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
fantastic miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutive
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 som