that beat through the body of the listener and died
away under his feet like the shock of a distant blasting. I endured
twenty strokes and removed myself, not in the least ashamed of mistaking
the sound for an earthquake. Many times since I have heard the bell
speak when I was far off. It says _B-r-r-r_ very deep down in its
throat, but when you have once caught the noise you will never forget
it. And so much for the big bell of Kioto.

From its house a staircase of cut stone takes you down to the temple of
Chion-in, where I arrived on Easter Sunday just before service, and in
time to see the procession of the Cherry Blossom. They had a special
service at a place called St. Peter's at Rome about the same time, but
the priests of Buddha excelled the priests of the Pope. Thus it
happened. The main front of the temple was three hundred feet long, a
hundred feet deep, and sixty feet high. One roof covered it all, and
saving for the tiles there was no stone in the structure; nothing but
wood three hundred years old, as hard as iron. The pillars that upheld
the roof were three feet, four feet, and five feet in diameter, and
guiltless of any paint. They showed the natural grain of the wood till
they were lost in the rich brown darkness far overhead. The cross-beams
were of grained wood of great richness; cedar-wood and camphor-wood and
the hearts of gigantic pine had been put under requisition for the great
work. One carpenter--they call him only a carpenter--had designed the
whole, and his name is remembered to this day. A half of the temple was
railed off for the congregation by a two-foot railing, over which silks
of ancient device had been thrown. Within the railing were all the
religious fittings, but these I cannot describe. All I remember was row
upon row of little lacquered stands each holding a rolled volume of
sacred writings; an altar as tall as a cathedral organ where gold strove
with colour, colour with lacquer, and lacquer with inlay, and candles
such as Holy Mother Church uses only on her greatest days, shed a yellow
light that softened all. Bronze incense-burners in the likeness of
dragons and devils fumed under the shadow of silken banners, behind
which, wood tracery, as delicate as frost on a window-pane, climbed to
the ridge-pole. Only there was no visible roof to this temple. The light
faded away under the monstrous beams, and we might have been in a cave a
hundred fathoms below the earth but for the sunshi