The boy travellers in the Far East : adventures of two youths ... - Library

half SO pretty. And it is proper to add
that he bought two of these robes. Why
he should buy two, when he had only one
sister—and she would not be likely to want
two wrappers of the same kind—I leave
the reader to guess.
Then there were fans on the list, and
he went in pursuit of fans. He found
them, and he thus had the opportunity of
JAPANESE FANS. 2il
JAPANESE I'ATTERN-DESIGNER.
seeing the fan-makers at work. He found that there is a great variety in
the fans which the Japanese make, and that the articles vary from prices
which are astonishingly low to some which are dear in proportion. There
is such a large trade in fans that he expected to find an extensive factory,
employing hundreds of hands. He found, instead, that the fan-makers
work on a very small scale, and that one person generally does only a
lAN-MAKEKS AT ^VORK.
small portion of the work,
then turns it over to an-
other, who does a little
more, and so on. Cer-
tain low-priced fans are
all finished in one shop ;
but with the high grades
this is not the case, and,
from first to last, a fan
must 23ass through a good
many hands. The fan-
makers include wouien as
well as men in tlieirguild
and Frank thought it was
by no means an unpleasant
sight to see the wom-
en seated on the floor in
front of low benches and gracefully handling the parts of the fan that
was approaching completion in consecpience of their manipulations.
Mary had been seized with the prevailing mania for Japanese porce-
lain, and among the things in her list she had noted especially and under-
scored the words " some good things in Japanese cloisonne.''^ Frank had
seen a good many nice things in this kind of work, and he set about se-
lecting, with the help of the Doctor and Fred, the articles he was to send
home. He bought some in Yokohama, some in Tokio, aud later on he
IC