town has lived on sleepily, embodying and absorbing the features of Eastern civilization, unchanged and unchanging, its beauty expressive because it is a beauty of its own, untinted by Europeans. We have old towns in the European world. We even speak as if we had a past in fresh America. But what impresses you in these aspects of Eastern development is their antiquity, before which the most ancient of our towns

are but as yesterday. The spirit of ages breathes over Nagasaki, and you cease to think of chronology, and see only the deep, rich tones which time has given and which time alone can give.

A trailing line of mist rises from the town and slowly floats along the hill-side, veiling the beauty upon which you have been dwelling all the afternoon. The green becomes gray, and on the tops there are purple shadows, and the shining waters of the bay become opaque. The ships swing at anchor, and you can see above the trim masts and prim-set spars of the "Richmond" the colors of America. The noble ship has sought a shelter near the further shore, and as you look a light ascends the rigging and gives token that those in command are setting the watches for the night. Nearer us, distinguishable by her white wheel-house, rides the "Ashuelot," while ships of other lands dot the bay. As you look a ball of fire shoots into the air and hangs pendent for a moment, and ex

A JAPANESE MOTHER.

AN HISTORICAL DINNER.

489 plodes into a mass of shooting, corruscating stars, and you know that our friends in the town are rejoicing over the presence of General Grant. From the other hills a flame breaks out and struggles a few moments, and becomes a steady asserting flame, and you know that this is a bonfire, and that the people have builded it to show their joy. Other bonfires creep out of the blackness, for while you have been looking night has come, and reigns over hill and valley and sea, and green has become black. Lines of light streak the town, and you see various decorations in lanterns, forming quaint shapes. One shapes itself into the flag of America, another into the flag of Japan, another into a triangle, another into a Japanese word—the word in red lanterns, surrounded by a border of white lanterns-and Mr. Yoshida translates the word to mean a sentiment in honor of General Grant. These lights in curious forms shoot up in all parts of the town, and you know that Nagasaki is illuminated, and that while here in this venerable temple the merchants have assembled to give us entertainment, the inhabitants are answering their hospitality with blazing tokens of approval. As you look below on the streets around the temple you see the crowd bearing lanterns, chattering, wondering, looking on, taking what comfort they can out of the festival in honor of the stranger within their gates.

But while we could well spend our evening strolling over this graveled walk, and leaning over the quaint brick wall, and studying the varied and ever-changing scene that sweeps beneath us, we must not forget our entertainment. The servants have brought in the candles. Before each table is a pedestal on which a candle burns, and the old temple lights up with a new splendor. To add to this splendor the wall has been draped with heavy silks, embroidered with gold and silver, with quaint and curious legends of the history of Japan. These draperies lend a new richness to the room, and you admire the artistic taste which suggested them. The merchants enter again, bearing meats. Advancing to the center of the room, and to the General, they kneel and press their foreheads to the floor. With this demure courtesy the course begins. Other

attendants enter, and place on each table the lacquer bowls and dishes. Instead of covering the tables with a variety of food, and tempting you with auxiliary dishes of watermelon seeds and almond kernels, as in China, the Japanese give you a small variety at a time. I am afraid, however, we have spoiled our dinner. Our amiable friend, Mr. Yoshida, warned us in the beginning not to be in a hurry, to restrain our curiosity, not to hurry our investigations into the science of a Japanese table, but to pick and nibble and wait-that there were

good things coming which we should not be beyond the condition of enjoying. What a comfort, for instance, a roll of bread would be and a glass of dry champagne! But there are no bread and no wine, and our only drink is the hot preparation from rice, with its sherry flavor, which is poured out of a teapot into shallow lacquer saucers, and which you sip not without relish, although it has no place in any beverage known to your experience. We are dining, however, in strict Japanese fashion, just as the old daimios did, and our hosts are too good artists to spoil a feast with champagne. Then it has been going

on for hours, and when you have reached the fourth hour of a dinner, even a temperance dinner, with nothing more serious than a hot, insipid, sherry-like rice drink, you have passed beyond the critical and curious into the resigned condition. If we had only been governed by the minister, we might have enjoyed this soup, which comes first in the course, and as you lift the lacquered top you know to be hot and fragrant. It is a soup composed of carp and mushroom and aromatic shrub. Another dish is a prepared fish that looks like a confection of cocoa-nut, but which you see to be fish as you prod it with your chopsticks. This is composed of the red snapper fish, and is served in red and white alternate squares. It looks well, but you pass it by, as well as another dish that is more poetic at least, for it is a preparation of the skylark, wheat flour-cake, and gourd. One has a sense of the violation of proprieties in seeing the soaring lark snared from the clouds, the dew, and the morning sunshine, to flavor a cake of wheat. We treat the lark better at home, and we might pass this to the discredit of Japan, if we did not remember how much the lark contributed to feasts in the Palais Royal, and that the French were alike wanting in sentiment. We are not offended by the next soup, which comes hot and smoking, a soup of buckwheat and egg-plant. The egg-plant always seemed to be a vulgar, pretentious plant that might do for the trough, but was never intended for the dignity of the table. But for buckwheat the true American, who believes in the country, and whose patriotism has not been deadened by debates on army appropriation bills, has a tender, respectful feeling. Somehow it has no business upon a foreign table, and at a daimio's dinner you feel that it is one of your contributions to the happiness of the world, that you have given it as your unit in the sum of human entertainment. You think of glowing buckwheat fields over which bees are humming of overladen tables in many an American home, crowned with a steaming mound of brown and crisp cakes, oozing with butter. You think of frost and winter and tingling breezes from the granite hills. It brings you October, and in this wandering round the world, disposed as one always should be to see sunshine wher

ever the sun shines, I have seen nothing to rival an American October. But buckwheat in a soup is unfitting, and allied with the egg-plant is a degradation, and no sense of curious inquiry can tolerate so grave a violation of the harmony of the table. You push your soup to the end of the table and nip off the end of a fresh cigar, and look out upon the town, over which the dominant universe has thrown the starsprinkled mantle of night, and follow the lines of light that mark the welcome we are enjoying, and trace the ascending rockets as they shoot up from the hill-side to break into masses of dazzling fire and illuminate the heavens for a moment in a rhapsody of blue and scarlet and green and silver and gold.

If you have faith, you will enter bravely into the dish that your silk-draped attendant now places before you, and as he does bows to the level of the table and slides away. This is called oh-hira, and was composed, I am sure, by some ambitious daimio, who had given thought to the science of the table, and possessed an original genius. The base of this dish. is panyu. Panyu is a sea-fish. The panyu in itself would be a dish, but in addition we have a fungus, the roots of the lily, and the stems of pumpkins. The fungus is delicate, and reminds you of mushroom, but the pumpkin, after you had fished it out and saw that it was a pumpkin, seemed forlorn and uncomfortable, conscious no doubt of a better destiny in its New England home than flavoring a mess of pottage. What one objects to in these dishes is the objection you have to frogs and snails. They lack dignity. And when we come to real American food, like the pumpkin and buckwheat, we expect to see it specially honored, and not thrown into a pot and boiled in mixed company. The lily roots seemed out of place. I could find no taste in them, and would have been content to have known them as turnips. But your romantic notions about the lily-the lines you have written in albums, the poetry and water-colors-are dispelled by its actual presence in a boiled state, suffused with arrow-root and horseradish. Here are the extremes of life-the arrow-root which soothes

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