The “elegant repose” of Kiyôto degenerates into wearisome dawdling in the shops. They are slower than anywhere else. One can hardly buy the merest trifle in less than an hour. Three or four men and sharp, business like boys squat on the floor round a hibachi, with two or three wooden basins for money, several ledgers and ink boxes, and a soroban or two among them. They offer you the tabako bon and produce tea after every little purchase; and if I go with a Japanese, they waste more time in asking my age, income, where my husband is, if I am “learned,” and where I have been.

But the beauty of the things in many of the small, dingy shops is wonderful. Kiyôto is truly the home of art. There are wide mousseline de laines, with patterns on them of the most wildly irregular kind, but so artistic in grace of form and harmony of colour that I should like to hang them all up merely to please my eyes. From the blaze of gold and silver stuffs, stiff with bullion, used chiefly for ecclesiastical purposes, which one sees in some shops, one turns for rest to silk brocades in the most artistic shades of brown, green, and grey, with here and there a spray or figure only just suggested in colour or silver, and to silk crêpes so exquisitely fine that four widths at a time can be drawn through a finger ring, and with soft sprays of flowers or bamboo thrown on their soft, tinted grounds with an apparent carelessness which produces ravishing effects.