I walked up the main street.  Great Scott! what a din!  It was enough to drive anybody crazy.  Each house, with its paper walls, hardly suitable for the climate, seemed to contain a regular pandemonium.  Men and women were to be seen squatting on the ground round a huge brass hibachi, where a charcoal fire was blazing, singing and yelling and playing and clapping their hands to their hearts’ content.  They had lost somehow or other that look of gracefulness which is so characteristic of them in their own country, and on a closer examination I found the cause to be their being clad in at least a dozen kimonos,[2] put on one over the other to keep the cold out.  Just picture to yourself any one wearing even half that number of coats, and you will doubtless agree with me that one’s form would not be much improved thereby in appearance.  The noise increased until New-Year’s Eve, and when at last the New Year broke in upon them, it was something appalling.  The air was full of false notes, vocal and otherwise, and I need scarcely say that at the “Dai butzu” also grand festivities went on for the greater part of the night.

I was lying flat in bed on New-Year’s Day, thinking of the foolishness of humanity, when I heard a tap at the door.  I looked at the watch; it was 7.20 A.M.

“Come in,” said I, thinking that the thoughtful maid was carrying my sponge-bath, but no.  In came a procession of Japs, ludicrously attired in foreign clothes with antediluvian frock-coats and pre-historic European hats, bowing and sipping their breath in sign of great respect.  At their head was the fat proprietor of the hotel, and each of them carried with him in his hand a packet of visiting cards, which they severally deposited on my bed, as I, more than ten times astounded, stood resting on my elbows gazing at them.

“So-and-so, brick-layer and roof-maker.  So-and-so, hotel proprietor and shipping agent; so-and-so, Japanese carpenter; so-and-so, mat-maker; X, merchant; Z, boatman,” &c. &c, were how the cards read as I inspected them one by one.  I need hardly say, therefore, that the year 1891 was begun with an extra big D, which came straight from my heart, as I uncoiled myself out of my bed at that early hour of the morning to entertain these professional gentlemen to drinks and cigarettes.  And yet that was nothing as compared with what came after.  They had scarcely gone, and I was just breaking the ice in order to get my cold bath, when another lot, a hundredfold more noisy than the first, entered my room unannounced and depositing another lot of “pasteboards,” as Yankees term them, in my frozen hands, went on wishing me all sorts of happiness for the New Year, though I for my part wished them all to a place that was certainly not heaven.  In despair I dressed myself, and going out aimlessly, strolled in any direction in order to keep out of reach of the New-Year’s callers.  But the hours were long, and about eleven I went to pay a visit to Mr. T., the American merchant