TIGER-HUNTING IN CHINA 249 



as pleasantly, if not so instructively, as if it had been 

 spent seeing temples in the interior. A week in Mi- 

 yanoshita, with a trip to Lake Hakone, then down 

 to Kioto, where Nara and Lake Biwa were visited, 

 and so through the island to Osaka and Kobe, 

 whence ship was taken back to Yokohama, com- 

 prised my travels in that delightful country. 



Alas for the traveller, the old Japan, with the 

 steady progression of a new era, is, in the coast cities 

 at least, rapidly giving way to western ideas, west- 

 ern customs, and western architecture ; her gardens 

 of cherry-blossoms and wistaria, her spotless houses 

 of straw mats and sliding screens, her bowing, laugh- 

 ing, gay-kimonoed people remain ; but, mixed with 

 a prosaic assortment of European hotels, European 

 stores, and European dress, their peculiar fascina- 

 tion and picturesqueness necessarily must suffer. 

 In Tokyo I searched out a Japanese hotel, where I 

 was smilingly assigned a room by the proprietor. 

 Leaving one's shoes at the door, one ascends care- 

 fully polished stairs in straw slippers; but at the 

 first floor even these must be discarded, for the car- 

 pet is the cleanest of straw-mattings in double thick- 

 ness, into which one sinks as in velvet. One's room 

 is like a cardboard box, built of sliding screens and 

 bare of furniture, save for a mat to sit on and a little 

 dressing-table placed on the floor before which one 



