"Why don't they work on the ground instead of climbing up there?" Fred asked."You can hardly have dreamed of the beautiful things we found in Canton cut out of ivory. There were combs and brooches so delicate that it seemed as if they could be blown to pieces by a breath; and there were boxes and card-cases with representations of landscapes, and men and animals on them so small that we needed a microscope to see them distinctly. In one shop we saw the whole tusk of an elephant carved from one end to the other so closely that you could hardly put a pin on it without hitting some part of the work. They told us that the tusk had been sent there by the gentleman who killed the elephant in India, and he was having it carved to keep as a trophy. The carving had cost six hundred[Pg 419] dollars; and if it had been done in America, it would have cost nearer six thousand. Skilled labor is cheap in China, just as unskilled labor is, and it is astonishing for how little a man can be employed on the kind of work that would bring a high price in Europe or America.
ONE:The cause of our interruption was Camille Harper. We had been pacing the side veranda and she came out upon it with an unconscious song on her lips, and on one finger a tiny basket.
Ill see him, he said. Show him up.To see the whole of Tokio is a matter of no small moment, as the area of the city is very great. There seems to have been no stint of ground when the place was laid out, and in riding through it you find whole fields and gardens so widely spread that you can readily imagine yourself to be in the rural districts, and are rather surprised when told that you are yet in the city limits. The city is divided into two unequal portions by the Sumida River, and over this river is the Nihon Bashi, or Nihon Bridge, which is often called the centre of Japan, for the reason that all the roads were formerly measured from it. It has the same relation to Japan as the famous "London Stone" has to England, or, rather, as the London Stone had a hundred years ago."Do you mean she loves him; what sign of such a thing did she show yesterday or last evening?"
