Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/308

 Japanese frame of mind where haste enters not; time is forgotten, days slip by uncounted, and limits cease to be. The spring days, when the rain falls in gauziest mist—the rain that is so good for young rice—or summer days, when the sun scorches the earth and burns one’s very eyeballs, seem to bring the most unbroken leisure and longest hours in any agreeable refuge.

Sitting on Yaami’s veranda, with the great plain of the city wreathed in mists or quivering in heat, I have recognized my indebtedness to Griffis, Dresser, Mitford, Morse, and Rein, those authorities on all things Japanese, not to mention Murray and his ponderous guide-book, whose weight and polysyllabic pages strike terror to the soul of the new-comer. Griffis I read, until Tairo and Minamoto, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, grew as familiar as William the Conqueror and the Declaration of Independence; Dresser’s text and illustrations were a constant delight and illumination, explaining the incomprehensible and pointing to hidden things; and Morse’s Japanese Homes laid bare their mysteries, and made every fence, roof, rail, ceiling, and wall take on new features and expression. Rein’s is the encyclopædia, and he the recorder, from whose statements there is no appeal, and to him we turned for everything. It is only on the sacred soil that the student gets the true value and meaning of these books; while nothing so nearly expresses and explains the charm of the country as that prose idyl, Percival Lowell’s Soul of the Far East, nor so perfectly fits one’s moods on these long, leisure days, and Mifford’s Tales of Old Japan are of ceaseless delight.

In this Japanese atmosphere the traveller feels what he misses through his ignorance of the vernacular, and is even inspired with a desire to study the language; but a little skimming of the grammar usually brings down that vaulting ambition. It is easy to pick up words and phrases for ordinary use, as all servants understand some 292