ed.

When on our arrival in the house we sat and talked in the first
reception-room we entered, I noticed that outside the lattice a
company of villagers was listening with no consciousness of intrusion,
in full view of our host, to the sound of foreign speech. It was a
Shakespearean scene.

Out of its setting, as it is often witnessed to-day, the tea ceremony
seems meaningless and wearisome, an affected simplicity of the idle.
But as a guest of this old house of fine timbers weathered to
silver-grey I found the secret of _Cha-no-yu_. This flower of Far
Eastern civilisation is an aesthetic expression of true
good-fellowship, and a gentle simplicity and sincerity are of its
essence. The admission of a foreigner to a family _Cha-no-yu_ was a
gesture of confidence.

Five of us gathered late in the afternoon of an August day in the cool
matted rest-room in the garden. We looked on the beauty that
generations of gardeners of a single vision had created. Our minds
rested in the quiet as in the quaint phrase, we "tasted the sound of
the kettle and listened to the incense." At length at a signal we
rose. Led by the priestess of the ceremony, our host's aunt, a slight
figure in grey with snow-white _tabi_ and new straw sandals, we passed
by the dripping rocky fountain, with its lilies, and the azure
hydrangea of the hills which, some say, suggests distance. The
hut-like tea-room, traditionally rude in the material of which it was
built but perfect in every detail of its workmanship, we entered one
by one. According to old custom we humbly crept through the small
opening which serves as entrance, the idea being that all worldly rank
must bow at the sanctuary of beauty. The tiny chamber held, besides
the wonderful vessels of the ceremony, a flower arrangement of blue
Michaelmas daisies, and an exquisite scroll of wild duck in flight in
the miniature _tokonoma_,[28] the tea mistress, our host and four
guests. We drank from a black daimyo bowl which had been made four
hundred years before. We passed an hour together and in the twilight
we came out from the little room as from a sacrament of friendship. A
year afterwards my host wrote to me, "Yesterday we had _Cha-no-yu_
again and you were in our thoughts. During the ceremony we placed your
photograph in the _tokonoma_."

After dinner we had _kyogen_[29] by distinguished amateurs, one of
whom, a neighbouring landowner, had lately appeared before the
Emperor. After the plays he