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48 this morning I didn’t stop, as I usually did, for a chat and to express my admiration for his painstaking art, which though almost totally lacking perspective, was yet quaint and pretty.

“No! I am in a hurry”—this to him.

“Is the sir going back to England?”

“No!” scarcely stopping.

“That is well! good, good! The Nankin vases you, most illustrious sir, are so condescending as to admire are still unsold. Will you take them, honourable sir? They are” All this I hear him say in his queer, cracked, high-pitched, monotonous voice ere I turn the corner.

“Yes, Mr. Kotmasu is in,” replied San, my friend’s clerk, and I could see him.

Kotmasu’s office is a strange mixture of East and West. It is on the second floor of a warehouse, down on the Natoba near the water-side. He, with memories of English ways, has a writing-table made of