valleys in the attitude of giants wearied by the weight of centuries;
and their look of _big trees_ perplexes one and falsifies the
perspective. When from the dark recesses of the apartment one
perceives at a certain distance this diminutive landscape dimly
lighted up, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one
is not oneself the victim of some morbid illusion; and if it is not
indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of
focus, or through the wrong end of a telescope.

To any one familiar with Japanese life my mother-in-law's house in
itself reveals a refined nature,--complete nudity, two or three
screens placed here and there, a teapot, a vase full of lotus-flowers,
and nothing more. Woodwork devoid of paint or varnish, but carved in
most elaborate and capricious openwork, the whiteness of the pinewood
being kept up by constant scrubbings of soap and water. The posts and
beams of the framework are varied by the most fanciful taste: some are
cut in precise geometrical forms; others artificially twisted,
imitating trunks of old trees covered with tropical creepers.
Everywhere little hiding-places, little nooks, little closets
concealed in the most ingenious and unexpected manner under the
immaculate uniformity of the white paper panels.

I cannot help smiling when I think of some of the so-called _Japanese_
drawing-rooms, overcrowded with knick-knacks and curios and hung with
coarse gold embroideries on exported satins, of our Parisian fine
ladies. I would advise those persons to come and look at the houses of
people of taste out here; to visit the white solitudes of the palaces
at Yeddo. In France we have works of art in order to enjoy them; here
they possess them merely to ticket them and lock them up carefully in
a kind of mysterious underground room shut in by iron gratings called