Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/159

 streams slipped down our shoulders and glided into our laps. Putting their heads down, the coolies beat their way against the rain for two more soaking miles to Imaichi, the last village on the road, only five miles from Nikko. The tea-house into which we turned for shelter was crowded with belated and storm-bound pilgrims coming down from the sacred places of Nikko and Chiuzenji. All Japanese are talkative, the lower in station the more loquacious, and the whole coolie company was chattering at once. As the place was too comfortless to stay in, we turned out again in the rain, and the coolies splashed away at a walk, through a darkness so dense as to be felt. At midnight our seven jinrikishas rattling into the hotel court, and fourteen coolies shouting to one another as they unharnessed and unpacked, roused the house and the whole neighborhood of Nikko. Awakened sleepers up-stairs looked out at us and banged the screens angrily, but no sounds can be deadened in a tea-house.

To the traveller the tea-house presents many phases of comfort, interest, and amusement altogether wanting in the conventional hotel, which is, unfortunately, becoming common on the great routes of travel. The dimensions of every house in the empire conform to certain unvarying rules. The verandas, or outer galleries of the house, are always exactly three feet wide. foreigner, who insisted on a nine-feet-wide veranda, entailed upon his Nikko carpenter many days of painful thought, pipe-smoking, and conference with his fellows. These mechanics were utterly upset in their calculations. They sawed the boards and beams too long or too short, and finally produced a very bad, un-Japanese piece of work. The floors of these galleries are polished to a wonderful smoothness and surface. They are not varnished, nor oiled, nor waxed, but every morning rubbed with a cloth wrung out of hot bath-water which contains oily matter enough to give, in time, this peculiar lustre. Three years 143