and her face was marked with small-pox. Her big mouth
opened wide as she talked, like a nestling's. But she was immensely
rich. The only child of one of the richest bankers of Japan, she
had brought to her husband the opportunity for his great gifts as a
political leader, and the luxury in which they lived.

The little trees were in evidence everywhere, decorating the living
rooms, posted like sentinels on the terrace, and staged with the
honour due to statuary at points of vantage in the garden. But their
chief home was in a sunny corner at the back of a shrubbery, where
they were aligned on shelves in the sunlight. Three special gardeners
who attended to their wants were grooming and massaging them, soothing
and titivating them, for their temporary appearances in public. Here
they had a green-house of their own, kept slightly warmed for a few
delicate specimens, and also for the convalescence of the hardier
trees; for these precious dwarfs are quite human in their ailments,
their pleasures and their idiosyncracies.

Countess Saito had a hundred or more of these fashionable pets, of all
varieties and shapes. There were giants of primeval forests reduced to
the dimensions of a few feet, like the timbers of a lordly park seen
through the wrong end of a telescope. There were graceful maple trees,
whose tiny star-like leaves were particularly adapted to the process
of diminution which had checked the growth of trunk and branches.
There were weeping willows with light-green feathery foliage, such
as sorrowing fairies might plant on the grave of some Taliessin
of Oberon's court. There was a double cherry in belated bloom; its
flowers of natural size hung amid the slender branches like big birds'
nests. There was a stunted oak tree, creeping along the earth with
gnarled and lumpy limbs like a miniature dinosaur; it waved in the air
a clump of demensurate leaves with the truculent mien of boxing-gloves
or lobsters' claws. In the centre of the rectangle formed by this
audience of trees, and raised on a long table, was a tiny wisteria
arbour, formed by a dozen plants arranged in quincunx. The
intertwisted ropes of branches were supported on shining rods of
bamboo; and the clusters of blossom, like bunches of grapes or like
miniature chandeliers, still hung over the litter of their fallen
beauty, with a few bird-like flowers clinging to them, pale and
bleached.

"They are over two hundred years old," said their proud owner, "