Frederick and Willy both marvelled at the lapidary style of this metal work, in which the artist with the finest understanding of his art displayed a wealth of composition within the smallest space.

One of the tsubas represented a tea pavilion behind a hedge.  In the spacious landscape was a waterfall, sky and air, perfectly depicted by holes in the iron, that is, by nothing.  Others represented the hero Hidesato vanquishing a monster on the bridge of Seta; the sage Lao Tsze on his ox; Senno Kinko, a pious man, riding on his golden-eyed carp, absorbed in a book; the god Idaten, pursuing an oni, or devil, who had stolen Buddha’s pearl; a bird prying open a Venus’s shell with his bill; a golden-eyed octopus or cuttlefish; the sage Kiko leaning from the window of his house, reading a scroll by moonlight.

Willy, endlessly resourceful and allowing nothing to daunt him, had ferreted this collection out of a restaurant in the Five Points district, a restaurant of viler repute than even the neighbourhood it was in.  A Japanese had left the tsubas with the proprietor of the den as pledge of the payment of his bill, but had disappeared without ever returning to redeem his pledge.  Scarcely a day passed that Willy did not visit a junk shop on the Bowery, or in the Jewish quarter.  Peering with his fearless, fiery eyes, which always wore an expression of mingled astonishment and indignation, he ventured into the worst sections of the city, even into the obscurest opium hells of Chinatown.  His confident manner and round spectacles, he told Frederick, caused him to be mistaken for a detective; which stood him in good stead in making his purchases.

In one shop in Chinatown, belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints.  These were the next things he showed Frederick.  There were most of Hiroshige’s views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of Fujiyama by Hokusai.  One of the most exquisite showed remnants of snow left on the mountain and a brownish red sun setting in a cold sky with fleecy clouds.  There were Shunsho’s and Shigemasa’s illustrations of the book, “Mirror of the Beauties of the Green Houses,” Yedo, 1776, and Shunsho’s illustrations of “The Book of Sprouting Weeds.”  Frederick called one of Hokusai’s prints “the golden poem of summer.”  It was a deep-blue heaven with Fujiyama to the left and golden grain beneath, persons sitting on benches, heat, radiance, joy!  One of Hiroshige’s prints he dubbed “the great poem of the moon.”  On wide, moist, melancholy meadows, scant-leaved trees, like weeping willows, their branches drooping in the mirror of an idly flowing stream, barges loaded with turf passing by, a floating bridge propelled by Japanese raftsmen, the water blue in the evening twilight, a great, pale moon, veiled by pale, bloody tints, rising above the distant edge of the melancholy plain.

In addition to his tsubas and prints, Willy had a collection of so-called netsuke, some in boxwood, some in ivory, small, dice-like carvings, representing with remarkable animation all sorts of real and fantastic scenes.