Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/222

JAPAN servitors, including a tonsured priest, and the men thus trodden on declared that they had felt nothing more than a hawk hopping along their backs, the priest saying that for his part it had seemed simply as though some one had put a hat on his bald pate. That is the historical record! The patience that supported this statesman through nineteen years of perpetual foot-ball practice, and the terms used by the annalists to describe his achievements, are equally suggestive of the mood of the era.

Love for flowers, which amounts almost to a passion in Japan, had declared itself long before the time now under review, but, like everything else, it assumed an extravagant character in that epoch. Large trees were completely covered with artificial blossoms of the plum or the cherry to recall the spring, ancient pines overhanging miniature lakes were festooned with wistaria blooms in autumn, snow was piled in vast heaps so as to preserve some traces of it under sunny skies. To be unnatural, abnormal, unreasonable, was to possess a special charm. One of the manias of the time was to keep pet dogs and cats. The annals speak of the "delightful voice and winning ways" of the cat, and tell how not only were cats and dogs called by human beings' names, but official titles also were bestowed on them, and religious services were performed when they died. A pet cat in the Palace bore kittens in the year 999, whereupon the Emperor and the Ministers of State sent 194