The pitiful thing is that a modest, polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system. It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should be so little conscious of the pace at which her industrial rake's progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be recovered. It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were dying we also were insensitive. But because the Middle Ages in England encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more slowly than Japan is doing. Because, too, we never had in our bustling history the long periods of immunity from home and foreign strife by which Japanese craftsmanship profited so wonderfully, we may not have had such large stores of precious skill and taste to squander as New Japan, the spendthrift of Old Japan's riches, is unthinkingly casting away. It is at Christmas at home that we have in the Christmas tree our reminder of the country. It is on New Year's Day that in Japan a pine tree is set up on either side of the front gate, but there are three bamboos with it, and the four trunks are all beautifully bound together with rope. If the ground be too hard for the trees to be stuck in the ground, they are kept upright by having a dozen heavy pieces of wood, not unlike fire logs, neatly bound round them. The pines may be about 10 ft. high, the bamboo about 15 ft. To the trees are affixed the white paper _gohei_. Over the doorway itself is an arrangement of straw, an orange, a lobster, dried cuttlefish and more _gohei_. A less expensive display consists of a sprig of pine and bamboo. Poor people have to be content with a yard-high pine branch with a French nail through it at either side of their doorway. I have been ruralist enough to harbour thoughts of the extent to which the woods are raided for all this New Year forestry. Some prefectures, in the sincerity of their devotion to afforestation, forbid the New Year destruction of pine trees. I remember the gay and elaborate dressing of the horses during the New Year holidays. I saw one driver of a wagon who was not content with tying streamers on every part of his horse where streamers could be tied: he had also decorated himself, even to the extent of having had his head cropped to a special pattern, tracts of hair and bare scalp alternating.