I sleep just now with a sword by my hand, in case of robbers, who, by the way, visited us every day last week but one. The dogs bark when they come, and after ten minutes or so of furious noise my house Herr gets up, armed with a mild wrath and a sword, and the robbers beat a retreat. Now one day it chanced that Professor _M----_ had given me a huge quince, hard as a stone. The quince had been given to me because I had pined for quince jam, in the making of which I pride myself. Well, I had made my jam one evening, and its fine smell rejoiced my heart (and perhaps attracted the robbers), but the core of the quince remained, weighing about half a pound, and as hard as a brick. At night the robbers came, the dogs barked in vain for my house Herr to arise. At last I looked out of my window, aimed the core of the stony quince with all my might, and presumably hit the robber, for he decamped suddenly, and with much more noise than he made coming. Hence I gather that housewifely instincts in women may have uses hitherto undreamed of.
=November 28.=--A day at the Institute spent in soaking the fossils in gelatine--a tedious but necessary job which I must do myself. Oh, Tokio in the rain, what a place it is! In London we grumble if by accident we step into a “mud pie” left by the street cleaners at some corner of the road, but in Tokio in the wet one must walk through one continuous soft mud pie, along roads where there is no footpath. Of course, take a _kuruma_, is the native reply, but _kurumas_, though cheap, will easily run up into three or four shillings a day at that rate, and they jolt one’s spine to a jelly. The Japanese who walk do so on wooden clogs of a curious kind, with two high stilt-like parts of quite thin wood, so that it is difficult to balance. I fall off even the low kind, and could not walk in them any distance, even if I didn’t fall, as one must take such short steps.
=November 29.=--Still pouring wet. I went to lunch at the Faculty lunch; however, the Dean was most charming, and the President of the University did his best to be, but speaks very little English, so that we say much the same kind of things to each other every day. How ridiculous are the people who imagine “all Japanese are alike”; as I look along the table I see every possible type (except the brutally coarse or sensual one), which may be seen in the English nation, so beyond the fact that all are rather darkly brown or slightly yellow, what need to describe them?