"But the faces! There cannot really be such faces in the world."
"We think those are ordinary men. Really horrible faces we very seldom draw."
He stared in surprise, evidently suspecting that I was not in earnest.
*
To a little girl of eleven I showed some engravings representing famous European beauties.
"They do not look bad," was her comment. "But they seem so much like men, and their eyes are so big!... Their mouths are pretty."
The mouth signifies a great deal in Japanese physiognomy, and the child was in this regard appreciative. I then showed her some drawings from life, in a New York periodical. She asked, "Is it true that there are people like those pictures?"
"Plenty," I said. "Those are good, common faces,—mostly country folk, farmers."
"Farmers! They are like Oni [demons] from the jigoku [Buddhist hell]."
"No," I answered, "there is nothing very bad in those faces. We have faces in the West very much worse."