fields, and always in the distance the ranges of snow-covered mountains in Kiushiu and Shikoku, the islands which enclose this lovely sea on the south. I longed to land and begin work at once, with a nervous dread in my heart that I should find nothing so good elsewhere, and, indeed, though there is plenty of material to be found everywhere in Japan, I saw nothing finer than these islands of the Inland Sea; to cruise about among them in a comfortable boat would be an ideal way to spend a summer, and would probably not be devoid of adventure, for our captain told me many tales of treacherous currents and sudden squalls and sunken reefs.
[Illustration: HILLS NEAR KŌBE, FROM SUWA-YAMA]
We reached Kōbe next morning, and before I had been on shore more than an hour I had heard of a village six miles away which was celebrated for its plum orchards, and had started off to find it. Okamoto lies at the foot of the hills which rise behind Kōbe on the north, and climbs a little way up them, and in front of the highest cottage, a modest tea-house with platforms arranged to accommodate the visitors who come in crowds to gaze at the blossoms, I unfolded my stool and easel, and in spite of a bitter wind and vicious little snow-storms made my first sketch in Japan. All round me and in the village below were the pink-and-white trees, then a band of rice-lands, pale green with young barley, and beyond them lay Osaka Bay, and the mountains of Yamato, which constantly changed in color as snow-storms passed over, or gleams of sun lighted the shining water and the snow on the distant hills. It is an exciting thing to begin work in a new country, to compare the local color and the atmosphere with those you have tried before, and to find yourself half unconsciously using an entirely new set of pigments. I was too absorbed with these problems to take any notice of the fact that my back was aching, but after two hours, when I had finished my drawing, I found myself unable to rise from that sketching-stool, and for the next fortnight an attack of lumbago prevented my seeing anything more of the plum groves. The Buddhist pictures of their Inferno depict many ingenious tortures; I think they ought to add a man with lumbago doing six miles over a Japanese by-road in a jinricksha. When at last I got back to Okamoto there were still some blossoms, and the trees were tinged with the pink of withered petals, but the luxuriant freshness had gone.