ne and maple,
ash and willow. It was a land of green-clothed cliff and silver
waterfall, lovely beyond the defilement of the pen. At every turn in the
road whence a view could be commanded, stood a little tea-house full of
admiring Japanese. The Jap dresses in blue because he knows that it
contrasts well with the colour of the pines. When he dies he goes to a
heaven of his own because the colouring of ours is too crude to suit
him.

We kept the valley of the glorified stream till the waters sank out of
sight down the cliff side and we could but hear them calling to one
another through the tangle of the trees. Where the woodlands were
lovelier, the gorge deepest, and the colours of the young hornbeam most
tender, they had clapped down two vile hostelries of wood and glass, and
a village that lived by selling turned wood and glass inlay things to
the tourist.

Australians, Anglo-Indians, dwellers in London and the parts beyond the
Channel were running up and down the slopes of the hotel garden, and by
their strange dresses doing all they knew to deface the landscape. The
Professor and I slid down the cliff at the back and found ourselves back
in Japan once more. Rough steps took us five or six hundred feet down
through dense jungle to the bed of that stream we had followed all the
day. The air vibrated with the rush of a hundred torrents, and whenever
the eye could pierce the undergrowth it saw a headlong stream breaking
itself on a boulder. Up at the hotel we had left the gray chill of a
November day and cold that numbed the fingers; down in the gorge we
found the climate of Bengal with real steam thrown in. Green bamboo
pipes led the hot water to a score of bathing-houses in whose verandahs
Japanese in blue and white dressing-gowns lounged and smoked. From
unseen thickets came the shouts of those who bathed, and--oh shame!
round the corner strolled a venerable old lady chastely robed in a white
bathing towel, and not too much of that. Then we went up the gorge,
mopping our brows, and staring to the sky through arches of rampant
foliage.

Japanese maids of fourteen or fifteen are not altogether displeasing to
behold. I have not seen more than twenty or thirty of them. Of these
none were in the least disconcerted at the sight of the stranger. After
all, 'twas but Brighton beach without the bathing-gowns. At the head of
the gorge the heat became greater, and the hot water more abundant. The
joints of the water-pipes on