in monochrome low
down on the verandah doors. An iris broken by the fall of a branch torn
off by a surly ape; a bamboo spray bowed before the wind that was
ruffling a lake; a warrior of the past ambushing his enemy in a thicket,
hand on sword, and mouth gathered into puckers of intensest
concentration, were among the many notes that met my eye. How long,
think you, would a sepia-drawing stand without defacement in the midst
of our civilisation were it put on the bottom panel of a door, or the
scantling of a kitchen passage? Yet in this gentle country a man may
stoop down and write his name in the very dust, certain that, if the
writing be craftily done, his children's children will reverently let it
stand.

"Of course there are no such temples made nowadays," I said, when we
regained the sunshine, and the Professor was trying to find out how
panel pictures and paper screens went so well with the dark dignity of
massive woodwork.

"They are building a temple on the other side of the city," said Mister
Yamagutchi. "Come along, and see the hair-ropes which hang there."

We came flying in our 'rickshaws across Kioto, till we saw netted in a
hundred cobwebs of scaffolding a temple even larger than the great
Chion-in.

"That was burned down long ago,--the old temple that was here, you know.
Then the people made a penny subscription from all parts of Japan, and
those who could not send money sent their hair to be made into rope.
They have been ten years building this new temple. It is all wood," said
the guide.

The place was alive with men who were putting the finishing touches to
the great tiled roof and laying down the floors. Wooden pillars as
gigantic, carving as wantonly elaborate, eaves as intricate in their
mouldings, and joinery as perfect as anything in the Chion-in temple met
me at every turn. But the fresh-cut wood was creamy white and lemon
where, in the older building, it had been iron-hard and brown. Only the
raw ends of the joists were stopped with white lacquer to prevent the
incursions of insects, and the deeper tracery was protected against
birds by fine wire netting. Everything else was wood--wood down to the
massive clamped and bolted beams of the foundation which I investigated
through gaps in the flooring.

Japan is a great people. Her masons play with stone, her carpenters
with wood, her smiths with iron, and her artists with life, death, and
all the eye can take in. Mercifully she has been den