Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/256

220 study. Every morning Minami San or Ohara San appeared with a stock of tempting pictures, and as they perfectly understood the art of playing off one buyer against another, you often paid too high a price or delayed decision until a bolder and perhaps more foolish gudgeon took the bait. Minami San was a thin, melancholy man, with carefully plaistered hair and irreproachable attire. He had the air of letting things go at an appalling sacrifice, so that at times you almost hesitated to haggle with him. He seemed too gentle for his trade. But Ohara San roused defiance and inspired respect. He was an obese, jolly man of shrewd capacity. As he sat on your floor drinking tea or taking snuff, his patience and persistence were admirable. He interspersed the bargaining with merry anecdotes and jovial information, as though he rather sought your company than your cash, but nothing escaped his twinkling eye, and, when a hasty covetous glance of the would-be purchaser revealed a preference, the wily merchant refused all abatement of price. He was of coarser grain than Minami, who, when Beauregard left the country, presented him with a very good Kunisada, as a polite acknowledgment of his many purchases. But Ohara lent him for a few days an extremely rare series of pornographic designs by Utamaro, and reclaimed them on the morning of his departure.

One morning Ohara was unrolling a very spirited makimono, copied from Keion's "Flight of the Court," and giving a vivid representation of military pageant in the fourteenth century. As the original is, of course, not to be bought, we were on the point of arranging terms, when the hotel-boy entered and handed a telegram to Beauregard: "I have run