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The coffee-pot in which the coffee served at my yadoya is prepared is an ingenious contrivance with three chambers, evidently a reproduction of Yankee ingenuity. A big Shinto temple occupies the crest of a little hill near by, and flights of stone steps lead up to the entrance.
Some few there are that are admirable as works of art, but most of them are hideous daubs and representations more than passing rude. Down the street near my yadoya, within a boarded enclosure, a dozen wrestlers are giving an entertainment for a crowd of people who have paid two sen apiece entrance-fee.
Not far from the yadoya my attention is arrested by a prominent sign, in italics, "uropean eating, Kameya hous." Entertaining happy visions of beefsteak and Bass's ale for supper, I enter the establishment and ask the young man in charge whether the place is an hotel. He smiles, bows, and intimates his woeful ignorance of what I am saying.
The villager who sports a European hat or coat comes around to my yadoya, wearing an amusing expression of self-satisfaction, as though filled with an inward consciousness of inv approval of the same. Whereas, every European traveller deprecates the change from their native costume to our own. Following for some distance along the bank of a large canal I reach the village of Hakama for the night.
Now, there is an old story the Story of the Futon of Tottori. But the danna-sama knows that story? Indeed, the danna-sama does not, and begs earnestly to hear it. And the story is set down somewhat as I learn it through the lips of my interpreter. 9 Many years ago, a very small yadoya in Tottori town received its first guest, an itinerant merchant.
One is loath to exchange the neat yadoya, with everything within so spotless and so pleasant, the tiny garden, not over ten yards square, but containing a miniature lake, grottos, quaint stone lanterns, bronze storks, flowers, and stunted trees, for the road.
Ureshino and the baths are some little distance off the main road to Shimonoseki; so, not caring particularly to go there, I continue on to the village of Takio, where rainy weather compels a halt of several hours. Everything is so delightfully superior, as compared with China, that the Japanese village yadoya seems a veritable paradise during these first days of my acquaintance with them.
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