can have it for an hour for five cents with rice flour dough to bake cakes on it. The girls bring out their dollies. The dollies look just like themselves. The boys fly kites. The kites are shaped like fish balloons, like dragons and butterflies and animals. They play something like pussy wants a corner, and a card game like authors. They call this the game of the one hundred poets. Verses are on the cards and you have to learn them to play well.
At dinner the family sits in a circle on the floor. Each person has a little stool for a table. The maid brings food on little black and gold trays, one thing at a time. There are no knives or forks or spoons. You eat with long ivory pencils called chop-sticks—if you can. You drink soup from cups. Candy and sweet things are brought first. Then you have fish with pineapple sauce, then salad and hard green pears, then rice and tea. There is quite a peck of boiled rice in a round wooden box, with a cover to keep it hot. Rice is Japanese bread. You may eat all you want. If you drop vour chop-sticks or break a cup, everybody will laugh and begin to talk about something else very fast. They know you feel bad about it and it wouldn't be polite to notice an accident.
At night the maid slides the walls in place around the house. Then she pulls out more walls, and makes as many bedrooms as are needed. She opens cupboards in the walls and tumbles out dozens of soft thick comforters onto the floor. That makes a bed. You use the top comforter for a cover. She gives you a wooden brick for a pillow. Little Cherry Blossom giggles when she sees your surprised look. But she rolls up a quilt to make you a pillow. She lies down beside you, tucks the block under her own neck and goes sound asleep in a minute.
Before you leave Japan you must go to visit a Japanese school with your little friends. You find they have forty-seven letters to learn, instead of twenty-six. And they have thousands of word signs, that look like very queer, black, bird-tracks. They write with a paint brash. Their books begin at the back, and the reading goes up and down instead of across the page. They sit on mats on the floor, in their stocking feet. They count with wooden beads strung on wires in a slate frame. They have to learn English, too. They say English is the hardest to learn of all their lessons, because it seems upside down.
If you go to Japan in the spring you will see the cherry trees in bloom, and the pear trees and plum trees. The Japanese grow
