ng, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally
sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be
recovered. It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were
dying we also were insensitive. But because the Middle Ages in England
encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more
slowly than Japan is doing. Because, too, we never had in our
bustling history the long periods of immunity from home and foreign
strife by which Japanese craftsmanship profited so wonderfully, we may
not have had such large stores of precious skill and taste to squander
as New Japan, the spendthrift of Old Japan's riches, is unthinkingly
casting away.

It is at Christmas at home that we have in the Christmas tree our
reminder of the country. It is on New Year's Day that in Japan a pine
tree is set up on either side of the front gate, but there are three
bamboos with it, and the four trunks are all beautifully bound
together with rope. If the ground be too hard for the trees to be
stuck in the ground, they are kept upright by having a dozen heavy
pieces of wood, not unlike fire logs, neatly bound round them. The
pines may be about 10 ft. high, the bamboo about 15 ft. To the trees
are affixed the white paper _gohei_. Over the doorway itself is an
arrangement of straw, an orange, a lobster, dried cuttlefish and more
_gohei_. A less expensive display consists of a sprig of pine and
bamboo. Poor people have to be content with a yard-high pine branch
with a French nail through it at either side of their doorway. I have
been ruralist enough to harbour thoughts of the extent to which the
woods are raided for all this New Year forestry. Some prefectures, in
the sincerity of their devotion to afforestation, forbid the New Year
destruction of pine trees.

I remember the gay and elaborate dressing of the horses during the New
Year holidays. I saw one driver of a wagon who was not content with
tying streamers on every part of his horse where streamers could be
tied: he had also decorated himself, even to the extent of having had
his head cropped to a special pattern, tracts of hair and bare scalp
alternating.

It was pleasant to learn that a fine chrysanthemum show arranged in an
open space in Tokyo was free to the public. Some plants, by means of
grafting, bore flowers of half a dozen different varieties. Several
plants had been wondrously trained into the form of _kuruma_, etc. Not
a few of the varieties