Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/90

 no knowledge of botany until they acquired it from the West. Their gardens have never included conservatories of rare exotics. It has not occurred to them to organise competitive flower-shows in the Occidental fashion, and nature has bequeathed to them only a small portion of the floral wealth with which England, France, and the United States are dowered. Yet they have made so much of her comparatively scanty gifts that the blossoms of each season are a feature in their lives, a prime element in their happiness. If they possessed the laburnum, the lilac, the hawthorn, the gorse, the bluebell, the snow-drop, the honeysuckle, the jessamine, the primrose, and all the other "letters of the angel tongue" written on the fair faces of some Western countries, it is possible, indeed, that the keenness of their appreciation might have been dulled by satiety; but, judging by the facts as actually existing, the strong probability is that they would have taught the world new ways of profiting by these gifts of nature. Certainly they stand alone among nations in the public organisation of their taste for flowers and in the universal fidelity with which they gratify it. The cherry fêtes of Tōkyō, Kyōtō and other Japanese cities need not be described here. In former times, when the patrician stood above the law, and when the disguise of an eye-mask—an "eye-wig," as it was jocosely called—sufficed to justify almost any licence, these motley crowds were sometimes unwilling witnesses of rude practical