ly servant, Mata.

Kano's garden, always the most important part of a Japanese dwelling
place, ran out in one continuous, shallow terrace to the south. A
stone wall upheld its front edge from the narrow street; and on top of
this wall stiff hedges grew. In one corner, however, a hillock had
been raised, a "Moon Viewing Place," such as poets and artists have
always found necessary. From its flat top old Kano had watched through
many years the rising of the moon; had seen, as now, a new dawn possess
a new-created earth,--had traced the outlines of the stars. By day he
sometimes loved to watch the little street below, delighting in the
motion and color of passing groups.

For the garden, itself, it was fashioned chiefly of sand, pebbles,
stones, and many varieties of pine, the old artist's favorite plant. A
small rock-bound pond curved about the inner base of the moon-viewing
hill, duplicating in its clear surface the beauties near. A few
splendid carp, the color themselves of dawn, swam lazily about with
noses in the direction of the house whence came, they well knew,
liberal offerings of rice and cake.

Kano had his plum trees, too; the classic "ume," loved of all artists,
poets, and decent-minded people generally. One tree, a superb specimen
of the kind called "Crouching-Dragon-Plum," writhed and twisted near
the veranda of the chamber of its name-child, Ume-ko, thrusting one
leafy arm almost to the paper shoji of her wall. Kano's transient
flowers were grown, for the most part in pots, and these his daughter
Ume-ko loved to tend. There were morning-glories for the mid-summer
season, peonies and iris for the spring, and chrysanthemums for autumn.
One foreign rose-plant, pink of bloom, in a blue-gray jar, had been
pruned and trained into a beauty that no western rose-bush ever knew.

Behind the Kano cottage the rise of ground for twenty yards was of a
grade scarcely perceptible to the eye. Here Mata did the family
washing; dried daikon in winter, and sweet-potato slices in the summer
sun. This small space she considered her special domain, and was at no
pains to conceal the fact. Beyond, the hill went upward suddenly with
the curve of a cresting wave. Higher it rose and higher, bearing a
tangled growth of vines and ferns and bamboo grass; higher and higher,
until it broke, in sheer mid-air, with a coarse foam of rock, thick
shrubs, and stony ledges. Almost at the zenith of the cottage garden
it poised,