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Rh garden was large enough to dry my husband’s handkerchief in, for he tried it (he uses it as coolies do their towels on a tramp), but the hillside, which was the main part of the garden, could hardly have been covered by a tablecloth of moderate dimensions. Not that it looked tiny. No, I forbade the children to explore up the cascade path for fear they would get lost, or out of earshot! Great pains had been taken here to have for each season some change in the little garden’s greenness, by the introduction of flowers. The first time I saw it, crimson Azaleas clambered and smouldered in the crevices of the rocks, and some delicate Irises, demure but conscious of their beauty, looked shyly at themselves in the pool’s mirror at the foot of the waterfall. In summer some splendid Lilium auratum, gold-banded and bronze-freckled, reigned supreme. Another time the royal-blue of Monkshood, and silver grasses, were there. Last of all, after the red fire of Nerine, the wild ‘Death Lily’ of the rice-fields, had burned down, the embers had seemed to set the autumn Maples alight; and already there could be seen the reddening berries of the Nandana, the swelling buds of the early Plum tree, getting ready to cheer these simple peasant owners in the winter.

Although there are such fine natural falls all over Japan, the best classical models come from elaborate gardens in the south of China, called