Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/32

18 eyes, is instantly a mass of flame, and then, in another instant, a blackened travesty of a fish.

There are trees in the garden, also fantastic; green grotesques tended and trained with the minute care of a singular taste. There are little nooks, little rockeries in which strange toads and reptiles hide in the fresh moss and darkened crannies, coming out occasionally, sometimes to slip unawares or through ungainliness into miniature lakes—toy ponds—frightening the lazy gold-fish and making the water-lily buds and blossoms nod and curtsey in the ripples caused by their immersion.

The moon is rising, and the wall of blackness which begins where the lights of the garden end becomes gradually less inky, till at last, as the moon tops the mountain ridge, like some laborious and persistent climber, and floods the harbour with her pale, silver light, the vastness of the scene is disclosed.