CHAPTER XI.
A FAIRY HISTORY OF JAPAN.
The shop in which Ned had discovered the object of his search was well down toward the water front, and the course of the sailor was now toward the center of the city. The two passed the customs quarters and the official offices of the city—Yokohama is the old-time treaty port of Japan—and so on to wide streets lined with shops, still alight, though the hour was getting late.
Such quaint little shops Ned had never seen before, and more than once he stopped to look at lacquered ware of rare quality, bronze work, and fancy embroidery. Directly the sailor led the way from the wide streets to the old-time narrow ones in the native quarter, which were not far from the old canal which virtually makes an island of the town.
After proceeding, with hesitating steps, down a particularly dark and foul-smelling street, the sailor paused at a corner, glanced up at a window in a tea-chest of a house which stood flush with the alley-like thoroughfare, and began the ascent of a flight of stairs which swayed under his weight.
On the corner below the tea-house was still open, and the invariable graphophone was grinding out some indistinguishable tune. When the two passed up the dark stairway an attendant slipped out of the public room, walked to the foot of the stairs, and observed the two mounting figures. When the sailor opened the door to as miserable a room as the sun of the Orient ever shone on, the attendant slipped back to the public room and conferred with a keen-eyed, slender man who sat there—a man garbed in the native costume, but bearing in manner and face the stamp of a European!
The sailor closed the door of his room and set a match to a candle which he found on a shelf hanging to a wall. There was nothing in the room, nothing but mats, as it seemed to Ned. There was no table, no chair. Only the mats to sit on and sleep on. The walls were of paper, and Ned saw with pleasure that the whole front of the room, which faced the alley, might be rolled up at will!
The sailor dropped on the floor and fumbled in his clothing for a cigarette.
"Have you got the makings?" he asked, giving up the search at last.
Ned shook his head.