Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 January 1875 — The Japanese Minister’s Wife. [ARTICLE]

The Japanese Minister’s Wife.

The Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune writes: “ The Japanese Minister has brought with him his wife and intends giving fine entertainments here this winter. He says the Japanese Embassy has hitherto made itself very inconspicuous and he intends raising it out of the depths of humanity into which it has fallen. His wife is the tiniest piece of womanhood in existence outside of the Liiiputian kingdom, perhaps, measuring only four feet eight or nine inches. Her face is not pretty at all but her figure is round and symmetrical and her hands and feet are marvels of littleness. She attended the reception given King Kalakaua, in the costume worn in her country by a lady of rank, and of course the petite lady was gazed on and stared at and talked at till she felt anything but comfortable. Her husband is desirous that she should be clothed like les belles Americaines, and has engaged a modiste, Mme. Soule by name, to manufacture an outfit for his lady, fashionable and becoming. The madame speaks only Japanese and declares she cannot and will not learn English, whereupon her husband, understanding woman nature sufficiently not to urge the point at present, receives her guests with all the affability imaginable, ’speaking English with ease, while his wife smiles and nods, and snuggles up to the ladies in the most confidential ami-imploring manner. One day her husband came rushing down into the parlor in the most excited manner, holding the unfinished waist of one of his wife’s dresses aloft over his head. Running to one of the ladies present, he exclaimed: ‘See! the dresswoman has spoiled this waist. See! she has cut these crooked lines into it *• (pointing to the ■ darts). * Come up, please, and tell her what to do. She is cutting everything into ribbons; and all because we are strangers, and know no better.’ The lady comforted him by telling him that the * crooked lines’ were necessary to the proper fit of the waist, and the ribbons were to be transfigured into beautiful flounces, and that the dressmaker was very reliable, and knew what she was about. What will the little lady do when all the mysteries of a civilized woman’s toilet are displayed to her astonished vision?”