Nor are the animals less faithfully depicted, for there are pheasants with eyes on their tails, wild ducks flying across a pale-blue ground, with their flapping, outstretched wings, and webbed feet; a stork with red legs on which the sinuous rings are so life-like. In one room, which was especially reserved for the use of the Shogun when he came to visit his kinsman, the decorations are especially gorgeous, and here there are ideal Chinese scenes, which exactly resemble the familiar willow-pattern plate. There is the five-storied pagoda, the willow trees, and the high curve of the bamboo bridge. The roofs of these rooms are of black lacquer, inlaid with gold, whilst the windows are made of that geometrically carved lattice work, covered with opaque paper.
But perhaps the most beautiful thing of all is the open wood carving on the ramma, or ventilating screens, between the rooms, for here, that great Japanese artist, Hidara Jingoro, has carved the most exquisitely faithful representations of a white crane, a tortoise, a hen with her little ones, parrots, and birds of paradise. There is one that excites everybody's admiration. It is a cock perched on a drum, its beak wide open in the act of crowing, so natural, that you expect to hear the "Cock-a-doodle-doo." The red, erect coxcomb, and the brown and blue iridescence of the tail are life-like. And when we look round on this mass of gorgeous paintings and carvings, we marvel that their resplendent colours are undimmed by the lapse of three hundred years, that some are as bright to-day, as when they were executed three decades ago.
We ascend the great, gloomy, five-storied Keep, which is built up inside on massive beams of wood, whole tree trunks being used as supports. From the gallery at the top we have a charming view of the brown roofs of Nagoya, lying around the castle, of the military prison below, where the prisoners are exercising in the yard, of the heavy square roof of the temple rising up majestically above the squat houses--of the wide-reaching plain, and the circling mountains. The precious golden dolphins, covered over with wire netting, are above us, glittering resplendent in the sun. They measure eight feet in height, and are valued at 180,000 dols. One of them was sent to the Vienna Exhibition of 1873, and great was the despair of the citizens when, on its return voyage, it was wrecked in the Messageries steamer, the _Nil_. However, it was recovered from the deep, with great difficulty, and proudly restored to its original position.