Geoffrey could only think of the vivid gentleman, who had been talking with Tanaka. The guide was sent for and questioned, but he knew nothing. The gentleman in green had merely stopped to ask him the time.
_Tomarite mo Tsubasa wa ugoku Kocho kana!_
Little butterfly! Even when it settles Its wings are moving.
Next morning it was snowing and bitterly cold. Snow in Japan, snow in April, snow upon the cherry trees, what hospitality was this?
The snow fell all day, muffling the silent city. Silence is at all times one of Tokyo's characteristics. For so large and important a metropolis it is strangely silent always. The only continuous street noise is the grating and crackling of the trams. The lumbering of horse vehicles and the pulsation of motor traffic are absent; for as beasts of burden horses are more costly than men, and in 1914 motor cars were still a novelty. Since the war boom, of course, every _narikin (nouveau riche)_ has rushed to buy his car; but even so, the state of the roads, which alternate between boulders and slush, do not encourage the motorist, and are impassable for heavy lorries. So incredible weights and bundles are moved on hand-barrows; and bales of goods and stacks of produce are punted down the dark waterways which give to parts of Tokyo a Venetian picturesqueness. Passengers, too proud to walk, flit past noiselessly in rubber-tyred rickshaws--which are not, as many believe, an ancient and typical Oriental conveyance, but the modern invention of an English missionary called Robinson. The hum of the city is dominated by the screech of the tramcars in the principal streets and by the patter of the wooden clogs, an incessant, irritating sound like rain. But these were now hushed by the snow.
Neither the snow nor the other of Nature's discouragements can keep the Japanese for long indoors. Perhaps it is because their own houses are so draughty and uncomfortable.
This day they were out in their thousands, men and women, drifting aimlessly along the pavements, as is their wont, wrapped in grey ulsters, their necks protected by ragged furs, pathetic spoils of domestic tabbies, and their heads sheltered under those wide oil-paper umbrellas, which have become a symbol of Japan in foreign eyes, the gigantic sunflowers of rainy weather, huge blooms of dark blue or black or orange, inscribed with the name and address of the owner in cursive Japanese script.