The rooms are splendidly large, about 100 mats when all opened out. It took me quite a long time to count up the mats, for I am rather stupid at it. In an ordinary room one can estimate immediately whether it is an 8 or 10 mat room, by the way they are placed, and without any counting. We were seated all round the edge of the end room, I in front of the _tokonomo_, as the chief guest. It left a large space in the middle to start with, but very soon the maids began to bring dishes of things to eat, and every guest had the same placed before him on the ground; as dish after dish was placed in front of us all, each in the same relative position before every guest, there grew up a symmetrical border pattern all round the room, which slowly encroached on the centre.
It made all moving about very difficult, really impossible for one with skirts, which most of us had, as a number of the men came in _hakama_ (stiff silk divided skirts worn by men when dressed for ceremony). Moving about would not have been at all out of place, as the feeding was very intermittent, and it was only towards the very end of the evening that they brought the rice. While we were eating, a kind of superior geisha danced; three girls dressed in ancient-time costumes performed an old well-known dance supposed to bring good luck. Afterwards they brought in a red-arched bridge and some flowers, and did the butterfly dance--two red-and-white and two white, in such lovely embroidered dresses with butterfly wings on their backs, which they opened and shut. The whole effect was charmingly pretty. They said they were the same girls who waited on us earlier, but I did not recognise them. All the rooms and dishes and lacquer were ornamented with maple leaves, and they brought sweet cakes in the form of coloured maple leaves, which we ate before dinner and through the evening.
Professor _S----_ made a speech which _really_ made me blush. He, in the goodness of his heart, may have meant what he said, but I can’t believe it voiced the views of any of the others. Then they all _banzaied_, and drank my health. Of course, I had to make a reply speech--after one of the men who had come to the lectures thanked me,--and read a poem he had made about me--it is a thousand times harder to make an “after-dinner-return-thanks” speech than a long scientific lecture. I did it somehow. Later, I proposed the health of the future of Japan, amid hearty _banzais_--but always feel a miserable failure at such things.