on the right side the hillock, immediately at its base, and it was plain to me at first glance that its shape conformed to the Chinese character for the word “heart”, just as in the garden of the temple of Kameido, to which the people of Tokyo go to admire the purple splendour of the wistarias towards the end of April. “Shindji no Ike, the Pond of the Word Heart,” I remarked quietly, and it did not escape me that Kumamoto was delighted by my sagacity. In the middle of the pond was a little square island, from whose upper side two little bridges led to the shore in such wise that the extremity of the lake there resembled a shining mark above an angular capital U. Two small basins of water, at either end of the lake, completed the likeness to the Chinese ideograph in question. Well-nigh the whole of the islet was taken up by a grave, by the side of which stood a high stone lantern, chiselled out of a single piece. I had seen similar lanterns, born on the shells of tortoises,—all of one piece; this toro, however, appeared to be born by some strange sort of insect, recalling a cicada or a bee, and so realistically chiselled that, green with moss as it was, it seemed ever ready to fly or to give some kind of sign of life.
Japanese gardens do not resemble ours in any respect; as a rule they contain no flower-beds, which in the majority of cases would disturb, if not destroy altogether, that impression of a landscape seen from afar, which is the fundamental idea of Japanese gardening, whether the garden in question be ever so extensive or ever so tiny. Nor were there flowers in the Garden of Fulfilled Desire; it seemed to have blossomed forth with strangely shaped boulders and carefully formed mounds of yellow sand, among which the path meandered like a brook, strewn with flat stones as if to afford a dry crossing. Only here and there were clumps of bamboo with leaves either pale green or almost blue, but always edged with white or yellow; some clumps were periwinkle-green, others sulphur-yellow and one group was as if bronzed. Moss in places heaped up to form odd imitations of bushes, clusters of bamboo and isolated wisps, of grass were the only living green things in the garden besides a mighty, knotty pine, without doubt a century old, which extended its rugged picturesquely gnarled limbs on the left side of the hillock.
All of this was surrounded by a bamboo fence, which accurately followed the oblong form of the garden but still gave the impression, at first glance, of a zigzag line, because the ground on the border was not level, but here gradually rising and there suddenly dropping: and this bamboo fence was a little over two inches high, a mere toy. There was no need for a higher fence for the Garden
