[Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI]
streets, and were being cleaned up in preparation for the day’s performances. The town is studded with tall fire-proof go-downs, in which the precious vehicles are safely stored during the rest of the year.
Near Maibara there were large orchards of persimmons with brilliant-colored fruit, which, as Andrew Marvel says of the oranges, “hang like gold lamps in a green night.” They were particularly beautiful in the well-designed garden of Seigwanji, where I made some sketches. It is a fine example of a temple garden, and some massive evergreen oaks form an impressive background to the gray stones, the carefully trained pines, and the trimly clipped shrubs; but except for the persimmons, a few reddening maple leaves, some late blooms of platycodon, and the scarlet berries of a little ardisia, it was all green and gray.
[Illustration: MINIATURE PAGODA IN THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI]
In the cottage gardens near Suzukawa, a little station on the Tokaido to the south of Fuji where I made a short halt late in October, I began to see some chrysanthemum flowers; they were not particularly fine or effective, but I found plenty to paint there, and wished very much that the days and my remaining weeks in Japan were not getting so short. The village lies behind a range of sand dunes, which are overgrown with ancient pines, and beyond them is the shore of Suruga Bay, a grand expanse of gray volcanic sand, called by the Japanese Tago-no-ura, where fishermen are always hauling at nets in lines of naked brown figures against the blue sea, or wandering back in groups across the sands in long dark-blue coats, with pale-blue and white handkerchiefs tied over their heads, carrying their nets and parcels of fish wrapped in straw. At my tea-house, the Koshuya, I reaped the result of their labors, and got excellent dinners of red or gray tai, lobsters, and huge prawns, cooked by a man who was a real artist and took a pride in his profession.
The first really fine chrysanthemums I saw were in Yokohama, when I got back there early in November; I was disappointed to find that they were in temporary sheds put up to protect them from rain and sun, and not in masses out-of-doors, as I expected to see them; but they were excellently grown, and in the softened light of the oil-paper shades their colors showed to great advantage. The plants are treated much as they are with us, raised in pots from cuttings taken in the spring, and encouraged with plenty of manure until the buds are formed; before flowering they are removed from their pots and planted out in bold groups of color in the beds which have been prepared for them. Some plants are reduced to a single stem, on which only one enormous blossom is allowed to develop; these are generally arranged in a line, with each flower stiffly tied to a horizontal bamboo support, and the effect is very sad; but the excellence of the gardeners is best shown in growing large bushes, which have been known to carry as many as four hundred flowers of medium size, all in perfect condition, on the same day. An English gardener who had visited every show within reach of Tōkyō, including the Emperor’s celebrated collection in the palace grounds, told me that he had seen no individual blossoms equal to the best dozen or so at a first-rate London exhibition, but that these great plants with their hundreds of flowers were