truth, but I
prefer to believe that tale as gospel truth. Only the Japanese could
invent the God who Plays with Little Children. Thereafter the images
took a new aspect in my eyes and were no longer "Graeco-Buddhist
sculptures," but personal friends. I added a great heap of pebbles to
the stock of the cheeriest among them. His bosom was ornamented with
small printed slips of prayers which gave him the appearance of a
disreputable old parson with his bands in disorder. A little further up
the bank of the river was a rough, solitary rock hewn with what men
called a Shinto shrine. I knew better: the thing was Hindu, and I looked
at the smooth stones on every side for the familiar dab of red paint. On
a flat rock overhanging the water were carved certain characters in
Sanscrit, remotely resembling those on a Thibetan prayer-wheel. Not
comprehending these matters, and grateful that I had brought no
guide-book with me, I clambered down to the lip of the river--now
compressed into a raging torrent. Do you know the Strid near
Bolton--that spot where the full force of the river is pent up in two
yards' breadth? The Nikko Strid is an improvement upon the Yorkshire
one. The blue rocks are hollowed like soapstone by the rush of the
water. They rise above head-level and in spring are tufted with azalea
blossom. The stranger of the godlings came up behind me as I basked on a
boulder. He pointed up the little gorge of rocks, "Now if I painted that
as it stands, every critic in the papers would say I was a liar."

The mad stream came down directly from a blue hill blotched with pink,
through a sky-blue gorge also pink-blotched. An obviously impossible
pine mounted guard over the water. I would give much to see an accurate
representation of that view. The stranger departed growling over some
hidden grief--connected with the Academy perhaps.

Hounded on by the Professor, the guide sought me by banks of the river
and bade me "come and see temples." Then I fairly and squarely cursed
all temples, being stretched at my ease on some warm sand in the hollow
of a rock, and ignorant as the grass-shod cattle that tramped the
further bank. "Very fine temples," said the guide, "you come and see. By
and by temple be shut up because priests make half an hour more time."
Nikko time is half an hour ahead of the standard, because the priests of
the temples have discovered that travellers arriving at three p.m. try
to do all the temples before four--th