and the
women in the other. Those who knew me were very kind. Countess H----
introduced me to the bridesmaids; at least they would be the maids at
home. They were the sisters and young relatives all dressed in the most
brilliant kimonos and embroidered and decorated to the limit; they
looked like all the parrots and peacocks and paradise and blue birds and
every lovely color imaginable, while the uniform black of the guests,
decorated with the pure white of their crests which stand out in such a
group, formed the perfect background, free from all the messiness which
is so apparent in a diversified gathering of all sorts of color and
shape and materials in our land. At tea, which was very elaborate and
taken sitting at the tables, the family of the two filled one table, a
long one at the end of the room. The bride now wore a green kimono,
equally brilliant; about two feet away from her sat the groom, both in
the middle of the long table.

TOKYO, Thursday, March 20.

We have had a number of social events this week. Tuesday evening General
H----, who speaks no English but who came over on the _Shinyo_ with us,
gave a party for us in the gardens of the Arsenal Grounds. We could not
have entered the Arsenal Grounds in any other way. There were about
twenty-five people there, mostly Christian Association people, and the
clergyman of the Japanese church where I had spoken the night before. He
is keen about introducing more democracy in Japan, and I spoke on the
moral meaning of democracy. Well, the garden isn't a garden at all in
our sense, but a park, and the finest in Tokyo outside of the Imperial
ones. It is quite different from the miniature ones we know as Japanese
gardens, being of fair size, with none of those cunning little
imitations in it; big imitations there are in plenty, as it was a fad of
the old landscapists, as you might know, to reproduce on a small scale
celebrated scenes elsewhere. The old Daimyo, who built this one two
hundred years ago, was a great admirer of the Chinese and reproduced
several famous Chinese landscapes as well as one from Kyoto. The
extraordinary thing is the amount of variety they get in a small space;
they could reproduce the earth, including the Alps and a storm in the
Irish Channel, if they had Central Park. Every detail counts; it is all
so artistically figured out and every little rock has a meaning of its
own so that a barbarian can only get a surface view. It would have t