Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/141

Rh I hope the stage-carpenter atoned for his unorthodox abbreviation of Enshu's lesson in landscape by the exquisite view of the monastery of Uji Bridge. Nestling in the lap of pine-forested hills, this ancient temple of Byodo-in has been for at least six hundred years the protective centre of vast tea-plantations where is grown the finest tea for native taste, called Gyokuro, or Jewelled Dew. But Uji Bridge is famous also for its fire-flies, which on warm nights flash like living jewels beside the stream, to the joy of countless sightseers, eager to catch and cage them. Throughout the ensuing dance many eyes were diverted from the geisha to the sparkling play of emerald motes across the mimic Ujigawa. This time the girls wore kerchiefs such as peasant women wear when, with heads thus guarded and skirts rolled upward to the knee, they toil among the tea-plants. Then, unfolding and waving the kerchiefs, while a soloist intoned a rhapsody in honour of "the Great Councillor, whose memory lives for ever in the fragrant sweetness of the Jewelled Dew," they moved in pairs along the platform, alternately kneeling and rising, with arms extended or intertwined, their gradual retrocession signifying, as I learn, the reluctant withdrawal of summer.

Autumn succeeds. Momiji-Yama, or Maple Mountain, deeply mantled in myriads of reddening leaves, gives the cue to the now melancholy, almost stationary languor of gliding figures: no longer dragon-flies or humming-birds, they drift slowly, one by one, into the crimson gorge, and are lost among the maple-leaves. At this point the floral march of the seasons is abruptly broken, as if to forbid too hasty interpretation, by the fall of tricolour curtains, richly embroidered in scarlet,