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 eight hundred gallons of sea-water daily, and putting the salt into the park lake so that the traces of its water might be realistically briny. Kyōtō had no less than ten "detached palaces" by the beginning of the twelfth century, and on days of festival their western gates were thrown open for the admission of all visitors without distinction of rank. But it did not occur to any annalist or writer of the era to pen detailed descriptions of these buildings or their surroundings. All that can be certainly affirmed is that nature in her normal aspects began at this time to be taken as the best guide by planners of parks and gardens.

The area occupied by the buildings and the park was enclosed, in the case of a princely or noble mansion, by a high earthen wall having a fosse at its foot; but people of inferior rank had to be content with a wooden fence. Social status influenced the form of the principal entrance-gate also. The "four-footed gate," that is to say, a two-leaved gate having a roof supported by four pillars, was the most aristocratic; a "two-footed" gate, still with two leaves, came next in order of respectability, and a postern was the humblest of all.

The interior arrangement and furniture of an aristocrat's mansion showed much refinement in this era, though the architect suffered himself to be trammelled by rules which he afterwards violated with advantage. The principal hall—distinguished externally from the minor edifices by