“The Japanese have a process by which they can make paper crêpe book-covers as stiff as buckram.
“‘Well, Mr. Mayeda, how did your little boy like the stamp-book you mended up for him so beautifully?’ I asked one day.
“‘Ah! it is very sad; he has gone to hell. But the little boy, he has loved the stamp-book so that he has taken it to hell with him. It is on his grave, do you call it?’
“Mr. Mayeda was thinking of what the missionaries had told him when he was learning English.
“A few weeks more passed. Mr. Mayeda brought us the perfect book. He was so flushed and tearful that I poured him a couple of bumpers of vermouth, which he drank off with the excitement of an unemployed workman in England when he makes a trifle by chance, and spends it right off on his beloved gin.
“‘Is anything the matter, Mr. Mayeda?’ I asked.
“‘It is so sad. My other little boy has gone to hell, too. And I am so poor, and I have to keep my wife’s uncle, and my father is very silly, and so I get drunk every night.’
“The books he had brought were exquisite. The printing was really very correct, and the effect of the long hexameter lines, in the handsome small pica type, on the oblong Japanese double leaf of silky ivory-tinted paper, every page flowered with maple-leaves in delicate pearl-grey under the type, was as lovely as it was unique.
“The block printings on every single leaf were done by hand—the leaf being laid over the block, and rubbed into it by a queer palm-leaf-pad burnisher.
“The covers were marvels of beauty, made of steel-grey paper crêpe, ornamented, the back one with three little sere and curled-up maple leaves drifting before the wind, and the front one with a spray of maple leaves in all their autumn glory and variety of tints, reproduced to the life.