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Updated: June 19, 2025
Especially is this the case as to courtesy and civility, qualities which cost nothing, but which buy everything. A visit to the curiosity bazars, or curio-shops, as they are called, is one of the first excursions of the newly-arrived tourist. The Japanese have quickly discovered to what European and American tastes run, and they can manufacture antiquities as rapidly as purchasers can be found.
Then to the curio-shops! The antique shops of Kyoto give to the simple foreigner the impression that he is being received in a private home by a Japanese gentleman of leisure whose hobby is collecting. The unsuspecting prey is welcomed with cigarettes and specially honourable tea, the thick green kind like pea-soup.
Arab boys selling oranges ran about the streets. The heat was stifling the shadows purple-black, the sunlight glared golden-white on the buildings and towers and minarets. Here were curio-shops with queer oriental carvings and alabaster figures. It was like a chapter of my Thousand-and-One Nights come true, and I remembered the gray barracks at Limerick and the incessant drill.
The reason that so many swords and daggers are for sale, and at prices for which it would be impossible to manufacture them, is because the army has discarded the native weapons and adopted European arms. So the junk-dealers and curio-shops have the former supply of the army.
When this kind of thing was first exhibited by the lamented P. T. Barnum, it is just possible that some bumpkin really believed it to be a mermaid, but the invention has become so common of late that it is found in the curio-shops of every town, and as an eye-catching device is often put into show-cases by some merchant who deals in anything rather than mermaids.
This via sacra is marked by European-style hotels of varying quality, by insidious curio-shops, and by native guides, serious and profane, who classify foreigners under the two headings of Temples and Tea-houses.
He acted as their cicerone or "siseroan," as he pronounced it, to temple treasuries and old palace gardens, to curio-shops and to little native eating-houses. The Barringtons submitted, not because they liked Tanaka, but because they were good-natured, and rather lost in this new country. Besides, Tanaka clung like a leech and was useful in many ways.
Donnelly produced a copy of the Bertillon picture. "What?" exclaimed Bentley, as he glanced at it and then at the name and history on the back. "Annie Grayson? Why, she is known as the queen of shoplifters. She has operated from Christie's in London to the little curio-shops of San Francisco. She has worked under a dozen aliases and has the art of alibi down to perfection.
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