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232 how to hold your chop-sticks. After that you manage nicely the rice and the omelet, but the fish and the chicken you can’t contrive to shred apart without dropping your chop-sticks all the time. So, between dances, the maiko—little girls about twelve years old—kneel down beside you and help you. They can’t keep from giggling at your awkwardness; but you don’t mind—you just giggle too; and everybody giggles and has a lovely time. The girl I liked best of all was little Miss Karuta. That was not her real name; it was the play name she chose when she became a maiko, and it means a playing-card. Little Karuta wore a pale gray kimono with big red poppies climbing from the hem to the waist, and her under kimono, that showed through the openings of her great loose sleeves, was bright red silk. Her broad sash was of heavy red satin, and in her shiny black hair she wore a red silk flower with a long red tassel hanging from the stem. She knew about six English words, and I knew about three Japanese, and it was surprising how much conversation we made with them. She taught me to count in Japanese, and I taught her to count in English, and what fun we did have over each other’s queer pronunciation! No matter how much she screwed up her mouth (with the little dab of red paint under the lower lip, Miss Karuta could not say f. “Hore” and “hive” were the best she could do, while “eleven” she could only call “reven.”

Dinner over, we took turns playing a game which you can try when you have a piece of chalk and a piazza about you. On a Japanese floor the matting is n’t tacked down in strips, as we lay it, but made into mats, each three feet wide by six feet long, bound round with blue-and-white cotton or silk. The mats arelaid close together from wall to wall. A Japanese person does n’t speak of a small room or