Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/23

Rh passes current. When the country recovered peace under the Tokugawa shogun, the daimyo’s household was incomplete without a master of the tea-ceremony, an elaborate system of forms regulating the making, serving, and drinking of that beverage, once considered an indispensable accomplishment by men of gentle breeding, and the master regaled his lord with his endless store of anecdote in the intervals of tea-drinking. It helped to beguile the long days of forced leisure to which the daimyo was condemned in those uneventful times.

Early in the seventeenth century, we find the Taiheiki reader already established in Yedo, for in a picture published in 1630, he is to be seen sitting in a shed of reed-screens. He is beating with a fan on a book-rest before him to give emphasis to his speech, while rows of benches are set in front for the audience. The earliest known of these readers