Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/85

 Beyond Kameido's wistaria-bordered lake are ancient plum groves, whose trees—old, gnarled, twisted, black, and lichen-covered, propped with poles and stone posts—writhe and twist over the ground in contortions which explain their name—the Gwariobai, or the couchant dragon-trees. This Ume Yashiki was once the villa of a Shogun's favorite. Its buildings, fences, and hedges are gray with age, its stone tablets, moss-grown and something in the hoary antiquity of the place subdues one's pulses. The long cry of a hidden boatman in the creek beyond the high camellia hedge is the only sound that breaks the silence. People sit on the red-covered benches, women in soft-toned crapes walk under the strange skeleton shadows like moving figures of a dream, and children flash among the black trunks brilliant in their gay garb. Often one sees visionary old men sitting lost in reverie, and murmuring to themselves of ume no hana the, plum blossom. They sip tea, they rap out the ashes from tiny pipes, and slipping a writing-case from the girdle, unroll a scroll of paper and indite an ode or sonnet. Then, with radiant face and cheerful muttering, the ancient poet will slip his toes into his clogs and tie the little slip to the branches of the most charming tree. The well-bred spectators do not push upon the fluttering scroll, as my impetuous fellow-countrymen would do, but with a decent dignity read and criticise the praises of the blossoms and the solemn stillness of the old yashiki.

The veriest Gradgrind could not be indifferent to the poetic charm of the Japanese spring-time, wherein the setting of the buds, their swelling, and the gradual unfolding of sakura, the cherry blossoms, are matters of great public concern, the native newspapers daily printing advance despatches from the trees. Even more beautiful than the plum-tree festival is the Tokio celebration of the blossoming of the cherry, and gayer than the 69