460 GOLD LACQUER 



but do you know what gold lacquer is ? You pick up a 

 little shiny yellow box as light as a feather at a curio- 

 dealer's, a box which to your inexperienced eye looks 

 worth fifty cents, and ask its price. " One hundred dol- 

 lars," com.es the answer. You think the man is joking, 

 and offer him five, and keep on increasing up to fifty, six- 

 ty, perhaps eighty, and still you will not get that box. 

 There is many a gold-lacquer box too small to hold even a 

 few quires of note-paper, and without any fictitious archae- 

 ological value, which a thousand-dollar bill will not pur- 

 chase ; and I recently saw, in that wonderful curio-store 

 of Ikeda's in Kyoto, eight thousand dollars offered and 

 refused for a not very large cabinet. The offer came from 

 a well-known English nobleman. Until you know the 



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labor which goes into it, and its durability, and acquire 

 the taste for its refined beauty, you have no idea of what 

 gold lacquer can be. It is the most indestructible prod- 

 uct of human skill. Though made solely by repeated coat- 

 ings of an ill-smelling sort of varnish on a wood frame, a 

 needle will not scratch it nor a live coal burn it. Some 

 lacquer sent by the Mikado to the Vienna Exposition 

 went down off the coast on its return home, and lay eigh- 

 teen months in the sea- water before it was fished up. 

 When opened, though its coverings had been at once 

 soaked through, and though the metal hinges were deeply 

 corroded, the gold lacquer was found to be as perfect as 

 the day it had been finished two hundred years ago. 

 His lacquer is somewhat of an index to the character of a 

 Japanese. Both contain much honest gold. 



Now, though the daimio may have been less of a rider 

 than the Indian in his home-made elkhorn tree, he often 

 sat in a gold-lacquer saddle, which represented the work 

 of a score of men for a decade, and very beautiful it was. 

 Its construction was odd. The pommel was like an enor- 



