Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/232

198 Thus the ingenious Japanese have found a way of diverting and profiting by that first infirmity of ignoble minds, which robs St. Paul's of dignity and desecrates Westminster Abbey with such legends as "Peter Jones from Hampstead" and "Eliza Smith of Bethnal Green." Much impressed by this strange custom, each of us bought a spoon and, veiling our vulgarity in Latin, suspended this device from the right-hand pillar of the porch:

For two months I had been haunted by visions of the bridge-Kintaikyō, as it seems to have haunted the landscape-painters of Japan. I remembered it as one of the most remarkable in Hokusai's series of "A Hundred Bridges"; I had another marvellous drawing of the five arches overwhelmed by a snow-storm and apparently detached from both land and water, for Hiroshigi understands the isolation of his subject from irrelevant detail as few others, slaves of perspective, would dare imagine. If uneducated eyes took the picture to represent a peal of blue bells, sprinkled with cotton-wool and straddling through space, so much the worse for uneducated eyes. But at any rate, being so near, I resolved to dispel vision by looking on reality, and spent half a day in visiting Iwakuni. We were obliged to leave our rickshaws at the foot of Katō Kiyomasa's towering temple that overlooks the almost waterless bed of the Nishikigawa, for none but a pedestrian could climb the huge arcs, thirty feet long, which spring in five bounds from shore to shore, like the curves of a switchback railway. Then the faithful camera was brought into play, and a bevy of