her comes a young girl carrying a rice-box and plate of fish. Most
gracefully she sets it down with the apology, "I have kept you long
waiting," and the invitation, "Please take up."

On the table are four covered bowls, two very small dishes containing
pickles and soy, and a little paper bag in which is a pair of
chopsticks. The place of each article is foreordained by gastronomic
etiquette, and rigidly observed. In the first bowl is soup, in the
second a boiled mixture consisting of leeks, mushrooms, lotus-root
and a kind of sea-weed. In a third are boiled buckwheat cakes or
dumplings, and _tofu_ or bean-curd. In the porcelain cup is rice. In
an oblong dish, brought in during the meal, is a broiled fish in soy.
Lifting off the covers and adjusting my chopsticks deftly, I begin.
The bowl of rice is first attacked, and quickly finished. The
attendant damsel proffers her lacquered waiter, and uncovering the
steaming tub of rice paddles out another cupful. It is etiquette to
dispose of unlimited cups of rice and soup, but a deadly breach of
good manners to ask to have the other two bowls replenished. Of course
at the hotels whatever the larder affords can be ordered. Boiled eggs,
cracked and peeled before you by the tapering fingers of the damsels,
are considered choice articles of food. Raw fish, thinly sliced and
eaten with radish, sauce, ginger sprouts, etc., is highly enjoyed by
the Japanese, who are surprised to find the dish disliked by their
foreign guests. A member of one of the embassies sent to Europe
confessed that amid the luxuries of continental tables, he longed for
the raw fish and grated radish of his native land. Some articles of
our own diet, especially cheese and butter, are as heartily detested
by the Japanese as their raw fish is by us. The popular idea at home,
that the Japanese live chiefly on mice and crawfish, and that the
foreigners are in chronic danger of starvation, is matched by that of