away the hideous coarse white cloth with which the pretty silvery wood table was disfigured, it was because our hosts took such simple pleasure and pride in it, as the outward and visible sign of how au fait they were with foreign notions. But I would have Honourable Tea, instead of the dishonourable stuff from Ceylon—logwood-dyed, with tinned milk from Switzerland to put into it—which they evidently thought the foreigner ought to prefer.
A hundred other tea-house gardens one might name, each of some individual charm. Kyoto is perhaps richest in them. The illustration facing this page is fairly typical. The Hakone Pass has many attractive places; in Tokio—even in Yokohama and Kobe—there are so many pretty ones; and every mountain or hill that boasts a view has its little shelter, and tiny half-wild garden, where one can get tea, and cool and a fine prospect all at the same time. The only rule of the landscape artist’s lore that these spots observe is that they must exhibit no artificiality, but resemble Nature as closely as possible. Some have just been made, but are already part of the road. On the way up the mountain at Miyagima (by the fine path whose nineteen hundred odd granite steps were the gift of Prince Ito a month or two before his sudden tragic end), we found such a place. Himself, who, as a sailor, prefers climbing rigging to a mountain,
