it expression. For an ordinary mortal to feel a fondness for Mother
Earth is a kind of folly, to be carefully concealed from his

fellows. A sort of shamefacedness prevents him from avowing it,
as a boy at boarding-school hides his homesickness, or a lad his love.

He shrinks from appearing less pachydermatous than the rest.
Or else he flies to the other extreme, and affects the odd; pretends,

poses, parades, and at last succeeds half in duping himself, half in
deceiving other people. But with Far Orientals the case is

different. Their love has all the unostentatious assurance of what
has received the sanction of public opinion. Nor is it still at

that doubtful, hesitating stage when, by the instrumentality of a
third, its soul-harmony can suddenly be changed from the jubilant

major key into the despairing minor. No trace of sadness tinges his
delight. He has long since passed this melancholy phase of erotic

misery, if so be that the course of his true love did not always run
smooth, and is now well on in matrimonial bliss. The very look of

the land is enough to betray the fact. In Japan the landscape has
an air of domesticity about it, patent even to the most casual

observer. Wherever the Japanese has come in contact with the country
he has made her unmistakably his own. He has touched her to caress,

not injure, and it seems as if Nature accepted his fondness as a
matter of course, and yielded him a wifely submission in return.

His garden is more human, even, than his house. Not only is
everything exquisitely in keeping with man, but natural features are

actually changed, plastic to the imprint of their lord and master's
mind. Bushes, shrubs, trees, forget to follow their original intent,

and grow as he wills them to; now expanding in wanton luxuriance,
now contracting into dwarf designs of their former selves, all to

obey his caprice and please his eye. Even stubborn rocks lose their
wildness, and come to seem a part of the almost sentient life around

them. If the description of such dutifulness seems fanciful, the
thing itself surpasses all supposition. Hedges and shrubbery,

clipped into the most fantastic shapes, accept the suggestion of the
pruning-knife as if man's wishes were their own whims. Manikin

maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with all
the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest,

grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished.
And they are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most

natural of artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural
whole. To walk into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden

into one of those strange worlds we see reflected in the polished
surface of a concave mirror, where all but the observer himself is

transformed into a fantasticminiature of the reality. In that
quaint fairylanddiminutive rivers flow gracefully under tiny trees,

past mole-hill mountains, till they fall at last into lilliputian
lakes, almost smothered for the flowers that grow upon their banks;

while in the extreme distance of a couple of rods the cone of a Fuji
ten feet high looks approvingly down upon a scene which would be

nationally incomplete without it.
But besides the delights of domesticity which the Japanese enjoys

daily in Nature's company, he has his acces de tendresse, too.
When he feels thus specially stirred, he invites a chosen few

of his friends, equally infatuated, and together they repair to some
spot noted for its scenery. It may be a waterfall, or some dreamy

pond overhung by trees, or the distant glimpse of a mountain peak
framed in picture-wise between the nearer hills; or, at their

appropriate seasons, the blossoming of the many tree flowers, which
in eastern Asia are beautiful beyond description. For he

appreciates not only places, but times. One spot is to be seen at
sunrise, another by moonlight; one to be visited in the spring-time,

another in the fall. But wherever or whenever it be, a tea-house,
placed to command the best view of the sight, stands ready to

receive him. For nature's beauties are too well recognized to
remain the exclusive property of the first chance lover. People

flock to view nature as we do to see a play, and privacy is as
impossible as it is unsought. Indeed, the aversion to publicity is

simply a result of the sense of self, and thereforenecessarily not
a feature of so impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic guidebooks

are written for the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these views
which the Japanese translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which

visitors come not only from near but from far to gaze upon. In
front of the tea-house proper are rows of summer pavilions, in one

of which the party make themselves at home, while gentle little
tea-house girls toddle forth to serve them the invariable

preliminary tea and confections. Each man then produces from up his
sleeve, or from out his girdle, paper, ink, and brush, and proceeds

to compose a poem on the beauty of the spot and the feelings it
calls up, which he subsequently reads to his admiring companions.

Hot sake is next served, which is to them what beer is to a German
or absinthe to a blouse; and there they sit, sip, and poetize,

passing their couplets, as they do their cups, in honor to one
another. At last, after drinking in an hour or two of scenery and

sake combined, the symposium of poets breaks up.
Sometimes, instead of a company of friends, a man will take his

family, wife, babies, and all, on such an outing, but the details of
his holiday are much the same as before. For the scenery is still

the centre of attraction, and in the attendant creature comforts Far
Eastern etiquette permits an equal enjoyment to man, woman, and

child.
This love of nature is quite irrespective of social condition.

All classes feel its force, and freelyindulge the feeling. Poor as
well as rich, low as well as high, contrive to gratify their poetic

instincts for natural scenery. As for flowers, especially tree
flowers, or those of the larger plants, like the lotus or the iris,

the Japanese appreciation of their beauty is as phenomenal as is
that beauty itself. Those who can afford the luxury possess the

shrubs in private; those who cannot, feast their eyes on the public
specimens. From a sprig in a vase to a park planted on purpose,

there is no part of them too small or too great to be excluded from
Far Oriental affection. And of the two "drawing-rooms" of the Mikado

held every year, in April and November, both are garden-parties:
the one given at the time and with the title of "the cherryblossoms,"

and the other of "the chrysanthemum."
These same tree flowers deserve more than a passing notice, not

simply because of their amazing beauty, which would arrest attention
anywhere, but for the national attitude toward them. For no better

example of the Japanese passion for nature could well be cited.
If the anniversaries of people are slightingly treated in the land

of the sunrise, the same cannot be said of plants. The yearly
birthdays of the vegetable world are observed with more than botanic

enthusiasm. The regard in which they are held is truly emotional,
and it not actually individual in its object, at least personal to

the species. Each kind of tree as its season brings it into flower
is made the occasion of a festival. For the beauty of the

blossoming receives the tribute of a national admiration.
From peers to populace mankind turns out to witness it. Nor are

these occasions few. Spring in the Far East is one long chain of
flower fetes, and as spring begins by the end of January and lasts

till the middle of June, opportunities for appreciating each in turn
are not half spoiled by a common contemporaneousness. People have

not only occasion but time to admire. Indeed, spring itself is
suitably respected by being dated conformably to fact. Far Orientals

begin their year when Nature begins hers, instead of starting
anachronously as we do in the very middle of the dead season, much

as our colleges hold their commencements, on the last in place at on
the first day of the academic term. So previous has the haste of

Western civilization become. The result is that our rejoicing
partakes of the incongruity of humor. The new year exists only in

name. In the Far East, on the other band, the calendar is made to
fit the time. Men begin to reckon their year some three weeks later

than the Western world, just as the plum-tree opens its pink white
petals, as it were, in rosy reflection of the snow that lies yet

upon the ground. But the coldness of the weather does not in the
least deter people from thronging the spot in which the trees grow,

where they spend hours in admiration, and end by pinning appropriate
poems on the twigs for later comers to peruse. Fleeting as the

flowers are in fact, they live forever in fancy. For they
constitute one of the commonest motifs of both painting and poetry.