Opposite me is a funny old cycad, not branched at all but bent. It grows on a slope, and is propped up with legs here and there. In the morning I saw Mount Fuji quite magnificently. She stands alone in the sky, three times higher in appearance (and more in fact) than any hill near, with a coronet of snow, and a cloak of clouds round her shoulders, which cut her off from the earth. Immensely more impressive than when seen from Tokio.

What a peaceful day! I stop in the midst of my examination of the cycads to fall into an aimless reverie, and am waked up by a frog croaking from a porcelain-green throat at my side. Big black butterflies come lumbering along, and one thinks they are stupid birds till they settle on a crimson azalea flower, and coming up from the rice fields is a low-toned rattling chorus of frogs and semi. Just before supper I went up the next little hill to see the temple of Kwannon on its top. There are 270 solid stone steps up to the temple, all neatly squared and nearly 8 feet wide—but the temple itself is built of mouldering wood. It commands a splendid view of the rice and barley fields, and then the sea, which lies but a mile away. Behind the temple is a hilly country with many trees and little cultivated patches here and there. There are lots of white Canterbury bells among the tall grasses, and the wild Fuji wistaria branches climb round many a trunk.

After supper the moon rode high in the pale grey sky—but it is so small even now, only what I would have thought was a first day moon in England. Perhaps the brilliantly clear air of Japan last night allowed me to see the crescent before it was really a moon at all, but was the soul of a moon before it was born.

June 3.—To get me to the station by 8.30 the good people started getting up at 5, and talked so that I could hear every word, repeating again and again the time that they must wake me. But once they had “waked” me, not a word did they say, and crept about like mice. The contrariness of the Japanese is incomprehensible. The kuruma came an hour before I ordered it—and I kept him waiting more than an hour by their clock, and then got to the station sixty-five minutes too soon for the train!

After a few stations, I was struck by a pretty beach, and hopped off the train, determined to have a bathe and go on by the next, whenever it might be, to-day or to-morrow. The station-master was very nice, and took charge of my luggage, from which I extracted a towel. The village—Kanbara by name—was very small, and there were a good many fishing-boats at intervals along the shore, but they were nearly deserted. The water was just delicious, so warm that one could not feel it at all, I never bathed in such a perfect temperature, but I expect our creeping cold water is more bracing. I sunned on the beach for a while, and found a train at midday that will take me a good deal quicker than the one I left, as it is a semi-express.

I had to wait about twenty minutes on the platform for it, and was of course gazed at solemnly by a number of small children who did not offer a remark, they were so young that very likely I was the first foreigner they had really seen at close quarters. There was a good deal of difference of opinion as to my sex. My panama hat always bewilders them, as only men wear them here.

The station-master came up and had a little chat, and took me to his room, because there was a chair there, which was very nice of him; though the chair was no more comfortable really than the bench, the quiet and coolness of his room was pleasant.

When I got off the train I had not told him that it was my intention simply to get a bathe, but had diplomatically said I wished to see his neighbourhood, which had evidently pleased him. I told him about the bathe afterwards, which seemed also to please him, for I had enjoyed it very much. I got to Tokio quite uneventfully before night.

June 8.—Fossil-cutting all day. In the afternoon there was a quite terrific thunder-storm, one peal seemed to break inside the very house. Then hail! The largest known for forty years, and really the hailstones were as large as eggs, some were measured by Professor P——, and were 2½ inches in diameter!

By a really quaint coincidence it was the Festival of the God of Thunder, and the storm took place in the middle of the temple festival. There seems some justification for a folk-belief in mythology. When the worshippers prayed for mercy from the fearful hail, the sun soon shone.

June 9.—Professor F—— came to tea in my house, which he now saw for the first time—and when I think how he had to arrange everything with my landlady in the last one, I feel quite proud of my progress. He is still ill, though a little better, and to-morrow goes away to some celebrated hot springs.

June 11.—Working at fossils all day: I developed some photos of cycads I took at Yejiri, but the weather is so hot the gelatine dissolves!

The air is now filled with mosquitoes and minute biting flies, and I would like to be a hedgehog. They sing so loudly outside the net that I can’t sleep, and though they don’t get inside the net much they are so vexed about it, and I am “so sweet to eat,” as my little maid says, they just howl on the top note of rage.

June 12.—A working day, in which the only attempt at excitement was the lunch at the Goten, but as Professor S—— was away it was a little like flat soda-water.

June 13.—I went to see the Agricultural University; it is at the end of the Aoyama tram, and quite away into the country. It possesses a very impressively beautiful stretch of ground, over which the different Institute Buildings are dotted. Dr. M—— met me and took me over. The botanical department is not very big, but those who do research there get every convenience. The only noteworthy thing was the curious arrangement of the paraffin oven, stuck right down in the ground like the hut of a cave-dweller, with steep steps into it and a metal entrance door. This is an old arrangement as a precaution against fire, for, of course, all the buildings are of wood. Of the other departments, I was principally interested in the silk-worm houses, where huge numbers of worms were reared. A scientist was there doing experiments with hybrids, and working at Mendel’s laws and the commercial value of different crosses. More convenient creatures for such a purpose one could hardly imagine. They need no cages, for they can neither fly nor run! When the moths hatch out you can pick them up, pop them down beside any other one you like, and they stay where you put them and mate, and you get a new generation in about thirty days. They are kind enough to fasten their eggs themselves in series on numbered cards, and are, in fact, as well behaved as any scientifically constructed animal could ever be imagined to be.

It was very wet, so the picnic planned for the afternoon did not come off, and I stayed a long time. It was interesting to notice some native Indians studying here, and to find that they, and one or two others who could not speak Japanese, had special classes held in English and given by a Japanese teacher for the various subjects. Who needs to learn any “world language” but English?

June 15.—An uneventful working day, but in the evening there was the Debate. We are going to have alternately afternoon and evening meetings, so as to try to please all varieties of people.

Miss B——’s paper was very amusing, as we all expected it would be, but very superficial also, so that I felt she had been convinced on the side of Hearn, for she brought no real serious argument against him. Miss G—— opposed her well, and brought far more solid reasons in favour of Hearn’s view of Japan; the two supporters were good, particularly “the Poetess,” who supported Hearn. Many of the audience spoke very well, but when it came to voting so many refrained that the votes were level, and I had to give the casting vote, of course in favour of Hearn.

June 19.—All yesterday the Institute had been undergoing extensive cleaning, and this morning was spent in expectation and preparation of exhibits—the great Dr. Koch, the world-famed German bacteriologist, was coming to see the Institute. Professor F—— was brought back from the mountain before his cure was finished to be on duty; my fossil slides were borrowed and put under microscope, and the spermatozoids of ginkgo were on show. He came, after the whole Institute and Baron H—— had waited in a flutter of excitement for nearly an hour; he is a big stout man, not very intellectual-looking. Though interested he had evidently been trotted round a great deal. He seemed to like the fossils, and asked me to show him a section of a leaf, as well as those I had under the microscope.

Then he was trotted off to a purely masculine dinner at the garden house. The newspapers have been full of his coming, his doings, and sayings. They say they are going to put a telephone up Mount Fuji, so as to be able to interview him from the top!

June 22 and 23.—Uneventful working days, with a little reading of Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism in the evening. I am reading aloud to Mrs. St——, who lives next door but one, and who must not use her eyes at present. We are doing Arnold pretty thoroughly, life, poems, and essays, and patted ourselves on the back when we found in an essay on his work that he “appeals exclusively to the cultured section of the educated classes!”

June 24.—At work all day; in the evening I gave a farewell party for the P——s (who leave on Friday), and invited about 30 people, of whom 26 or so accepted. It would have been preposterously ambitious in England, but here my little house, with the rooms thrown into one, and the garden lit with Chinese lanterns, made it a pleasure to play at entertaining. The room lit with lanterns looked very pretty; chairs and lemonade glasses I borrowed from next door, and all went merry as a marriage bell. Though it was the rainy season, the night was gloriously fine. The Dean and one or two Professors of the University, two clergymen and some minor folk from the Embassy disported themselves like children. Even the Poetess came, and entered into the games. We had a collection of 20 sen toys for Professor P——, and some of the things people brought were charming. By 11.30 all but a select few departed, but it was after 12 before these went. What a simple happy thing life in a Japanese house can be!

June 25.—Fossil-cutting all day. Miss M——, Mrs. H——, and President N—— came to see the fossil cutting-machine at work, and also some of the slides under the microscope. They were interested, but of course did not fully realise their significance, for fossils are principally for specialists.

June 26.—At 6.30 this afternoon Professor and Mrs. P—— left. What a crowd there was to see them off! By the same train the wife and daughter of the Austrian Ambassador were leaving, and that brought all the Legations’ representatives. Really the platform was so packed we could hardly move—and if there had been tea going round it would have seemed like a garden party. The train looked comfortable, with wagons-lit—and every one was entertained by the huge “send-off,” so that few tears were shed—but I am deeply sorry to lose the friends that train carries away.

June 30.—A good day’s work. In the evening there was a dinner where met all the botanists of Tokio. One or two could not come, but there were 18 men there. Seemingly foreign food is greatly appreciated—certainly there were more courses than the laws of health allow. It was amusing to note knives slipped furtively down after they had touched asparagus when their owners noted me holding a spike aloft in bare fingers—but otherwise the company behaved and looked much as a similar set of people would look anywhere. The sky, seen out of the windows, was the most astonishingly blue I have ever seen. The soft velvety depth of it suggested the impossibility of stars gleaming on its surface (as they usually do at night), they would have been drowned. The brilliant blueness like that of a cornflower or a solid mass of cornflowers that had flung off their colour into the surrounding air, till every particle for miles, each separate and distinct, was blue. Usually the sky seems a flat or a dome-shaped sheet of colour over us, to-night it was a solid vapoury mass of quivering blue particles—indescribable, but thrilling as an electric shock, and as unforgettable. After we had dined we talked, until I suggested Dr. H—— should give us a piece of Nō recitation; he studies its peculiar singing-like declamation and renders it well. Then others sang, and I was convulsed by “Home, Sweet Home,” sung by one of the young lecturers, “to prevent me feeling home-sick.” His rendering of it was intensely funny, but his voice was pretty good. Afterwards he sang a long Japanese battle song. We left at 9.45, and some of us, I fear, will be ill after that dinner.

July 1.—An uneventful and solitary day’s work. Professor F—— too ill to come. I only suffered spasmodic anger from an outraged digestive mechanism, and continued my usual occupations, and dined with the Sh——s in the evening. The little Japanese girl I have mentioned as staying with her is pretty nice. Alas, to-morrow she is going to be put into foreign dress! She is going to marry Prince S——, however, who is very pro-English, and as she will be much about the court, is compelled to wear it by that sad decree of the Empress.

I heard one good story of a little English girl who went home after having spent all her early years in Japan. In the train between Southampton and London she was much interested with the outlook, the sheep particularly fascinating her, and she called on her mother to admire them: “Look, what a lot!” “Why, here is another!” “There, mother, look, look!” she kept exclaiming, when a benevolent old gentleman said, “Why are the sheep so interesting, little girl? Haven’t you seen a sheep before?”

“Of course I have,” she answered, drawing herself up; “of course—we have two in the Zoo in Tokio.”

July 2.—Fossil-cutting all morning—I seem to be followed by misfortune, for the boy who works the engine has been away all this week, and my scientific colleague here only one afternoon! However, I keep at it, and slides are slowly accumulating, with a few nice things in them.

July 3.—Fossils in the morning and lunch at the Goten; Professor S—— jolly and talkative, and a great pleasure to meet. Professor F—— came in the afternoon, and we did a lot of looking through slides. There are a number of pretty little things among the fossils that puzzle us completely.

July 5.—There was a luncheon party with some nice neighbours to-day, and while we were there some strolling Japanese singers came to the door, and we gave them a few sen and watched them. There were an old woman and a young woman, both good-looking, and with the quaint huge round hats of their class, the young man wore a battered European-style hat—a jarring note, that was repeated in the little girl’s hat, red stockings, and European shoes. It is always the men and the children who wear the horrors of civilisation.

The child danced, clumsily and heavily with her feet, but moving her little body in all kinds of ways with wonderful grace and agility, and a strength in holding difficult curves; her hands too, so prettily shaped, were carefully posed and moved, now rigid, almost bending back, and now swiftly fluttering; she had an old gilt fan, which she opened and manœuvred, but her round pretty face was absolutely set. There was a haunting suggestion of bedraggled beauty in it all, beauty that had once adorned a noble’s palace and had been cast into the streets, and from soft white tabi and silk robes had taken to tight cotton gowns and old red stockings, with a hole showing above the down-trodden heel of a shoe.

Yesterday the Ministry resigned—and the commercial people are on the verge of revolt against the fearful expenditure on army and navy, while the country is so poverty-stricken. I could weep with Hearn over this country, and the hats they wear are enough to start me off!

I have read every word of the cross-examination and trial of Bethell over the Korean matters; you have probably heard of it at home; in many ways I feel that the Japanese use their catch phrases, “love of country”—“love of Emperor,” as cloaks for unscrupulous behaviour public and private, just as our county councillors seem to lose private honesty in dealing with public affairs. The Japanese have 20,000 troops active in Korea, and cannot keep order—my only surprise is that any Koreans submit at all without decent open warfare; they were not conquered, but tricked and coerced into having their Government absolutely controlled by the Japanese Government. Were I a Korean I should at least demand to be properly conquered. Yet, of course, from the point of view of world politics Japan must control Korea, only—God pity the Koreans who have themselves a spark of “love of country” or “love of Emperor.”

July 6.—A solitary day’s work—on the way home I called to inquire after Mrs. M——, who has been in bed for about a month, and I noticed that the ceiling of their big drawing-room is all of satin, embroidered with huge flowers and life-size peacocks and other birds. One can only think of the cost of it, and deplore that it was not put as hangings where one could admire the work.

I had to go by tram to-day, as the bicycle is in hospital, and noticed such a quaint sign over a shop. Most of the very funny ones have been gradually weeded out by thoughtless people informing the owners of their eccentricity, so that the streets are not nearly so entertaining as they were years ago.

This I saw, however:—

“Au Klnds wool are sell in her.”

I also noticed “Fruit’s Shops.”

How lazy a bicycle makes one, it feels a serious imposition to have to walk 2 miles of city road, though the Tokio streets do not seem to get any less entertaining because I am accustomed to them.

July 7.—We had a fine afternoon, so I did a little tidying up in my garden. During these many days of heavy rain the leaves have grown luxuriantly, but the flowers have quite ceased to come out in a world where they are only drenched with unkind torrents instead of being kissed by the warm sun they will get if they wait a few weeks longer. My four little lawns, altogether no bigger than a billiard table, are now like a jungle, and I planted them so few weeks ago. It is very pretty to watch the little side paths, where the moss and lichens and liverworts seem to grow every day; the small paths where O Fuji-san (my maid) does not walk are now quite green—more aged-looking than paths a hundred years old with us. The little stone lantern I bought the day of the paeony flowers, is also green, with a faint haze of centuries over it! It is the lovely greenness of Tokio that marks it out from every city I have seen before. To-day, bicycling along the road above the moat, I could well have believed myself far in the country, with the high green grass on the steep banks of the moat and the grey-green pines growing above and shading it. The green and the grey and the blue that lies in and over this city, blue in the sky and blue in the gowns of every one; grey on the tree trunks, the moats, and the houses; green everywhere there is foot-hold for a moss plant, are a harmony that thrills one’s very soul.

July 9.—Work till 5.30, and then dinner at 6, with Professor S——. This was arranged to suit Professor B——, from New Zealand, who goes to bed at 8.30 or so. Professor O——, the seismologist, and Professor T——, the anthropologist, were also there. It was, of course, a “foreign style” dinner, and was done with great magnificence. Professor B—— talked with almost no comments from any one, but the conversation was never dull.

Professor S——’s garden was more of a dream than ever,—lit with stone lanterns and with a few red roses among the green, the moon being in a watery mist, and we turned the light down, and listened to the bell-like tones of a little “Bell insect,” hanging in a 2-inch cage in the garden. The note was slightly muffled, but musical, penetrating, and sad—one of those notes that act as an “Open Sesame” to the gate of emotions—that is, I should say, to some people’s emotions. Professor B—— had the insect under a “scientific scrutiny” for a whole minute, and then produced his note-book, and the light was turned up while he wrote down his observation that the noise is made by the rubbing of the wings where they slightly overlap.

July 10.—The last day’s lunch at the Goten, and a lot of work of one sort and another got out of hand. Collecting plant-material, etc., takes more time than one would think. The fossil lab.-boy is ill again, and fossils are hanging fire a little, for I can’t do more than three things at once.

July 12.—Writing all morning; the weather is glorious, and the rainy season seems to be pretty well over, and has been a record one. The rain came at the right time, lasted the right length of time, and was cool instead of “steamy hot,” as it often is—we cannot be too thankful for these mercies. Even as it is, the inside of my writing case and the whole of my shoes and straps are covered with blue mould.

I paid several calls in the afternoon—my neighbours are off to the mountains first thing to-morrow morning—lucky people! How I wish I could feel free to do the same, instead of grinding over these old fossils. Soon Tokio will be empty of all the sane people who inhabit it in the winter.

As I am writing I hear the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” set to Japanese and sung lustily. It is one of the favourite foreign tunes among the Japanese, and many sing it without knowing it isn’t Japanese, I believe.

July 13.—I was in the garden with Professor F—— for the first time this year. We were getting some gymnosperm material, and found a brilliant green frog sitting in the sunshine on a brilliant green leaf. He told me he would be brown on a barky branch, so I picked the frog up and put him on the curve of a broad brown branch, and, sure enough, the webs of his feet went quite brown in a minute, and his back went a much darker, duller green, but we couldn’t wait to see him all turn brown, it took too long.

July 14.—Absolutely alone all day. The engine and fossil boy and Professor F—— are all ill again, and the other people not visible. I felt more than a little ill myself, and my bicycle was so bad it had to go into hospital. A very grey day—and in the evening torrents of rain fell from the heavens, and I began to feel inclined to weep also, when Mrs. F——’s little daughter came round to ask me to go in to dinner, as the weather was so depressing. Eastern life has its share of compensations.

July 15.—At 11 I started my work, and took some micro-photos, and I am also seeing about chemical analysis of nodules, covering glasses of great size for fossil slides, printing of photos, artificial cultivation of ginkgo prothallia (and the wretches insist on going mouldy, like my boots), collecting of gymnosperm material, and half a hundred other things that are pulling me in as many directions as the points of a compass for a universe of six dimensions. Why I was such an ass as to undertake both fossil and recent work, I can’t imagine—one must go to the wall.

Coming home late to-day (Professor F—— turned up about 3.30), I passed through the road to a temple where there was a children’s festival, along whose sides were rows of gay little stalls with all manner of bright things to tempt the children, who throng in holiday attire. I never saw more children and fewer elders, and all the children were so bright, and, excepting for the crude, almost savage decorations in their hair, so prettily dressed. The various toys and eatables are indescribable, all brilliant and all ridiculously cheap, from half of a farthing up to a penny or so being the normal prices. Among the eatables were little brown germinating beans, with long white rootlets sticking out, then there was a special stall for a kind of clear seaweed jelly, which was squeezed into a glass cup through a bamboo squirt.

Very decorative little stalls were arranged with brilliant seaweed and shells, and one man did quite a lively trade cutting up small wriggling living fish. That is one thing about eating raw fish, it should be alive to be really good. As you may imagine, I have not yet tested it. Then there is the man that “pops” sugary beans over a charcoal fire, and makes a delicious noise with his shaking grid-like box. The dealer of live red crabs attracts a crowd, and the crabs crawl up the sides of his cage as he pours water down on their backs. Though why any one should buy the crabs, I don’t know, for they are less than 2 inches from toe to toe. One boy I met had a lovely toy—a great dragon-fly, 6 inches across the wings, eagerly flying attached to a red thread—but alas! I soon saw it was real.

All the sentimental nonsense that is written about Japanese love of animals is simply not worth the paper it is written on, and as for their treatment of horses! In England I would go up and beat a man myself that I only pass quickly here, with a prayer for his horse.

There was inevitably among the stalls one for second-hand odds and ends. These I examined carefully, for it is just at such times one can get lovely curios very cheaply. This time I got a tiny double figure, most delicately carved, and an old carved horn comb.

July 16.—My “At Home” day—and therefore, of course, pouring in torrents. When I get to the level ground below the Botanical Gardens I found the road under 2 feet of water. Fortunately there were kurumas waiting to ferry one across, and I got in one, and had a man to carry my bicycle on his shoulders. It was serio-comic to see the houses with 2 and 3 feet of water in them, and clothes hung up out of reach of the dirty flood. The channels between the houses are deep, and I saw several people waist high, with a pole, feeling their way. To think that less than six hours’ rain made that flood, and that it is in the city of Tokio, and that it happens every few weeks in the summer, fills one with surprise. How can they put up with it? It only means the deepening of the channel of the little stream which drains the district—but men and women tuck up their skirts and wade a quarter of a mile up to their knees, and those whose houses the water invades place what they can of their goods out of its way—and probably the last thing any one of them would do would be to grumble at the City Council.

I bought some peaches coming back, they are now in season, and in Tokio more than in any place I know it is a case of “gather ye roses while ye may.” They were very big, soft, and glowing crimson, and cost one halfpenny each. When we cut them the stones separated perfectly, and the rich blood-red flesh stained one’s lips and fingers with its juice. In buying fruit and vegetables the only Chinese character I know is of great use, it is that for “Mountain,” and is used for piles of cucumbers or trios of peaches, and I can read “one mountain cost 10 sen,” or whatever it may be that a cucumber mountain costs.

By the way, it may interest you at home to know that a pile of four cucumbers costs 3 sen, which is exactly 3 farthings the lot. Are you surprised that I eat boiled cucumbers with white sauce? It is at home a vegetable we could not often indulge in, with cucumbers 1s. each, but here, where all things are ridiculous prices, being either too dear or too cheap, I have the power to indulge in this delicate dish.

Eggs are funny things here; they get dear in the summer, just when the man in Punch finds his hens begin to lay. Here the extreme heat enervates the hens for a couple of months in the summer.

July 17.—A long solitary day’s work till the late afternoon, when Professor F—— came, and we did a little “joint work”—it is beginning to be almost farcical; however, without him I should never have got on at first, so it is all right.

July 18.—Work till 2, when a party of provincial botanists came to the laboratory, and I met once more the Mr. O—— who was kind to me at Okoyama in my second tour, as funny and as amusing as ever, with his twinkling black eyes and mobile eyebrows, that so incongruously reminded me of “the silk-worm moth eyebrows of a woman.” At 3 I left the party, who had, of course, to see all the sights of the Institute, among which was the “Fossil Lab.”

July 19.—At 6.30 I got up to go and see the “Morning Glories,” huge brilliant convolvulus flowers, which are specially cultivated in a number of gardens in a part of the town near Oyeno Park. We went to about a dozen gardens, and saw many of the flowers, though it is still a little early in the season. The flowers are trained in pots to grow round light bamboo frames, and are specially cultivated to be very large. Each morning at ten o’clock all the flowers that have bloomed that day are picked off, so as to ensure the next day’s blooms shall not be deprived of any nourishment. The bells are very large and extremely brilliant, blue, purple, magenta, all the possible intense shades of each. The flowers are almost a little crude, some verging on vulgarity in their flaring tones. Many of them are delightful, and some so large they are said to reach 8 inches or so across a single bloom; such huge ones I did not see, but what I saw made it possible to believe in the bigger ones.

In some of the gardens there are many other beautiful things to be seen, one in particular was almost like a museum of precious things. There were open rooms in it, with the flowers arranged according to the best artistic styles, with valuable dwarf trees and curios placed beside them; there were three old kakemonos I should have loved to possess. In this garden also was a wonderful collection of landscape stones, arranged as islands on flat porcelain trays filled with water. It was indeed a case of bringing the mountain to Mahomet—perfect rocky scenes, with gleaming waterfalls made by streaks of white quartz. The innumerable lovely stones—from an inch to a foot high—represented perfectly, enchantingly, all types of grand, beautiful, natural scenery. The one I liked best was (even in Japanese things my fancy usually hits on the most expensive) just a thousand yen in price!

An old man, apparently master of the garden, came up and talked to us, he was curious to see a foreigner so interested in stones, and wished to hear which I liked best, and so on. I wished I could speak fluently with him, he was just the type of character that seems to be dying out, and that is so rich in interest and quaint wisdom and remote culture. His deep wrinkles and keen light eyes were so attractive. I wished I had gold to spend in that garden, he and I would enjoy the good old Japanese way of spending several days over selecting the treasures. He had a pretty little piece of carved white jade among his flowers, six inches long and an inch high—a foil for a dark foliage arrangement, £20 it cost, he said, and he didn’t lie as to its worth.

This is the first nursery garden I have been in that seems to be the creation of an old artistic Japanese, it was indeed charming.

Afterwards we lunched in Oyeno Park, and then I went a round of calls on my bicycle, then home to have two friends to tea, and a view of copies of old Japanese prints: half a chapter I forced myself to write in the evening sent me to sleep.

July 20–24.—An uneventful week of work, all the Institute seems asleep, and Professor F—— only came an hour or two for some of the days till Friday, when we worked very hard.

July 25.—The cycads in Tokio won’t flower, and it is a long way to go to the places they are reported to grow, so that when I heard they were to be found in Yokohama, I went off at once by an early train to visit the various gardens where they are said to be found. There were two female trees and a male, but they were not very healthy; still, as the Tokio ones refuse to bloom, and as I need them, they will be visited by my pilgrimages.

What a hideous influence is the “foreign” style at Yokohama, where red brick warehouses and treeless streets covered with a pall of smoke remind one of the “advance” made by modern Japan. Fortunately the plague spots are not very extensive, one needs to go but a very little way to find beauty again, but I shudder for the future when moss-grown walls and green hedges shall have been ousted from the cities, as they are from ours.

July 26.—I got up at 6 to go to Boshu after more cycads, as the temple, Awajinja, is reported to have fine ones. The sail down the coast in the little steamer was very pleasant. It took seven and a half hours, but we passed very pretty scenery, and for some time seemed out of sight of land in a sea dotted with innumerable white-sailed fishing-boats. In the middle of the day many of the fishers were taking a siesta, the square sail lowered so as to lie along the boat and form an awning, under whose shade they slept.

When we neared the coast, it required but the smallest imagination to picture myself in a savage country, for over the rocks ran and scrambled dark brown men, stark naked, not even the proverbial string of beads to adorn them. They had long bamboo poles in their hands, which they waved like savage spears, and gave them a truly wild aspect.

After landing I bicycled about 8 miles to the temple, and found splendid male flowers on the cycads, but no female. Last year there were lots of female. It is too bad, this year seems to be so unfavourable for the seeds.

I put up at a little hotel near the sea, and after six went down for a bathe. The coast was perfect, shelving rocks sloping out to sea, with little bathing coves and sheltering rocks, and, as I imagined, perfect solitude. But, of course, in this out of the way place I had been noticed, and before I was in the water a minute a crowd of women and children had collected. Nothing I could do or say would drive them away, and so I had to get out and dress under the fire of their eyes and criticisms. In their long-drawn country tones they kept up a running commentary, “Ooā—how white she is!” “Is she married?” “Why does she wear a dress in the sea?” “How old can she be?” “Perhaps twenty years.” There was no escape from nearly fifty people forming a cordon but 3 feet away from me; if I had fled they would have followed; so I dressed as leisurely and as unconcernedly as if I were at home, and gravely buttoned the little buttons of my bodice and put on my stockings while I returned the compliment and made a searching examination of them.

The boy children were naked, with smooth glowing copper limbs like sun-burned clay—as indeed they were. The girl children had usually some floating robe of a dressing-gown nature, open to show the whole body, or caught at the waist and turned down to leave the upper part free. Bright-eyed they were and muddy-cheeked, but neither pretty nor attractive. The women were naked to below the waist, the kimono being turned down over the girdle to form a kind of double skirt. No one wore any ornament of any kind, save a few coloured beads to tie their hair, but few of them had even that. The men wore 3 inches of cloth round their waists and sometimes a band round their heads made of a small Japanese towel. All were perfectly quiet, and the remarks were made one at a time by the older women; the children stood open-mouthed. I know that the blue of the sea-water makes one gleam like white ivory, and as all my clothes were white, I suppose the effect must have seemed novel to them. The deep colour of the Japanese is chiefly due to sunburn, but as they are exposed to it from their earliest days it gets so ingrained that they may not realise it is an attempt at clothing on the part of a body otherwise so unprotected.

July 27.—I rode back again to the starting-point of the steamer, and got there twenty minutes too soon, and so went along the shore and had a bathe. The steamer was very crowded and hot—I wonder who it was that started the fiction that a Japanese crowd does not possess an odour? Why, the detestable smell of the rancid oil in the women’s hair is enough for one alone, without any of the other items, which include a peculiarly virulent pickle, daikon, and an odour of decayed fish that hangs over a good many in a poor crowd.

The heat is now upon us, and as I returned on my cycle through the Tokio streets I met gentlemen with fans, schoolboys with fans, errand-boys with big baskets and fans, kuruma men with fans, even the men dragging heavy carts fanned themselves as they struggled along. Yet very few women had fans, only the ladies riding in kurumas.

July 28.—I had to go up to the University and to several places and get ready for my start to-morrow. Fearfully hot.

July 29.—Started for Hakone. After the railway journey there was a tram ride for several miles along the old Tokkaido road; a beautiful avenue of Cryptomerias shaded it most of the way, and on one side gleams of the blue sea shone between the tree trunks. After reaching the foot of the hills there was a four-hours’ walk up the pass, by a steep and very rough path, with beautiful views of a clear river rushing over big rocks, and blue hills rising peak by peak behind the trees.

My luggage was carried by the quaintest human being to whom I have ever spoken—a dwarf. He hardly reached up to my elbow, and had bent legs and long arms, yet he was very strong and very genial, though so hideous. His back view was like this sketch, and his short stick, about 18 inches long, was very thick and used as a walking-stick or a support to prop up the saddle-like luggage-holder when he rested.

Going with him quite alone through the narrow paths in the woods I felt as though I had been transported into the Middle Ages, where damsels were served by strange dwarfs who led them to witches’ haunts and fairies’ palaces. I walked slowly in this dreamland, and he pattered along, half in a run, for his legs were so short that my slow pace was haste for him. But I need not have felt that his burden was too heavy, I met several charcoal-burners carrying six and seven times more than his load. It is wonderful what the natives can carry here.

We passed a mountain hamlet, a double row of houses built along a path. There was a runnel of clear water rushing down the middle of the road, and a tributary stream brought between each of the houses to join it. In its building the village must be very old, and is not so “Japanese” looking as the buildings of the plain. There seemed to be no gardens, but in the space between the houses grew banks of blue hydrangeas, crimson phlox, and great white lilies.

After a long and rather weary pull up the hills, where the road was bad and very stony, we crested them, and looked down on the lake of Hakone, girt with Cryptomerias.

In the evening I was housed in an old dwelling where daimios used to sleep when they travelled along the Tokkaido—by the lake whose farther shore was cut off by driving clouds. One could imagine it an ocean, and cool fresh breezes made me forget the stifling heat of Tokio.

July 30.—We are living in the clouds; below, above, and around us they swirl and writhe in the wind, sometimes breaking a little to show us the edge of the lake, but then directly driving together again and shutting us out from all but our own garden. Below us in the plain the sun will be shining and the people sweltering, but we are cool—and damp.

July 31.—Still the mist and clouds dance past and wreathe round the trees in such enchanting wise that they make poems and pictures and mysteries of the swift visions they are allowed to reveal.

Sad that I am ill—terrible pain in the night, so that I had to rouse the house; and all day I have done nothing—but grin sometimes when it returned.

August 1.—Clouds still there; and I am a little better though not well. The household in which I am staying is unconsciously amusing. It is to join J—— that I came; the other inmates are missionaries of uncertain age,—very high church, with prayers night and morning, grace before and after meat, with devout crossings and bows, till I long to tell them they are popish idolaters, but refrain, for J——’s sake. The first night I felt too crushed to venture a remark at meals; the book I brought (a clever light thing by Barry Pain) was said to be “such weak rubbish it seemed a pity to read it” by the lady who told us all one evening that she “had read a very great deal—and among it no rubbish!”

J—— begs me not to catch her eye at meals, and I refrain. The Pan-Anglican Congress and the Bishops attending it are the staple articles of interest at present.

While we are not supposed to be seen in a kimono “because the Japanese think us ridiculous in them” (with which I quite agree in one way), the Japanese servants are brought into prayers, and I wonder whether prayers said in Japanese by an English woman escape the ridiculous!

The village street was illuminated last night and to-night with square paper lanterns, for to-day is a great festival at the temple by the lake; and there will be a week’s matsuri, during which time the carpenter cannot mend the boat because he wishes to play with his children. Sunshine came for a couple of hours and we went in a boat to the temple. The boat was beached at the end of a little path, leading straight up from the water to the temple, by a flight of grey stone steps, moss-grown and decked with ferns. On either side were great Cryptomerias and bamboo, a cool deep wood in which the greyness and the greenness were set off by huge white lilies and their visitors, black butterflies with blue-tipped wings. Our path was solitary, but by another meeting it trooped gaily dressed villagers, brilliant in blue, red, and pink—sometimes whole families, father, mother, sons, and daughters in blue kimonos all alike.

The temple service was already well begun before we got there, but we came in time to see the presentation of the first-fruits. In the outer part of the temple the congregation sat on the floor,—the front rows all occupied by elderly gentlemen clad in their black haori with white mons, behind them sat the small boys, and at the back the young girls. By accident, or for some reason I do not understand, there were no women at all in the temple, though a few old ones with babies stood outside. They made no difficulty about us entering, so perhaps it was the preparations for the feasts to follow which kept (as it so often does at home) the women from worship. While the solemnity of presentation went on a man with a ridiculously flat face, dressed in semi-foreign style, played a harmonium, like the ones missionaries use on the seashore in the summer holidays. It was only given the chance of droning half a dozen notes with no tune audible to Western ears, but it was solemn enough, and had a certain fitness for the occasion. Three priests officiated, one in white and one in yellow over-dress with baggy trousers, just like a Turkish lady’s, beneath, and one in a lovely peach-coloured satin dress, an exquisite “Liberty” colour, and a great contrast to the harsh yellow one. The other brought the lacquer trays of offerings to him, with many slow reverences, and he walked up the altar steps and presented them. The walking up the steps was quite a feat—he turned his body sideways, at right angles to the steps, and brought both his feet together on each step. I noticed that his toes were moved up and down in the way prescribed in the ceremonial walk of the Nō.

One of the missionary ladies amused me as we were coming away. She dropped behind with another missionary and said in a tragical stage whisper, “Did you see that English lady in a red-striped dress? She was buying charms and mementoes of the priest! Oh, I hope she is not one of them! It is so horrible to think of——” This dear lady takes all things very seriously, and is as devoid of humour as any one I have met. I marked the lady in a red-striped dress, and discovered that she was carrying a quite new scarlet Kelly & Walsh (a little phrase-book used by all tourists). We all buy little odds and ends when we are touristing.

August 2.—I feel still ill. I expect it was the relative cold and the constant wet, for all the time the clouds were driving through us. So I walked down the pass and went back to Tokio—a long hot journey. Last summer I described all the varieties of undress one can study in the railway carriage, and as the Kobe express cars are as big as big Pullmans and crowded, you can imagine I did not lack entertainment.

August 3.—I went up to the University and the Bank in the morning, and in the afternoon Professor B—— came to tea. He is as talkative as ever, but is now thoroughly disgusted with the Japanese. Their “futility,” their “absurd waste of time,” their “indirectness” irritate him, as they must irritate any one; and he sees no deeper to the things one loves, and which in some degree compensate. He proclaims, infuriated, that all the mysticism that was ever in Japan was brought there by Lafcadio Hearn himself.

August 4.—I set off with my bicycle, carrying all my luggage, for a fossil-insect hunt in Shiobara. The train takes five hours, according to the time-table, to go to the nearest station, and after that I had about 16 miles to ride to the haunt of the fossil insects. Fossil insects are shy and scarce, and I am the first to stalk them here, so I came with a double lot of patience; and I believe I remarked half a year ago, I have been so battered and worn in this country, where my impetuous spirit tugs at Oriental passivity in vain, that I have now normally the patience of two Jobs.

The train journey was remarkable only for the small quantity of clothing the passengers in the cushioned second class (pauper as I am, I only once travelled third) considered essential. Then the bicycle began, and as I spun past the jolting kurumas the other travellers engaged, my heart rejoiced, for not only was I safe from their horrors, but I should reach the hotel first and get the pick of what rooms there might be; for it is a hot-spring place, and much frequented in August.

The first half of the journey was nearly flat, and I have described it before, when I came to this place hunting plants; and then the hills began, but the road was splendidly graded, and I rode up all but one with great ease. The road followed the winding valley, and sometimes seemed to hang over the roaring flood of the river beneath, so precipitous was the slope. At each curve of the road a broiling sun shone on me, and at each convex bend there was a waterfall, which seemed to emanate the coolness of hidden ice, and as the road curved and wound in and out like a Chinese dragon’s tail, I did not lack sensations. The beauty of the solitude of a million trees whispering together, of the silvery blue water and the grey rocks, shone with a clearness and brilliance that is so rare in England, and that is one of the chief charms of this country.

When I arrived and settled into my rooms, I had a bath. It was a big hotel, built for the hot springs which ran directly into the baths, and I was ushered into a bath-room where a man and woman were disporting themselves after the manner of Adam and Eve before the Fall. I felt like the serpent; but refused, with more tact than he showed, to form a third. This surprised the bath-attendant, who, however, allowed me to wait, and then stood outside the door all the time I was bathing to keep others out, and only peeped through the broken glass in the door now and then just to see whether I was ready to come out. After the bath he escorted me across the road (I had to sleep in the annexe), holding the umbrella over me, as I trotted along in a kimono and a pair of stilt-like gheta. In the luxury of idleness after supper I watched a woman in the house opposite. She was clad in a brilliant blue kimono, just the right old china blue—open at the throat, and her face and neck were the colour of warm sun-tanned unstained wood. “Olive,” I suppose people call the complexion, but it was warmer, and more beautiful than that, while her hair was smooth and black as polished ebony, arranged with a series of rich curves in it. The old abused word “chaste” expressed her more exactly than any other I know. The tawdry fluffiness of most of our women’s dress and hair seemed like flannelette beside rich satin as compared with her. Yet a curl may bewitch one and entangle one’s soul, I know—a curl, but not the frippery and broken lines that are so rife in Europe. I wonder till I verge on lunacy how it is that the West has not yet discovered the glory that lies in smooth curves and gleaming surfaces, and in lines of cloth, unbroken by frilling and tucking and ruching and pleating.

August 5.—I hunted fossil insects morning and afternoon, and got a haul, better than I might have expected, if not so good as I had hoped. I left the bicycle at a primitive little saw-mill, turned by the river one has to cross to get the fossil quarry. The people are all greatly interested in it, never having seen a woman’s bicycle before. The hotel is about a couple of miles from the fossil place, so I go on it as far as I can get, for it is hot to walk, and stones are heavy to carry.

August 6.—Another quiet day. I took a walk over the stream up a branch valley. How gloriously limpid and clear the water is. The solitude is complete, and yet there are footpaths where one can wander without battling with sasa. It is a particularly charming place.

August 7.—I got very wet while getting fossils, indeed, it was like fishing rather than anything else. After I got back there was a terrible storm, really a small typhoon; one realised then why the houses are built with such greatly projecting roofs. The rain washed over them in a torrent, a white cascade, and streamed off the sides and swirled up into the air like a great waterfall. I have never seen anything like it; the whole building was like a giant fountain of dashing white water, and the wind blew till I feared for our roof.

August 8.—I had great luck cycling back to the station in excellent weather, but found the train was two hours late, owing to the destruction of last night’s storm; and before we got back to Tokio it was three hours late, so that instead of getting home just in time for dinner, I arrived, famished, at nearly 10. A kind Japanese lady gave me some biscuits in the train, for which I was grateful indeed; they were Huntley and Palmers’ “Osborne,” and M’Vitie and Price’s Shortbread! The joy of meeting these dear old friends in such an unexpected place was even greater than the relief my internal economy felt. They must have been wealthy people to have such biscuits, as, indeed, I had previously suspected, for the girls’ blue and white kimonos, that would naturally have been of cotton, were made of silk—poor children! for it is really much hotter than the plebeian cotton.

August 9.—A quiet day of rest. It is very hot, and I expect I am the only foreigner fool enough to be in Tokio.

August 10–12.—I spent a short time at the Institute and the rest at home, writing in my garden, and battling with mosquitoes and mould, but really having a restful time, for I ran away (thinking it the better part of valour) from the former, and write inside a mosquito net.

August 13.—I set off with my bicycle to Yejiri to see the cycads again. As it is 7½ hours’ journey by slow train, I went to the farther station of Shizuoka, at which the express stops, and got there in five hours, to bicycle 7 miles back to the temple. The wicked old sinner of a priest had written to me, in answer to my requests, to say that there were no cones this year, and I had believed him till I heard by chance it was false. And I found quantities of cones—twenty-six huge things, a foot and a half long, on one tree!

The smell of these cones is very strong, like pineapple and cake fermented together; it is a very thick smell, and in a room one of the cones was very persistent and penetrating, though it did not seem to attract any insects at all.

I had difficulty with the females, for the trees are awfully tall and shaky, but by tying two ladders together I got at them, and clung for my life to the sturdy leaves. The temple is as sweet as ever, but the evening was wet. As I sat over my supper in the house, which is all opened up so as to look very big, the priest unconcernedly took off his only garment and had his bath without closing the bath-room partition, while his wife went about all the time with about a yard of cotton round her hips.

Clothes, you will say, fill a large part of this journal, but Japan is one great exhibition in the art, mistakes, or want of clothes. Everything from perfection to nothingness is to be seen nearly every day. Everything from a soul-thrilling beauty and dignity to a side-aching farce of incongruity.

August 14.—I set off at half-past six to get back to Shizuoka, as I expected Professor B—— to tea in the afternoon in Tokio. Well, first they put me on the sea road, which at the start seems more direct than the one I came by, but actually follows the bays and hills, and adds several up and down miles to the journey. Then, even when I started, it was steadily pouring with rain. Then both my tyres went flat with punctures, quite unmendable in those wilds. Then the road was bad and narrow, and made of stones the size of marbles up to the size of a doubled fist. Then the streams flooded, and I had to go through thirty or forty of them which had decided to go over instead of under or beside the road. Then the roar of a landslip added a fillip of excitement. Then the growl of thunder and the brilliance of lightning, which I fancied might be attracted by my spokes. Then, not torrents of rain, but cataracts, waterspouts, Niagara falls!

I said naughty things ever so many times, but stuck on my bicycle and wouldn’t get off for the stony-bedded little torrents that impertinently crossed the roads, and just went through them. What matter if I couldn’t see the bottom upon my bicycle, I couldn’t see it any better if I waded them. I folded up the sheets (I always travel with sheets for sleeping), put them in a pad under my cloak to try and keep my back dry, but soon they were saturated and merely added to the general weight of water. I never felt more depressed and more weary; what with the road as it was, the floods, and the punctures, I couldn’t go much more than 5 miles an hour, and that with jolting like an Irish cart, and at an expense of effort that would have taken me 20 miles an hour the day before. All the time I ploughed along I remembered the part I was to act by 4 o’clock in Tokio, clad in white samite (I mean muslin), gracefully dispensing tea and small talk to a distinguished visitor.

There was nothing to do to counterbalance the leg-aching pedalling or to lend a little warmth to the clammy, dripping mass that I was. I got to the station and missed the train! There was two hours’ interval to the next, and I was so drowned I couldn’t go to a hotel, for the abominable sun had come out as I got to the station and the sky was blue and innocent-looking, and every one was dry, and supercilious to a creature who left pools at every step. A little sweet-shop provided hot water and peppermint, and things drained off a little as I rode slowly back, and then walked round and round and round the waiting-room reading Thackeray’s Pendennis, as the crowd entertained itself with speechless staring, and the porters volubly sympathised as I took a towel out of my bag, which was less saturated than the rest of me, and dried my hair a little.

When the next train came it was mercifully the Nagasaki express, with a dining-car attached, so I left my car and went along and had coffee. The waiters were so sympathetic, that as I was the only customer, one offered to lend me a nice dry kimono of his own while I took everything off, and they dried them over the train fire. As every other passenger was in a kimono I felt less shy than the situation warranted, till I saw the stuck-up nose of an English lady tourist at the far end of the passenger car as I returned in my Japanese rig-out.

However, it was better than sitting five hours in a super-saturated condition. They dried my things very quickly, for fortunately they had nothing else to do (the weather was now glorious), and except that all the colours from belts, books, and cases had got on to the garments I was normal again, and got back to Tokio in time to have just changed my dress, when the cheery voice of Professor B—— hailed me in the garden.

August 17.—What a thunder-storm! I never could have imagined anything like it. One peal lasted eleven minutes, and another began again after a couple of seconds’ interval, and so they kept it up for an hour and a half, rolling round and round the heavens, as though the gods played nine-pins with Mount Fuji. The lightning was almost continuous, too, and filled the heavens with broad sheets of flame. Yet with all the terrific massiveness and grandeur of the storm, it lacked the point of sharp concentration that would have added terror. I always enjoy a storm, unless it is centred and concentrated just above me. And this stupendous storm was the finest display I have ever imagined, let alone experienced, and I did not grudge the hours of sleep of which it robbed me.

The morning dawned clear and still, but the garden was full of wrecked things.

August 19.—Are the gods never going to have mercy and stop their cruel play of battering Professor F——, and through him me and our fossil work? Instead of coming early in the morning, as we arranged, he came very late, with the horrible news that he had just heard that the people who lived in his house before him (he moved last year) had a leper in the family! Consequently he and his household have stood grave danger of getting this ghastly disease, and may actually have it now, the latent period is so uncertain and often so long that the doctor cannot tell for some time to come. It sometimes lies dormant for years. Of course, he must move at once, and in the meantime take every possible precaution. A nice waste of time, even if there were not the horror hanging over it all!

How this country can possibly pretend to be a first-class Power, how it can build warships and drill armies to the blare of trumpets, how it can have a “World’s Fair” in a few years, and invite all the nations to join in its Exhibition, and all the time have hundreds and thousands of lepers scattered about the country, and marrying—how they can do this simply passes my comprehension.

In this land of islands why don’t they take one, fenced round by the sea, and isolate the fearful disease? In a generation Norway cleared the country of lepers—but here one may touch one any day. On my way back I saw several beggars, ghastly creatures, kneeling by the wayside, with fingerless hands, all purple blotched. True, it is not so contagious as we imagine it to be, being chiefly hereditary, but that makes it all the easier to stamp out if they will do it.

I am not really afraid (not terrified, at least) for Professor F—— (and through him, for myself), but I fear the removal will still further hinder the progress of the fossil work.

August 21.—I worked all day at fossils, and was much vexed to find that the powerful heat has brought bubbles in the Canada Balsam of nearly every slide! Botanists alone will understand the tragic significance of this, and they will sympathise and be merciful when I bring the bubbly preparations home!

You at home can hardly understand how hot the sun is, really burning hot, and many of my trays were so placed that the sun has been falling on them all the time I was away, resulting in thousands of bubbles. I discovered it by chance to-day, when I had mounted and examined some, and then left them for an hour where the sun got at them, and I found a thousand minute bubbles in each of the scorching slides. Alack!

August 27.—This morning at breakfast, thinking over cones, a question arose in my mind about those of Cryptomeria which I could not settle without a specimen, and which checked my line of thought, so I gave it up and glanced out of the window beside which I was sitting in search of lighter amusement (for there is a nice vine there whose tendrils curl round and round in a very pretty way), and by my hand, growing on the little hedge I had never noticed very specially before, was a Cryptomeria cone! Having associated the Cryptomeria always with the stately giants that surround the temples, I had never associated these green hedges, three feet high, with them, nor did I realise that they could bear cones while so young. It still remains a problem whether perhaps a fairy, listening to my thoughts, had not touched with her magic wand the branch nearest me, so that it produced the cone, for not another was to be found anywhere around.

I gathered it, cut it open, and settling the point I wanted, was able to pick up all the dropped stitches of the argument and carry it on. Fairies are most useful creatures to scientists!

August 28.—As my bicycle was once more having a puncture mended, I had to go in the tram, as it is far too hot to walk all the way. In this boiling weather the tram was as full as ever, 50 people where but 20 should be, standing so thickly all down the middle that they were pressed against each other on all sides, and every window and every ventilator and the door all closed! I slammed down two windows, but could not reach the ventilators, as they are so high up; directly I got the chance, I opened a window on the opposite side, but no one else followed the example, though the Japanese seem to feel the heat much more than I do, when not in a foreign style vehicle or house.

Taking this in conjunction with the remarks Japanese have often made to me about the foreigners’ dislike of fresh air, and in conjunction also with numerous other observations of a similar nature, I am forced to conclude that the Japanese, as a nation, are not at all sensitive to bad air. Their houses, built according to the ancient plan, force them, by their construction, to live in ideally fresh rooms, but put them in a foreign house, and everything is hermetically sealed.

August 29.—I went into one of the Laboratories to-day, and found four men, three gas burners, and a stove at work, without an inch of window open—it nearly stifled me. I have noticed this Laboratory before, and never, all through this scorching summer, have I seen the windows unclasped. It is a foreign style building, of course.

August 30.—I got up very early and set off on my bicycle to see the sacred lotus flowers on the great pond near Oyeno Park, but I did not get there in time to see them burst open, for that takes place at sunrise, but the flowers were fresh and fair, still unfaded by the heat of the day when I got to the edge of the water. There must have been several acres of them, with their great leaves overtopped by huge rosy flowers. The purity and radiance of their opaque yet lustrous petals is something I have never seen surpassed in any other flowers, and as they stand up in a rich succession of curves to form a 9-inch bowl, their cumulative effect is magnificent, while in them glows a golden radiance of captured sun-rays. Glorious flowers!

A little island lies in the pond, which is reached by a bridge, and on it is a temple, with shrines standing on it. There those who come to see the lotus worship in their simple way, pulling the temple bell and clapping their hands to ensure that the gods hear the short muttered prayer and put to their credit the half-farthings they bestow. One is always hearing of the lack of religion among the Japanese, but there never was a land with so many shrines and temples. On my way back I passed a shrine under a tree trunk on a crowded thoroughfare. It was only a toy building a couple of feet high, but a workman was busy arranging his offering of dangling white papers. Religion and daily life are mingled here.

September 2.—I set off for Hayama, a little seaside place not far from Tokio, hoping to escape this dreadful heat. Though really a very trifling journey, it takes several hours, as the trains are so slow. It lies beyond the well-known Kamakura, and is much more beautiful and open, as it is round the point of the bay, and is mercifully free from most of the crowd that overwhelms Kamakura in summer.

The little hotel I went to stands on a hill among the woods, looking down on the sea; it was beautifully quiet, but it was “foreign style,” and the beds were miserable. I made a most interesting observation very shortly after my arrival: some ants had built the most extraordinary galleries all up the branches of a tree, and they had taken the leaves and rolled them up, and built houses inside them.

Then in some cases they had covered the whole twig over with their sandy houses, and just left little bits of leaves sticking out here and there.[5] I was ever so much interested, and found several plants of the same kind (a species of smooth-leaved holly) with the same thing happening. I fancy it is new to science, and I wish now I had brought down some instruments and reagents to examine it properly, but I brought nothing as I decided I would have one week’s real holiday.

It was amusing to find how difficult it was to get anything to fix the specimens and bring them back home. There was only one shop that sold foreign biscuits and so had tins, but they wouldn’t sell or give a tin for love or money. No, they said, they had no tins; of course I did not believe them, and roamed round the shop opening every tin to see what was in it, and I found one that was empty. But they refused absolutely to sell it. They were returning to Tokio, it was the end of the season, and they needed it for packing their own things, and they would not sell it—no, not for a yen. But I grew desperate in the thought of my specimens, probably new to the scientific world, and whose preservation depended on that tin; the man who owned it sat and smiled on his Japanese mats, his geta (sandals) were not in sight, and I knew I could run fast enough to get a start any way. So I took the tin under my arm (a huge square biscuit one it was too) and smiling, explained that I must and would have that tin, and put down 30 sen on his table and said I was just going to take it, and off I went. He didn’t chase me; I suppose he thought it hopeless, and besides, I had paid a very good price, for the tin was ancient and bent.

Then came the search for spirit to preserve it in, for I wanted to have the ants and all in situ; but one could not expect to find spirit in such a village, and it was no shock to find there was none. Then I bethought me of saké, the poet-famed drink, the wine of the marriage cups and the friendly festival, and I sent a maid for a jorum of saké; the wine is reported to be very highly alcoholic, I know two spoonfuls sent me to sleep after weeks of sleeplessness, and in the saké I plunged my specimens and hoped for the best.

September 3.—I moved to a Japanese hotel down on the shore, far more comfortable for bathing—and with much cosier sleeping arrangements. It is curious, but I am miserable in a bed now unless it is soft and safe feeling. If it is hard and rises up in the middle I dream of precipices all night, for all this year I have slept on the floor, which seems so nice and safe, and really the obvious thing to do when you have tatami floors.