On a steep slope facing to the northeast, and leading up by several roads to the broad and thickly populated district of Azabu, Tokio, can be seen a Japanese gate which is large without being imposing, and severe without being dignified. Perhaps the peculiar contours of the land in this unfavored spot, the infelicitous swerve of the road, and an awkward grading of the hill, make the tall gateway always appear just a little uneasy. This is the main entrance of the American Legation. Behind it stands a large structure of wood with office-buildings attached. The contrast of buildings and gate is not cheerful. Nor is the large surrounding garden of less amorphous aspect. A wide stretch of well-kept lawn with no particular outline, disheartening attempts along the edges at bits of Japanese hill and rock formation, together with certain unrelated patches of shrub and tree, coexist in a sort of Eurasian tolerance. Pretty Gwendolen openly called her present domicile a barn. Mrs. Todd had begun at once buying blindly and indiscriminately from peddlers, hawkers, and "curio-men," who infest the official homes of new-comers. As a result, the high walls of the Legation rooms were being rapidly covered with atrocious kakémono, some too high, some too low, and all, from the standpoint of art, utterly vicious. On tables, shelves, and mantelpieces stood gaudy Japanese vases such as a native rag-picker could hardly have been persuaded to use (though the price given by Mrs. Todd for a single article might have educated his son), and various household utensils, each, to the eye of a Japanese visitor, uttering a shriek of incongruity. Should a Japanese lady fill one of her low-ceiled, spacious rooms with foreign lithographs representing lambs, blue-eyed children, baskets of fruit, nude women, jockeys, and landscapes, each in a flaring gold frame, hanging them anywhere from two feet above the matting to the ceiling line itself,--should she, between these rectangular blasphemies, suspend bits of foreign underwear, old neckties, garters, belts, hair-brushes, and egg-beaters, and, to complete the artistic impression, set about on the floor decorated soup-tureens, water-coolers with growing plants, and lard-baskets piled high with Japanese cakes,--an American visitor, entering for the first time, would get much the same impression that Japanese visitors derived from Mrs. Todd's drawing-rooms.