The parcel was ready.
Mr. Karu was all smiles. He was a little, short man with extremely beady eyes, quick movements, and a yellow skin deeply pitted by small-pox.
“It is very big to-day!” he exclaimed in Japanese, referring to the package. “Very much larger; half a yen more, please, most honourable gentleman,” as I put down the usual amount.
The smiles were explained; and there was no doubt some truth, I thought, in what the little chief-clerk at the bank, who is so anxiously cultivating a beard, said, namely, “That most excellent friend, Karu, is in great much hurry to get much rich man.”
I pay what I know to be in great part an imposition, with an indulgent grin—I am in a hurry to get back to Mousmé, or might have argued the matter even in this heat—accept the offer of a coolie to carry my parcel for the equivalent of three-halfpence, and start to climb up the shady side of the rough-paved street to my home.
Mousmé was waiting for me at the little gate in the toy fence of bamboo—a fence the like of which in no country save Japan would have been deemed sufficient for the purpose intended.
She came forward to be kissed (I had had to give her a few lessons in this custom) with her chin—which in the sunlight was as if carved out of ivory, so fine is the texture of her skin—tilted up, and the red rosebud mouth wreathed in a smile. Mousmé is learning European ways rapidly. My experiment seems very promising; and she is evidently growing very fond of me. She is learning English, and even the English alphabet, so books are becoming of interest to her, especially those with pictures in them.
“What is there?” she inquires eagerly in Japanese, pointing to the parcel which the coolie carries on ahead of us up the garden-walk.
“Books.”