I have never seen a child in Japan cry; nor have I ever seen one smacked, for what mother can have the heart to touch so dainty a blossom as the child flower of this land of flowers? A group of Japanese children is perhaps the prettiest sight on earth, and they themselves are works of art, the beauty of which can scarcely be imagined. Each head and each piquant face is but a field where the ever-present artist can exercise his ingenuity and his skill in colour and design. Deliberately the child's head and face are treated as subjects fit for the most decorative of design, and the result, though quaint and formal to the last degree, is invariably as pleasing as it is undoubtedly startling and original. And the children themselves are no less full of interest than their heads and faces are full of paint. I once saw a pyramid of children gazing in at a sweet-stuff shop. They looked like three children; but on closer inspection I discovered that one was a doll looking about the age of a child of two, with its great head lolling on the back of its mother, aged three. The three-year-old was a boy, strapped to the back of his sister aged five. The doll and the sister looked very sleepy and tired as they gazed vacantly at the rows of tempting pink sugar-water bottles in the sweet-stuff shop; but what arrested my attention was the alert and intelligent expression of the three-year-old child in the middle, who, just as I took out my notebook to sketch the group, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, holding it between two chubby fingers, eyeing me with the peculiar introspective look of the old hand as he both tests the excellence of the tobacco and gives himself up to its enjoyment. As I sketched him he looked composedly at me out of his big eyes, and posed twice without a particle of artificiality--once with the cigarette in his mouth, and again as if he had just taken it from his lips for a moment while he paid attention to me.