On the table are four covered bowls, two very small dishes containing pickles and soy, and a little paper bag in which is a pair of chopsticks.  The place of each article is foreordained by gastronomic etiquette, and rigidly observed.  In the first bowl is soup, in the second a boiled mixture consisting of leeks, mushrooms, lotus-root and a kind of sea-weed.  In a third are boiled buckwheat cakes or dumplings, and tofu or bean-curd.  In the porcelain cup is rice.  In an oblong dish, brought in during the meal, is a broiled fish in soy.  Lifting off the covers and adjusting my chopsticks deftly, I begin.  The bowl of rice is first attacked, and quickly finished.  The attendant damsel proffers her lacquered waiter, and uncovering the steaming tub of rice paddles out another cupful.  It is etiquette to dispose of unlimited cups of rice and soup, but a deadly breach of good manners to ask to have the other two bowls replenished.  Of course at the hotels whatever the larder affords can be ordered.  Boiled eggs, cracked and peeled before you by the tapering fingers of the damsels, are considered choice articles of food.  Raw fish, thinly sliced and eaten with radish, sauce, ginger sprouts, etc., is highly enjoyed by the Japanese, who are surprised to find the dish disliked by their foreign guests.  A member of one of the embassies sent to Europe confessed that amid the luxuries of continental tables, he longed for the raw fish and grated radish of his native land.  Some articles of our own diet, especially cheese and butter, are as heartily detested by the Japanese as their raw fish is by us.  The popular idea at home, that the Japanese live chiefly on mice and crawfish, and that the foreigners are in chronic danger of starvation, is matched by that of some Japanese, who, finding that the “hairy foreigners” do not eat the food of human beings—­i.e. Japanese—­wonder what they do eat.  A member of the present embassy in Europe, when first leaving his native land, was thus addressed by his anxious mother:  “Now, Yazirobe, you are going to those strange countries, where I am afraid you will get very little to eat:  do take some rice with you.”  I confess that on first landing in Japan I could not relish Japanese diet and cookery.  Barring eggs and rice, everything tasted like starch or sawdust.  The flavors seemed raw and earthy, or suggested dishcloths not too well scalded.  I suspect that a good deal of Philadelphia and Caucasian pride lined the alimentary canal of the writer.  Now, after a ten-mile tramp, a Japanese meal tastes very much as it does to one native and to the diet born.

Besides the young damsel who presides, there is another, less neatly dressed.  Her apron is suggestive of the kitchen, and altogether she seems a Cinderella by the fireplace.  This damsel is evidently a supe or scullion.  She is not so self-possessed as her superior companion, and while observing the foreigner with a mild stare, unskillfully concealing her mirth, she finally explodes when he makes a faux pas with the chopsticks and drops a bit of fish on the clean matting.  Thereupon she is dispatched to the kitchen for a floor-cloth, and severely lectured for laughing aloud, and is told to stay among the pots and pans till she learns better manners.