shorter their noses, the more valuable they are considered. Fred found a dog, about the size of a King Charles spaniel, that had a nose only half an inch long. He was boasting of his discovery, when Frank pointed out one that had less than a third of an inch. Then the two kept on the hunt for the latest improvement in dogs, as Frank expressed it, and they finally found one that had no nose at all. The nostrils were set directly in the end of the little fellow's head, and his under-jaw was so short that the operations of barking and eating were not very easy to perform. In spite of the difficulty of barking, he made a great deal of noise when the boys attempted to examine him, and he gave Frank to understand in the most practical way that a noseless dog can bite. As they walked away from the shop where they found him, he kept up a continual snarling, which led to the remark by Fred that a noseless dog was very far from noiseless.