was a lisping mutter--very deep and entirely strange. "That's an
earthquake, and the hillside is beginning to slide," quoth I, taking
measures of defence. The sound repeated itself again and again, till I
argued, that if it were the precursor of an earthquake, the affair had
stuck half-way. At breakfast men said: "That was the great bell of Kioto
just next door to the hotel a little way up the hillside. As a bell,
y'know, it's rather a failure, from an English point of view. They
don't ring it properly, and the volume of sound is comparatively
insignificant."

"So I fancied when I first heard it," I said casually, and went out up
the hill under sunshine that filled the heart and trees, that filled the
eye with joy. You know the unadulterated pleasure of that first clear
morning in the Hills when a month's solid idleness lies before the
loafer, and the scent of the deodars mixes with the scent of the
meditative cigar. That was my portion when I stepped through the
violet-studded long grass into forgotten little Japanese cemeteries--all
broken pillars and lichened tablets--till I found, under a cut in the
hillside, the big bell of Kioto--twenty feet of green bronze hung inside
a fantastically roofed shed of wooden beams. A beam, by the way, _is_ a
beam in Japan; anything under a foot thick is a stick. These beams were
the best parts of big trees, clamped with bronze and iron. A knuckle
rapped lightly on the lip of the bell--it was not more than five feet
from the ground--made the great monster breathe heavily, and the blow of
a stick started a hundred shrill-voiced echoes round the darkness of its
dome. At one side, guyed by half a dozen small hawsers, hung a
battering-ram, a twelve-foot spar bound with iron, its nose pointing
full-butt at a chrysanthemum in high relief on the belly of the bell.
Then, by special favour of Providence, which always looks after the
idle, they began to sound sixty strokes. Half a dozen men swung the ram
back and forth with shoutings and outcries, till it had gathered
sufficient way, and the loosened ropes let it hurl itself against the
chrysanthemum. The boom of the smitten bronze was swallowed up by the
earth below and the hillside behind, so that its volume was not
proportionate to the size of the bell, exactly as the men had said. An
English ringer would have made thrice as much of it. But then he would
have lost the crawling jar that ran through rock-stone and pine for
twenty yards round,