My kurumaya calls himself 'Cha.' He has a white hat which looks like
the top of an enormous mushroom; a short blue wide-sleeved jacket; blue
drawers, close-fitting as 'tights,' and reaching to his ankles;
and light straw sandals bound upon his bare feet with cords of
palmetto-fibre. Doubtless he typifies all the patience, endurance, and
insidious coaxing powers of his class. He has already manifested his
power to make me give him more than the law allows; and I have been
warned against him in vain. For the first sensation of having a human
being for a horse, trotting between shafts, unwearyingly bobbing up
and down before you for hours, is alone enough to evoke a feeling of
compassion. And when this human being, thus trotting between shafts,
with all his hopes, memories, sentiments, and comprehensions, happens to
have the gentlest smile, and the power to return the least favour by
an apparent display of infinite gratitude, this compassion becomes
sympathy, and provokes unreasoning impulses to self-sacrifice. I think
the sight of the profuse perspiration has also something to do with
the feeling, for it makes one think of the cost of heart-beats and
muscle-contractions, likewise of chills, congestions, and pleurisy.
Cha's clothing is drenched; and he mops his face with a small sky-blue
towel, with figures of bamboo-sprays and sparrows in white upon it,
which towel he carries wrapped about his wrist as he runs.
That, however, which attracts me in Cha--Cha considered not as a motive
power at all, but as a personality--I am rapidly learning to discern
in the multitudes of faces turned toward us as we roll through these
miniature streets. And perhaps the supremely pleasurable impression
of this morning is that produced by the singular gentleness of popular
scrutiny. Everybody looks at you curiously; but there is never anything
disagreeable, much less hostile in the gaze: most commonly it is
accompanied by a smile or half smile. And the ultimate consequence of
all these kindly curious looks and smiles is that the stranger finds
himself thinking of fairy-land. Hackneyed to the degree of provocation
this statement no doubt is: everybody describing the sensations of his
first Japanese day talks of the land as fairyland, and of its people as
fairy-folk. Yet there is a natural reason for this unanimity in
choice of terms to describe what is almost impossible to describe more
accurately at the first essay. To find one's self suddenly in a world
where everything is upon a smaller and daintier scale than with us--a
world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings, all smiling at you as
if to wish you well--a world where all movement is slow and soft, and
voices are hushed--a world where land, life, and sky are unlike all
that one has known elsewhere--this is surely the realisation, for
imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a
World of Elves.