Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/94

 only a great swaying tassel four feet in length draws a “Naruhado!” (wonderful) from the connoisseurs. Whole families come to spend the day on the borders of the little lake, sipping amber tea, tossing mochi to the lazy goldfish, or sitting in picturesque groups on the low platforms under the canopies of flowers fluttering with poems and lanterns. The temple is ancient, and the grounds are full of tiny shrines, stone lanterns, tablets, and images, and dwarfed and curiously trained pine trees, with a high, hump-backed little bridge, over which, in the old days, only priests and grandees might walk. Golden carp, venerable old fellows, three or four feet in length, show an orange nose now and then above the surface of the pond. The people call these pets by clapping their hands, and the golden gourmands swim from one horn of plenty, filled with mochi, or rice-cakes, with which they are fed, to another. At Kasukabe, on the Oshukaido, north-east of Tokio, is the most famous wistaria in the empire. The vine is five hundred years old, with pendent blossoms over fifty inches long, and trellises covering a space of four thousand feet, and thither poets and pilgrims reverently go.

In August occurs the one great lotus show now seen in Tokio, when the lake below Uyeno Park shows acres of bluish-green plates of leaves starred with pink and white blossoms, and the enchanted beholder looks down from the bridges and tea-houses of the little islands straight into the heart of the great flowers. The castle moats no longer show their acres of lotus, and the mimic salutes no longer ring around the citadel, as when those myriad blossoms of Buddha opened with a gentle noise under the first warm rays of the sun. There is a lovely lotus-pond back of the Shiba pagoda, just seen as the jinrikisha whirls along the shady avenue skirting it, but the lotus of the moats was the summer glory of Tokio. The flower was not alone to blame for malarial 78