Golden Days
home and in-doors at night, and never going on midnight prowls. Or, if he prefer, there are the wonderful long-tailed Tosa chickens, fowls kept in tall, bamboo cages, that their tail-feathers, measuring ten and twelve feet in length, may make a graceful display. When they are let out to scratch and wander about like other chickens, their precious feathers are rolled up in papers and protected from any chance of harm. Japanese spaniels, or Kioto chins, those little black-and-white, silky-eared pets, with big, tearful, goggle eyes, and heads as round and high as Fukurokojin’s, are fashionably dear, ranging from five to forty dollars each, even in their native town.
From the lower end of Theatre Street a covered way leads to the fish-market of the city, a dark, cool, stone-floored place, where more peculiar things may be bought, and more picturesque groups may be studied, in the strange Rembrandtesque light, than anywhere else in Kioto. The foreign artists, who carry away scores of sketches of Japanese life, seem never to find this fish-market, nor in general to seize the best and least hackneyed subjects. Most of their pictures have been long anticipated by the native photographers, and the foreign artist repeats, with less fidelity, the familiar scenes and subjects, with that painstaking western method that, to the Japanese eye, leaves as little to the imagination as the photograph itself.
CHAPTER XXIX
GOLDEN DAYS
Nammikawa, the first cloisonné artist of the world, has his home, his workshop, and his little garden in a quiet corner of the Awata district. Most visitors never pass beyond his ante-room, as Nammikawa holds his privacy
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