* * * * *

After their dull lunch in this drab hotel, Geoffrey and his wife started once more on their voyage of discovery.  Nagasaki is a hidden city; it flows through its narrow valleys like water, and follows their serpentine meanderings far inland.

They soon left behind the foreign settlement and its nondescript ugliness to plunge into the labyrinth of little native streets, wayward and wandering like sheep-tracks, with sudden abrupt hills and flights of steps which checked the rickshaws’ progress.  Here, the houses of the rich people were closely fenced and cunningly hidden; but the life of poverty and the shopkeepers’ domesticity were flowing over into the street out of the too narrow confines of the boxes which they called their homes.

With an extra man to push behind, the rickshaws had brought them up a zigzag hill to a cautious wooden gateway half open in a close fence of bamboo.

“Tea-house!” said the rickshaw man, stopping and grinning.  It was clearly expected of the foreigners that they should descend and enter.

“Shall we get out and explore, sweetheart?” suggested Geoffrey.  They passed under the low gate, up a pebbled pathway through the sweetest fairy garden to the entrance of the tea-house, a stage of brown boards highly polished and never defiled by the contamination of muddy boots.  On the steps of approach a collection of geta (native wooden clogs) and abominable side-spring shoes told that guests had already arrived.

Within the dark corridors of the house there was an immediate fluttering as of pigeons.  Four or five little women prostrated themselves before the visitors with a hissing murmur of “Irasshai!  (Condescend to come!).”

The Barringtons removed their boots and followed one of these ladies down a gleaming corridor with another miniature garden in an enclosed courtyard on one side, and paper shoji and peeping faces on the other, out across a further garden by a kind of oriental Bridge of Sighs to a small separate pavilion, which floated on a lake of green shrubs and pure air, as though moored by the wooden gangway to the main block of the building.

This summer-house contained a single small room like a very clean box with wooden frame, opaque paper walls, and pale golden matting.  The only wall which seemed at all substantial presented the appearance of an alcove.  In this niche there hung a long picture of cherry-blossoms on a mountain side, below which, on a stand of dark sandalwood, squatted a bronze monkey holding a crystal ball.  This was the only ornament in the room.

Geoffrey and his wife sat down or sprawled on square silk cushions called zabuton.  Then the shoji were thrown open; and they looked down upon Nagasaki.