Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/48

 ice of ponds or garden lakelets. The plum is the poet’s tree, and symbolic of long life, the snowy blossoms upon the gnarled, mossy, and unresponsive branches showing that a vital current still animates it, and the heart lives. At New-years a dwarf-plum is the ornament of every home, and to give one is to wish your friend length of days. Ume, the plum blossom, has a fresh, delicate, elusive, and peculiar fragrance, which in the warm sun and open air is almost intoxicating, but in a closed room becomes heavy and cloying. The blossoming of the plum-tree is the first harbinger of spring, and to Sugita regularly every year go the Empress Dowager, many princes, and great officials to see those billows of bloom that lie under the Bluff, and the pink and crimson clouds of trees before the old temple.

During the rest of the year little heed is paid to Sugita’s existence, and the small fishing village in the curve of the Bay, with its green wall of bluffs, is as quiet as in the days when Commodore Perry’s fleet anchored off it and Treaty Point acquired its name. With the blossoms Sugita puts on its holiday air, tea-houses open, tateba spring from the earth, and scores of low, red-blanketed benches are scattered through the grove, signals of tea and good cheer, equivalent to the iron tables and chairs of Parisian boulevards. Strings of sampans float in to shore, lines of jinrikishas file over the hills, zealous pilgrims come on foot, and horsemen trot down the long, hard beach. The tiny hamlet often has a thousand visitors in a day, and the pretty little nesans, or tea-house maids, patter busily about with their trays of tea and solid food, welcoming and speeding the guests, and looking—quaint, odd, and charming maidens that they are—like so many tableaux vivants with their scant kimonos, voluminous sleeves, ornate coiffures, and pigeon-toes.

Notwithstanding the crowds, everything is decorous, quiet, and orderly, and no more refined pleasure exists 32