Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/28

 equal play in an area of a yard or a thousand feet, and a Japanese gardener will doubtless come to be considered as necessary a part of a great American establishment as a French maid or an English coachman. From generations of nature-loving and flower worshipping ancestors these gentle followers of Adam’s profession have inherited an intimacy with growing things, and a power over them that we cannot even understand. Their very farming is artistic gardening, and their gardening half necromancy.

On high ground, beyond the Bluff proper, stretches the race-course, where spring and fall there are running races by short-legged, shock-headed ponies, brought from the Hokkaido, the northern island, or from China. Gentlemen jockeys frequently ride their own horses in flat races, hurdle-races, or steeple-chases. The banks close, a general holiday reigns throughout the town, and often the Emperor comes down from Tokio. This race-course affords one of the best views of Fuji, and from it curves the road made in early days for the sole use of foreigners to keep them off the Tokaido, where they had more than once come in conflict with trains of travelling nobles. This road leads down to the water's edge, and, following the shore of Mississippi Bay, where Commodore Perry’s ships anchored in 1858, strikes across a rice valley and climbs to the Bluff again.

The farm-houses it passes are so picturesque that one cannot believe them to have a utilitarian purpose. They seem more like stage pictures about to be rolled away than like actual dwellings. The new thatches are brightly yellow, and the old thatches are toned and mellowed, set with weeds, and dotted with little gray-green bunches of “hen and chickens,” while along the ridge-poles is a bed of growing lilies. There is an old wife's tale to the effect that the women’s face-powder was formerly made of lily-root, and that a ruler who wished to stamp out 12