y thing the world has to show,
such a combination of nature and art as one dreams of. These wonderful
temples of enormous size, of natural wood filled with paintings and
sculpture of an ancient and unknown kind, fascinate one to the point of
feeling there must be many more worlds when such multiplicity of ideas
and feelings can exist on a single planet, and we live unconscious of
the whole of it or even of any part of its extent. The gardens we have
seen to-day are the old Japan unchanged since they were made a thousand
years ago, when they took the ancient ideas of China and India for
models. The temples of Tokyo seem like shabby relics of a worn-out era,
but here the perfection of their art remains and is kept intact. The
landscape of the first Buddhist monastery, where the tea ceremony
originated, has the same rivers and islands and little piles of sand
which were placed in the beginning, all in miniature, and planted with
miniature trees, all imitations of real scenes in China when China was
the land of culture. Now they say even the originals are destroyed in
China, which is so out of repair that it depresses every one who sees
it. Fifty years ago they advertised for sale here in Nara, a lovely
pagoda five stories high for fifty yen. It is obviously necessary for
some American millionaire to buy up the massive gates and pagodas and
temples of China in order to redeem them from complete ruin. The
Japanese are the one people who have waked up in time to the value of
these historic things, and several of the temples have been rebuilt
before the old material was so rotted as to make them hopeless. Wood is
a magnificent material when it is used in such massive structures as it
is here. The biggest bell in the world, twelve feet high, is hung on a
great tree trunk in a belfry with a curled-up roof of flower-like
proportions, first having been hauled to the top of the high hill. We
shall hear it boom next Saturday. We heard the one in Nara, the deepest
thing I ever thought to hear, nine feet high. They are beautiful bronze
and they are very mellow and melodious and reach to the center of
whatever the center of your being may be and leave you to hope the
greater unknown of the judgment day may be a call like that sound.

We had lunch with Miss D----. She tells stories about the efforts of the
Japanese girls to get an education that make you want to sell your
earrings, even if you have none, in order to give the money to the