brown colour had been applied. I confess I liked it, for there, with its warm Italian colouring in sky and sea and merry brown-faced children, it all seemed to harmonize. In other parts of Japan solid wooden fences are often used, and slabbed ones, or heavy rustic ones of unhewn trees, but seldom have I seen paint on any others.
Perhaps it is wrong of me to perpetuate its memory by writing of it, but I know of two or three fences in Hakone Machi and Moto Hakone which have been painted by their owners in what they fondly believe to be ‘foreign style.’
One of my friends had taken a house for the summer at the former place, which had possessed, during the three previous seasons of her occupancy, a beautiful old fence, stained by the fingers of time the most lovely silver grey, with mauve shadows and bronzy markings. What was her horror, on returning last year, to find it changed by that awful alchemy of progress, the paint-pot, into a terror in bright blue! It swore audibly and viciously at all around, the particular victim of its rage being a great clump of crimson (I dare not describe them in their true colour, as magenta) phlox, with which it had been sweetly in love the year before. The poor garden, once so perfect in its own stately way, with clipped trees and old dwarfed shrubs, seemed suddenly to have shrunk together, and
