CHAPTER XI.

We entered Fair Japan through a big gateway a hundred feet high.  It wuz called the Temple of Kiko, it wuz all covered with carvin’ and gold ornaments.  And they say it couldn’t be made now of the same materials for a million dollars.  It would been magnificent lookin’ if it hadn’t been for what looked like serpents wreathin’ up the pillars in front.  I hate snakes! and they’re the last ornaments I would ever sculp over my front door.

Blandina said they wuz dragons, and mebby they wuz.  ’Tennyrate they wuz fastened to the pillars and didn’t offer to hurt us.  We got quite a good meal, but queer, in a tea-house on the borders of the lake.  They had the best tea I ever drinked.  I asked ’em how long they steeped it, and how much they put in for a drawin’, but they bein’ ignorant didn’t seem to understand me.  But I enjoyed bein’ there, for whilst our inner men and wimmen wuz bein’ refreshed our minds wuz enriched by this real picture of life in Japan, for in there it is jest as if we had traveled thousands of milds and wuz sot down in the real Japan.

After the edge of Josiah’s hunger wuz squenched he begun to look about him and praise up the looks of the Geisha girls that wuz dancin’ or rather posterin’ in their pretty modest way, and some on ’em playin’ on queer lookin’ instruments that looked some like my carpet sweeper.

These girl musicians wuz settin’ on the floor dressed in what seemed to be gay colored night gowns, and they looked well enough, kinder innocent and modest lookin’.  But I told him it wuzn’t becomin’ in a old man and a professor to be so enthusiastick over young girls dancin’ and playin’.

And he sez, “Oh, well, fetch on your girl blinders and I’ll put ’em on.  But till you git ’em for me and harness me up in ’em I’ve got to look round some.”

But I told him there wuz enough for him to see besides girls and there wuz.  For it beats all what long strides the Japans have made in every branch of education and culture.  If they keep on in the next century as they have in this some of the so-called advanced nations will have to take a back seat and let this little brown, polite people stand to the head.  But then they have been cultured for hundreds of years, though lots of folks don’t seem to know it.

But I am sorry to say it wuzn’t the high art and culture of Japan that Josiah wuz most interested in, but the queer things, such as the strange stunted trees trained into forms of men and animals hundreds of years old and no higher than a common chair, and lots of ’em not so high.  And there wuz roosters with tails twenty-five feet long.

Josiah said he wuz bound to git an egg and see if he could hatch one.

And I sez, “Where would it roost?  It’s tail is long agin as the hen house is high.”

Well, he said in the summer it could roost on top of the barn with its tail kinder hangin’ down and out over the smoke house.