put its poor hands before its face to exclude the dreadful sight of the indignity that had been offered it. My horrified friend, artistic to the marrow, was speechless with grief and rage; but the ‘O Kama San,’ proud and pleased (although I know, from the way she arranged flowers, that she must have secretly hated it), displayed it to every ‘Igen San’ who passed, as a proof of her breadth of mind and progress.
I remember another painted fence, in the little fishing village where Commodore Perry first landed, Kurihama; but that was not so bad. Some sailor, perhaps from one of the foreign ships docked at Uraga, had given the pot of paint—yellow ochre, it was. Luckily there had not been enough of it to paint properly the tall fence of palings, and the artist had therefore thinned it down with oil or turpentine, or something of the sort, so that, except in places, due to inexperience in mixing, it was little more than a stain. Its warm, golden, wood colour was rather charming, and the village folk loved it as a natural curiosity which they hardly pretended to understand.
But let us return to fences in general, and leave particular ones and their styles of decoration until a little later. Walls of mud and tiles, of plaster and of wood, are of very ancient usage, but open work and ornamental fences appear to date only from about the Kamakura Period, while Mr. Conder tells us that “When
