Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/26

12 tells me is meant for him, as well as the smile and show of white teeth between pretty red lips. Perhaps it is, “What a long time since you have been here!” being obviously inapplicable to me on a first visit.

The paper walls of the room—spotlessly clean—into which we are eventually ushered with a great amount of ceremonious bowing, are just like those in my own little doll’s-house of a villa down in the outskirts of Nagasaki—mere sliding panels, each one in its own ingenious groove. And these by some wonderful process all fit into one another and mysteriously disappear. It is here we have to wait; in this bare room, with its long verandah running in front of it, from which “The Garden of a Thousand Lights,” as its proprietor loved to call it, can be seen; and in the daytime the harbour, an irregular segment of the ocean beyond, calm, green,