By the way, it may interest you at home to know that a pile of four cucumbers costs 3 sen, which is exactly 3 farthings the lot. Are you surprised that I eat boiled cucumbers with white sauce? It is at home a vegetable we could not often indulge in, with cucumbers 1s. each, but here, where all things are ridiculous prices, being either too dear or too cheap, I have the power to indulge in this delicate dish.
Eggs are funny things here; they get dear in the summer, just when the man in _Punch_ finds his hens begin to lay. Here the extreme heat enervates the hens for a couple of months in the summer.
=July 17.=--A long solitary day’s work till the late afternoon, when Professor _F----_ came, and we did a little “joint work”--it is beginning to be almost farcical; however, without him I should never have got on at first, so it is all right.
=July 18.=--Work till 2, when a party of provincial botanists came to the laboratory, and I met once more the Mr. _O----_ who was kind to me at Okoyama in my second tour, as funny and as amusing as ever, with his twinkling black eyes and mobile eyebrows, that so incongruously reminded me of “the silk-worm moth eyebrows of a woman.” At 3 I left the party, who had, of course, to see all the sights of the Institute, among which was the “Fossil Lab.”
=July 19.=--At 6.30 I got up to go and see the “Morning Glories,” huge brilliant convolvulus flowers, which are specially cultivated in a number of gardens in a part of the town near Oyeno Park. We went to about a dozen gardens, and saw many of the flowers, though it is still a little early in the season. The flowers are trained in pots to grow round light bamboo frames, and are specially cultivated to be very large. Each morning at ten o’clock all the flowers that have bloomed that day are picked off, so as to ensure the next day’s blooms shall not be deprived of any nourishment. The bells are very large and extremely brilliant, blue, purple, magenta, all the possible intense shades of each. The flowers are almost a little crude, some verging on vulgarity in their flaring tones. Many of them are delightful, and some so large they are said to reach 8 inches or so across a single bloom; such huge ones I did not see, but what I saw made it possible to believe in the bigger ones.