Professor _T----_ has made the best arrangement for keeping the specimens I have ever seen--small _tin_ boxes, with glass tops, and fastened by a tight ring clasp. The specimens, placed on cotton-wool in it, are immovable when the lid is shut, and the boxes can be placed in any position, but directly they are open they are free, and can be handled, unlike those sewn on to the irritating museum cards.
=December 5.=--At the Institute all day. I don’t at all approve of this Saturday work, but am too busy to feel justified in taking a single day off, as I can only work in the Institute; even writing for this work I can’t do at home, because I need the specimens and books at my hand.
=December 6.=--Lovely brilliant sunshine, but a heavy wind, so I am spending the day lying on a _futon_ on the _engawa_ (open verandah all along the house), in perfect shelter, for the ∠ shape of the house keeps off all the wind and cuts off none of the sun, and I am lying in a pink cotton kimono with my hair down, and can fancy myself on an August beach! but I know directly the sun goes in, Jack Frost will pop out, and in my thickest padded clothes I shall shiver. The sunshine is everything here--no wonder they put the sun and nothing else on their flag. The sky is more blue than our August heaven--and although dead leaves are whirling, the cryptomerias are green and the maples blood-red, while my rose bush has flawless leaves, with crimson petioles. Would it were always November in Japan!
=December 11.=--I have been too busy to write all these days, and as it happened, there has really been nothing worth recording except my discontent with the artisans and trades-people, which had perhaps better be left untold. To-day I lunched at the Goten and met Baron _M----_, last year the Minister of Education. He was very friendly and “made conversation” in quite a European and un-Japanese style, though I thought him stiff last year.
In the evening we had the second dinner of the University of London Union. Viscount _I----_ was there, the first Japanese to come to London to study, and a very entertaining brusque old man he is! Count _H----_, recently Ambassador to England, took me in, and there were sixteen of us altogether, seven foreigners and nine Japanese. It was quite a jolly dinner.