are frequently taken apart to furnish forth an artistic fence. I have seen the finely coloured piles of an ancient pier taken up to make supports for such a fence, and to adorn each side of the gateway. At Karuizawa (which is a place so overrun with foreign missionaries that there is not, one would think, much chance left for native taste to show itself) an old and lovely fence (or so it seems) around one of the new and ugly hotels which shows yet another way of exhibiting the grain of the wood. It appears in high relief. At first I thought that, in its nearness to Asama Yama (which is the most active volcano I have ever had the luck to see), the wind, blowing lava-dust and cinders about, had worn away the soft part of the wood, leaving, by one of those happy accidents which one is always imagining with respect to Japanese gardens, the hard, fibrous grain exposed; but, on further looking into the matter, I found that it was purposely, and even laboriously done by hand, the newly cut posts having been rubbed and rubbed and rubbed with the powdered pumice-stone that takes the place of sand and gravel in the neighbourhood of the fiery mountain. The process is employed in other places, using ordinary sand instead of the pumice-stone. The effect, to us, is not particularly pretty, more especially after the remark of an observer when you are admiring it that it suggests an anatomist’s model of a human leg
