CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER III.
Next morning when I look out of my window, whilst shaving in front of a “trade” glass I had obtained after some trouble for the express purpose, the view charms me with its vastness, just as the night before it had depressed me with its indefinable starlight gloom. “The view,” I say to myself, “is the only big thing about Nagasaki.”
Down below lay the harbour, bathed in Japanese sunlight, which—as even Japanese advertisements are beginning to put it—is like none other. On this particular morning it was filtering through a silver haze, and the water of the harbour looked like a solid block of chrysoprase with indigo shadows. In the distance one saw flaws in it where a sampan was, and white flecks where an incoming or outgoing foreign trader sailed.
What a network of narrow streets there was down below in the town proper! Narrow streets—most of which by now I knew—with slabs of stone laid in the middle of them, and in the older quarters, rickety houses nearly meeting overhead. It was down there that Kotmasu had his office, to which, however, owing to the industry and keenness of his merchant father before him, he was not very much tied. I had made up my mind to go and see him this morning, as he was usually to be found there in the forenoon.
It is pleasant to look upon the green hills, and even to watch the higher ones, bare and brown-topped, break through the fleecy mist hanging about their summits, as I have my breakfast on the verandah in the tiny cups and tinier plates and dishes in which my servants delight.