© Harper Brothers
LITTLE FISH WENT TO THIS MARKET
Before Japan woke up
A white woman, firmly knit in body and in character, made her way through the many aisles, purchasing with a precision as clearly civilized as it was silent. A Spanish woman, dark and dashing, swung through the same aisles like a little whirlwind. There was brilliance in her eyes, and brilliancy in the gems on her fingers and in her ears. She was exceedingly well dressed, buxom, and attractive, but every purchase was made with a gust of austerity and command quite uncalled for. She bullied the fisherwoman, she bullied her hackman, she bullied the servant who had come to carry her purchases for her; and then she sat down at one of the little restaurant tables and ate the strange concoctions with a dexterity obviously native to her. She was a half-caste, but the Spanish vein was strong in her blood, and Spanish passion actuated her. She got into her ancient-looking hackney-coach with flash and gusto; but not, however, before she had gained her point in the matter of an extra piece of fat upon which she was insisting. She was the little pig who had roast beef because she knew how to market economically.
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But the little pig that has none, and the one who cries, wee! wee! wee! all the way home, in the Far East, is like the Greek about to be ostracized by the community in the agora. Indeed, he has been ostracized in Japan for hundreds of years, and even modernization and imperial edict have changed his status but little. He is known as the eta. To him has been allotted the task of attending to dead animals, whether edible or not, and though his touch profanes the lowest classes of Japan, his labor keeps the country clean after a fashion. Much more. Not only do these outcasts remove dead carcasses from a careless Oriental world, but in one place at least they have been given the sweetest of all professions,—that of selling flowers with which to decorate the tokonoma, the most honorable place in the Japanese home. And all through the day, if one is not too much engrossed in the marts of the foreign settlement, one will hear the voice of these flower-girls calling plaintively, "Hana! hana-i! hana-iro!" Flowers are the things that stand between her and the degradation of her class, because for years the shrine of a loyal servant of the neglected emperor who was struggling against a greater and more powerful group of disloyal Japanese had been kept fresh with flowers by these eta, or outcasts, who did not know whose grave they cherished.
A FIJIAN BAZAR IS A RED LETTER DAY
GOOD LUCK MUST ATTEND THESE TRADERS AT THE DOORS OF THE CATHEDRALS IN MANILA