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230 our children to wear their party clothes to school. The only big people you see in gay  colors (and they are n’t really big—nobody is, in Japan) are the maiko and the geisha. These are the pretty girls who dance and play the lute and sing, to entertain you while you ’re eating your dinner at a tea-house.

If it’s your first Japanese dinner you ’re having a dreadfully hard time. In the first place, you must sit on the door, for they don’t have any chairs in Japan. You kneel down, and when you turn your toes in till one laps over the other, and then you sit back between your heels, At first you are quite proud to find how well you do it, and you don’t think it ’s so very uncomfortable. But pretty soon you get cramped, and your legs ache as if you had a toothache in them. You don’t say anything, because you think that if the Japanese can sit this way all day long, you ought to be able to stand it a few minutes, Finally both your feet go to sleep, and then you can’t bear it a moment longer, and you have to get up and stamp round the room to drive the prickles out of your feet, and all the little dancing-girls giggle at you. This is n’t your only trouble, either. All you have to eat with is a pair of chop-sticks, and you ’re in terror lest you spill something on the dainty while matting floor.