g. We are elaborating the theory of the
Japanese people, and we can't agree.

No. XV

KIOTO AND HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE CHIEF BELLE THERE AFTER I HAD
CONFERRED WITH CERTAIN CHINA MERCHANTS WHO TRAFFICKED IN TEA. SHOWS
FURTHER HOW, IN A GREAT TEMPLE, I BROKE THE TENTH COMMANDMENT IN
FIFTY-THREE PLACES AND BOWED DOWN BEFORE KANO AND A CARPENTER. TAKES ME
TO ARASHIMA.

"Could I but write the things I see,
My world would haste to gaze with me.
But since the traitor Pen hath failed
To paint earth's loveliness unveiled,
I can but pray my folk who read:--
'For lavish Will take starveling Deed.'"

We are consorting with sixty of the _Sahib-log_ in the quaintest hotel
that ever you saw. It stands on the hillside overlooking the whole town
of Kioto, and its garden is veritable Japanese. Fantastically trimmed
tea trees, junipers, dwarfed pine, and cherry, are mixed up with ponds
of goldfish, stone lanterns, quaint rock-work, and velvety turf all at
an angle of thirty-five degrees. Behind us the pines, red and black,
cover the hill and run down in a long spur to the town. But an
auctioneer's catalogue cannot describe the charms of the place or deal
justly with the tea-garden full of cherry trees that lies a hundred
yards below the hotel. We were solemnly assured that hardly any one
came to Kioto. That is why we meet every soul in the ship that had
brought us to Nagasaki; and that is why our ears are constantly assailed
with the clamour of people who are discussing places which must be
"done." An Englishman is a very horrible person when he is on the
war-path; so is an American, a Frenchman, or a German.

I had been watching the afternoon sunlight upon the trees and the town,
the shift and play of colour in the crowded street of the cherry, and
crooning to myself because the sky was blue and I was alive beneath it
with a pair of eyes in my head.

Immediately the sun went down behind the hills the air became bitterly
cold, but the people in crepe sashes and silk coats never ceased their
sober frolicking. There was to be a great service in honour of the
cherry blossom the next day at the chief temple of Kioto, and they were
getting ready for it. As the light died in a wash of crimson, the last
thing I saw was a frieze of three little Japanese babies with fuzzy
top-knots and huge sashes trying to hang head downwards from a bamboo
rail. They did it, and the closing eye of day regarded them so