Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/256

170 grass); a funny little flat-iron for smoothing sand, and a sieve for sifting it. There were also the inevitable chop-sticks, to be used as tweezers or for picking up things, a dear little rake, like bird’s claws of bamboo, for marking the sand in patterns, as well as many scraps of the same material to be used as props and architectural aids.

It was like seeing the real making of a garden, to watch the evolution of this miniature thing from a pile of earth and little stones and various coloured sands; from moss, and the tiniest of dwarf trees (so small that it seemed like kittens having kittens to see them covered with flowers and fruit), into veritable little landscape gardens.

First the mountains would be built up; and they, as well as their little houses, were founded on a rock—indeed, on many rocks. Then, half-way through this task, the stones for the cascade would be inset, carefully, firmly, so that no shaking, no torrents of sand could dislodge them; and then more earth, hard-packed, unyielding as in Nature, before the trees, the houses, temples, bridges, or the mossy grass were put in place. It was all so deftly, yet so securely, welded together, that one felt a Lilliputian, and not afraid to climb the hills and to venture on the sandy lake, or to explore the beach, the caves, and the rocky, Pine-clad islands.