Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/230

152 no means all found ready-made to the gardener’s hand, although so spontaneous do the artificial ones seem that it is difficult to think them the products of art. I remember a dear little garden of this kind on the road to Lake Biwa. The stones had all been carefully arranged, with a big ‘Immovable’ or ‘Guardian’ stone at the base, and its companion stone, lower, smaller, and rounder (supposedly of the feminine persuasion), lying gracefully on the ground at its feet. It all made, with some clipped Azalea bushes that bloomed in the very mouth of the shears, a charming group. Higher up the tender young green of a Maple stretched its pretty hands out, as if to wash them in the falling water, and ‘broke’ (in appearance, not in reality) the fine thread of the fall. A little shrine, set in a bower of small Cryptomeria trees at the top, not only offered an object for the climb, but made our scramble up the precipitous paths a dutiful pilgrimage.

Another cascade garden (there are a dozen or more in the same village)—which was so quaint and pretty that sketching it almost made us lose our tram at Yumoto, and hence our train to Yokohama—is on the Hata Pass, the road to Hakone Lake. It is in the back yard of a tea-house which our coolies insisted on our patronizing, instead of the one next door, which outwardly, and with its smiling and bowing nésans and okkasan, looked just like it. The flat part of the