wish
to be disturbed. The blood spurted across the granite slabs of the
river-ford in a sheet of purest vermilion. The king smiled. Chance had
solved the problem for him. "Build a bridge here," he said to the court
carpenter, "of just such a colour as that stuff on the stones. Build
also a bridge of grey stone close by, for I would not forget the wants
of my people." So he gave the little child across the stream a thousand
pieces of gold and went his way. He had composed a landscape. As for the
blood, they wiped it up and said no more about it; and that is the story
of Nikko Bridge. You will not find it in the guide-books.

I followed the voice of the river through a rickety toy-village, across
some rough bottom-land, till, crossing a bridge, I found myself among
lichened stones, scrub, and the blossoms of spring. A hillside, steep
and wooded as the flanks of the red Aravallis, rose on my left; on my
right, the eye travelled from village to cropland, crop to towering
cypress, and rested at last on the cold blue of an austere hill-top
encircled by streaks of yet unmelted snow. The Nikko hotel stood at the
foot of this hill; and the time of the year was May. Then a sparrow came
by with a piece of grass in her beak, for she was building her nest; and
I knew that the spring was come to Nikko. One is so apt to forget the
changes of the year over there with you in India.

Sitting in a solemn line on the banks of the river were fifty or sixty
cross-legged images which the untrained eye put down immediately as so
many small Buddhas. They had all, even when the lichen had cloaked them
with leprosy, the calm port and unwinking regard of the Lord of the
World. They are not Buddhas really, but other things--presents from
forgotten great men to dead and gone institutions, or else memorials of
ancestors. The guide-book will tell you. They were a ghostly crew. As I
examined them more closely I saw that each differed from the other. Many
of them held in their joined arms a little store of river pebbles,
evidently put there by the pious. When I inquired the meaning of the
gift from a stranger who passed, he said: "Those so distinguished are
images of the God who Plays with Little Children up in the Sky. He tells
them stories and builds them houses of pebbles. The stones are put in
his arms either that he may not forget to amuse the babies or to prevent
his stock running low."

I have no means of telling whether the stranger spoke the