Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/145

Rh fence below, and wild Orange hedge above, that is very attractive. Doubtless these fences are securely built, but I could not help thinking that, in my childhood’s days in the Southern States, it would have been the fence and not the hedge that I should have considered it easier to get through. I remember a thicket of wild Plum,—for, as it was never trimmed, that is what it came to,—in Arkansas, which bore the most delicious, sour red plums that ever a child longed for, regardless of cholera-morbus; and, in Virginia, an Osage Orange hedge that yielded forth beautiful, big, bitter fruit, and protected nothing in particular. Those two hedges were an end, not a means; and how many torn frocks, and bruised knees, and scratched little hands, and how many cruel, horrid tummy-aches they were responsible for! But I cannot remember ever having broken my way through either of them. The Orange hedge I considered much more impassable than the granite walls and wide moats of Fortress Munroe, in which we lived. It seemed to me, therefore, in Japan, highly appropriate that this look of a sally-port should be given to the entrances of these hedge walls, and that the gates of heavy masonry should often appear nearly solid enough to withstand an attack of artillery. I often wondered if, had the positions been reversed in Manchuria, and the Japanese been defending instead of attacking Port Arthur, Osage Orange,