CHAPTER IV.

FIFTY CENTS FOR A CUP OF TEA.

Maria and Her Mother on a Stroll— Tea frdm Ten Cents to Fifty Cents a Cup— And Tea for Nothing—
Bread Known as the Light of Asia— Where One May Feel at Home— That Which Stimulates
But Does Not Intoxicate— None Should Miss These Tea Gardens.

UT in a northeastly direction, beyond the Fish and Fish-
eries building, is a Japanese tea garden. "Fifty cents
for a cup of tea?" said a scandalized old lady who was
hesitating before the gate of this Japanese tea garden.
"My sakes alive, I don't spend that much in a month to
home, but I reckon we'd ought to see what it's like now
we're here. Come on, Maria!" And they went in. The
tea drinkers at the Fair are having such a chance to revel
in their favorite beverage as has never come to them before,
and very likely will never come again. This tiny Japanese
tea garden, that is like a bit out of another world, is thronged
all day long with curious people who have drunk tea all their lives, just as they have
eaten steak and pie, and have regarded it perhaps as a necessary filling for their de-
pleted interiors, but certainly as nothing more.

To them the dainty ceremony and grave, decorous formalities with which
the Japanese invest the operation come with something of the force of a revela-
tion.

When the visitor walks through the bamboo gate of the little tea garden he
steps in one stride from dirty, dun colored Chicago, with its sordid mercantile at-
mosphere, to Yeddo, basking in the shimmering sunlight of a perfect afternoon.
It always is afternoon in that little tea garden, nestling down by the water's edge
so lovingly, and the sun always shines there.

It may be raining torrents on the rest of the Fair, but the visitor feels con-
fident that it never does here. Nature wouldn't have the heart to.

The skies are always blue and the sunny light is ever gleaming on porcelain
dragons and antique bronzes, and the little rippling waves are always lapping the
sedges along the shore with a happy sound, suggesting distant merrymaking, and
over there on the hillside, dappled and flecked with the yellow sunshine, the little
gardener is always at work with his exaggerated shears, apparently clipping one
blade of grass at a time and never in the least hurrying, for he knows deep in his
heart that there is plenty of grass to cut and an endless succession of sunny days
to cut it in.

28

436 HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S FAIR.

Over on the porch of the ceremonial tea house they are always making tea,
and such strong, rich, fragrant tea it is, too. It goes to the head of the visitor, who
sits on a gay fat cushion and sips and sips and nibbles the while on the sugar cakes
which accompany it, and afterward goes peering around in the tiny rooms of the
doll house that the tea people call home, and finally his ideas get perverted, and
everything seems perfectly natural and worthy of imitation. He begins to see the
folly of chairs and tables and longs to go hopping around on the matted floors.
And stockings with thumbs on them like mittens look sensible and cool, and as he
looks down on his own hot patent leathers he no longer takes any joy or comfort
in them.

There are two tea houses in the little garden, a big, cool, shady retreat,
where the common herd who just drink tea may resort, and the ceremonial tea
house, where those to whom tea is a religious conviction may observe their rites.

The floor of this latter house is raised some two feet from the ground, and
visitors sit along the edge of the open porch and put their teacups on its shining
cedar boards and watch the little tea-makers hopping about like a bevy of amiable
and highly intelligent hoptoads.

First, the soft-spoken attendant hops down with a dish of candy. There are
two of them, looking like bricks of ice cream for a doll's party. They rest on a
transparent square of some shining material that might be a very delicate kind of
paper, but it is not; it's a shaving.

Following the candy comes a rough-looking cup filled an inch deep with
liquid so startling green that the visitor is almost afraid of it. This is the ieucha,
powdered tea — the very best leaf grown carefully ground in a little bronze mill and
steeped in the cup, and stirred with a bamboo-whisk broom. The rough yellow
cup which the. visitor looks at so slightingly is antique satsuma, more costly than
the finest egg-shell china.

The attendant brings the cup on a silken mat, from wh.ch the drinker lifts
ic. This being disposed of, a rather more decorative cup follows, containing tea
made from the natural leaves and steeped in a pot. This is called sees-cha, and is
pale yellow. A sample package of the tea and a little fan accompany the second
cup as a souvenir, and usually cause consternation to the visitor, who does not know
how to transport them from the grounds.

In the ceremonial tea house is a tiny, paneled room, a fac-simile of the room
where State teas are held in a Japanese house. There are some beautiful bronzes
here. and an iron raven to be used as an incense burner.

By the door is a bronze lavatory, where guests wash before entering. The
tiny room is so spotlessly clean and sweet with its cedar and bamboo and matting
that a lady visitor suggested the feasibility of a Turkish bath before allowing the
guest to enter.

After the tea drinker has exhausted the possibilities of the Japanese garden
if he or she still feels a craving for the seductive stimulant a few paces further on
beyond the intramural is the temple-like structure of the India Tea Association of
Calcutta.

HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S FAIR. 437

There is no charge for the tea here. The weary guest may bring his lunch
and drink the companies' tea to his heart's content. H the guest is male he sits
out in the big galleried room, hung with rich rugs and resplendant with gleaming
weapons, and under the beneficent eyes of some fat gilt god he drinks of the "Star
of India."

The feminine guest is treated to more seclusion and is fed a brand known
as the Light of Asia. The attendants are suggestive of anything but tea drinking
—great swarthy fellows clad in crimson and gold. Their uniform is adapted from
that of the viceroyal bodyguard. Most of them are fiercely bewhiskered, arid it
gives the feminine tea drinker rather a shock to receive the soothing draught
from such piratical parties.

At the door sits a pirate in white, with enough silverware in the shape of
weapons on to furnish the service for a State dinner.

The Indian tea is a rich amber color and smells like a hay field in July. The
repiesentatives of the company are very hospitable.

"We like," said one of them, "to have people come and try our tea, and we
like to have them bring their lunches and feel at home."

HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S FAIR.

439