upon the lawn. When this performance was over the guests were
conducted to an open space behind the cherry-grove, where a little
shooting-range had been set up, with a target, air-guns and boxes of
lead lugs. Geoffrey, of course, joined in the shooting-competition,
and won a handsome cigarette case inlaid with Damascene work. But he
thought that it was a poor game; nor did he ever realize that this
entertainment had been specially organized with a view to flattering
his military and sporting tastes.

But the greatest disillusionment was the Akasaka garden. Geoffrey was
resigned to be bored by everything else. But his wife had grown so
enthusiastic about the beauties of the Fujinami domain, that he had
expected to walk straight into a paradise. What did he see? A dirty
pond and some shrubs, not one single flower to break the monotony of
green and drab, and everything so small. Why, he could walk round the
whole enclosure in ten minutes. Geoffrey Barrington was accustomed
to country houses in England, with their broad acres and their lavish
luxuriance of scent and blossom. This niggling landscape art of the
Japanese seemed to him mean and insignificant.

* * * * *

He much preferred the garden at Count Saito's home. Count Saito,
the late Ambassador at the Court of St. James, with his stooping
shoulders, his grizzled hair, and his deep eyes peering under the
gold-rimmed spectacles, had proposed the health of Captain and Mrs.
Barrington at their wedding breakfast. Since then, he had returned
to Japan, where he was soon to play a leading political role. Meeting
Geoffrey one day at the Embassy, he had invited him and his wife to
visit his famous garden.

It was a hanging garden on the side of a steep hill, parted down the
middle by a little stream with its string of waterfalls. Along either
bank rose groups of iris, mauve and white, whispering together like
long-limbed pre-Raphaelite girls. Round a sunny fountain, the source
of the stream, just below the terrace of the Count's mansion, they
thronged together more densely, surrounding the music of the water
with the steps of a slow sarabande, or pausing at the edge of the pool
to admire their own reflection.

Count Saito showed Geoffrey where the roses were coming on, new
varieties of which he had brought from England with him.

"Perhaps they will not like to be turned into Japanese," he observed;
"the rose is such an English flower."

T