from a full-planted jaw--to make room for the houses. Then
the trees closed up as before to mount guard over the road. The banks
between which we drove were alight with azaleas, camelias, and violets.
"Glorious! Stupendous! Magnificent!" sang the Professor and I in chorus
for the first five miles, in the intervals of the bumps. The avenue took
not the least notice of our praise except by growing the trees even more
closely together. "Vistas of pillared shade" are very pleasant to read
about, but on a cold day the ungrateful heart of man could cheerfully
dispense with a mile or two of it if that would shorten the journey. We
were blind to the beauty around; to the files of pack-ponies with manes
like hearth-brooms and the tempers of Eblis kicking about the path; to
the pilgrims with blue and white handkerchiefs on their heads, enviable
silver-grey leggings on their feet, and Buddha-like babies on their
backs; to the trim country drays pulled by miniature cart-horses
bringing down copper from the mines and _saki_ from the hills; to the
colour and movement in the villages where all the little children
shouted "Ohio's!" and all the old people laughed. The grey tree-trunks
marched us solemnly along over that horrid bad road which had been
mended with brushwood, and after five hours we got Nikko in the shape of
a long village at the foot of a hill, and capricious Nature, to reward
us for our sore bones, laughed on the instant in floods of sunshine. And
upon what a mad scene did the light fall! The _cryptomerias_ rose in
front of us a wall of green darkness, a tearing torrent ran deep-green
over blue boulders, and between stream and trees was thrown a blood-red
bridge--the sacred bridge of red lacquer that no foot save the Mikado's
may press.

Very cunning artists are the Japanese. Long ago a great-hearted king
came to Nikko River and looked across at the trees, up-stream at the
torrent and the hills whence it came, and down-stream at the softer
outlines of the crops and spurs of wooded mountains. "It needs only a
dash of colour in the foreground to bring this all together," said he,
and he put a little child in a blue and white dressing-gown under the
awful trees to judge the effect. Emboldened by his tenderness, an aged
beggar ventured to ask for alms. Now it was the ancient privilege of the
great to try the temper of their blades upon beggars and such cattle.
Mechanically the king swept off the old man's head, for he did not