Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/213

  that even the blades of grass and ears of millet “compose,” and every pine-tree is a kakemono study. Thatched roofs, and arching, hump-backed bridges made of branches, twigs, and straw seem only to exist for landscape effects; but, unhappily, the old bridges, like the lumbering junks with their laced and shirred sails, are disappearing, and, in a generation or two, will be as unfamiliar to the natives as they now are to foreigners.

once was Shidzuoka, which now is only a busy commercial town of an agricultural province. The old castle has been razed, its martial quadrangle is a wheat field; and the massive walls, the creeping and overhanging pine-trees and deep moats are the only feudal relics. Keiki, the last of the Tokugawa Shoguns, lived in a black walled enclosure beyond the outer moat, but the modern spirit paid no heed to his existence, and his death, in 18S3, was hardly an incident in the routine of its commercial progress.

The great Shinto temple at the edge of the town is famous for the dragons in its ceiling. The old priest welcomed us with smiles, led us in, shoeless, over the mats, and bade us look up, first at the Dragon of the Four Quarters, and then at the Dragon of the Eight Quarters, the eyes of the monster strangely meeting ours, as we changed our various points of view.

At the archery range behind the temple our danna san proved himself a new William Tell with the bow and arrows. The attendant idlers cheered his shots, and a wrinkled old woman brought us dragon candies on a 197