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Consult her now," said Kano. The old dame threw aside the shoji like an armor, and walked in. "Yes, ask me what I think! Ask the old servant who has nursed Miss Umè from her birth, managed the house, scrubbed, haggled, washed, and broken her old bones for you! This is my advice, freely given, make of the youth her jinrikisha man, but not her husband!" "Impertinent old witch!" cried Kano.
The only things beyond the grasp of change are our own memories of what once was. On a New Cornice Road. The sunshine quickened us all, and our kuruma took the road like a flock of birds; for jinrikisha men in company run as wild geese fly, crisscross. It is an artistic habit, inculcated to court ladies in books on etiquette.
The first afternoon, a jinrikisha ride convinced us that we were in the most congested city on the face of the globe; a city of streets so narrow that two chairs could hardly pass each other; a city of strange sights and more violent contrasts than any we had yet seen. And the smells! the English language does not contain words strong enough to describe them.
These were lying about in heaps mixed with white mother-of-pearl shells, as big as your two fists, and shaped like a snail-shell. Our jinrikisha men deposited us at the bottom of the main street of the principal village, to enter which we passed through a simple square arch of a temple. The street was steep and dirty, and consisted principally of shell-fish and seaweed shops.
The suggestion of something having happened to Bobby had changed his anger to sharp solicitude. Gruesome tales of brutality toward foreigners in Eastern ports came back to him. "I wonder," said Mrs. Weston, persuasively, "if you would mind taking a jinrikisha and going down to Benten Dori to see if they are there. I have no one else to send."
We were anxious to make the best of our way home, and starting at four, with but a short stop at the halfway tea-house, we reached the hotel soon after seven, having taken less than an hour to come five miles over a very bad road, an inch deep in mud. So much for a 'man-power carriage, the literal translation of the word jinrikisha.
This had been ringing in my ears all the way, and to be compelled to proceed through the long street of the village in a closed jinrikisha was tantalizing. The Nikko Hotel was to have been my destination, but I met friends on the train and was persuaded to accompany them to the new Kanaya Hotel, situated nearer the village on a height.
Yesterday the authorities sent word that if the foreign teachers would come and make a little music for the sick men it would be appreciated. We had no musical instrument except the organ, so Miss Lessing and I bundled one up on a jinrikisha and trudged along beside it through the street.
They will lean to us, beloved, they will rush downward in a great passion of joy, catching us and straining us to immortality!" By this they were from sight and hearing of the river, and had begun to thread the maze of narrow city streets in which now lamps and tiny electric bulbs and the bobbing lanterns of hurrying jinrikisha men had begun to twinkle.
"I sha'n't want a bed, and I sha'n't want a bath," said Percival, then, seeing that a diminutive maiden was unloosing his shoes, he added petulantly: "My boots are quite dry. Tell her to go away." But Sanno was getting his jinrikisha under cover, and Percival had to submit to the gentle, but firm, determination of the nesan.
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