and the infusion is a clear straw-coloured liquid with a delicious
aroma and flavour, grateful and refreshing at all times. If
Japanese tea "stands," it acquires a coarse bitterness and an
unwholesome astringency. Milk and sugar are not used. A clean-
looking wooden or lacquer pail with a lid is kept in all tea-
houses, and though hot rice, except to order, is only ready three
times daily, the pail always contains cold rice, and the coolies
heat it by pouring hot tea over it. As you eat, a tea-house girl,
with this pail beside her, squats on the floor in front of you, and
fills your rice bowl till you say, "Hold, enough!" On this road it
is expected that you leave three or four sen on the tea-tray for a
rest of an hour or two and tea.

All day we travelled through rice swamps, along a much-frequented
road, as far as Kasukabe, a good-sized but miserable-looking town,
with its main street like one of the poorest streets in Tokiyo, and
halted for the night at a large yadoya, with downstairs and
upstairs rooms, crowds of travellers, and many evil smells. On
entering, the house-master or landlord, the teishi, folded his
hands and prostrated himself, touching the floor with his forehead
three times. It is a large, rambling old house, and fully thirty
servants were bustling about in the daidokoro, or great open
kitchen. I took a room upstairs (i.e. up a steep step-ladder of
dark, polished wood), with a balcony under the deep eaves. The
front of the house upstairs was one long room with only sides and a
front, but it was immediately divided into four by drawing sliding
screens or panels, covered with opaque wall papers, into their
proper grooves. A back was also improvised, but this was formed of
frames with panes of translucent paper, like our tissue paper, with
sundry holes and rents. This being done, I found myself the