where the grass is of wire, or of sharp swords, can know the pathetic joy we feel who come into our own again of velvet lawns and smooth pastures and tasselled meadows. Not even the fear of snakes can keep me from rolling in and on it there, like a young horse let loose in the fields! Eleven hundred missionaries, and the flat and nasal intonation of the Middle West, which is my country’s least pleasant characteristic, could not lessen my rapture in it. A fat old lady with a waist as wide as her shoulders (most of these godly people consider it a crime to compress the figure unduly, and the idea seems to be that the bigger the waist the more souls they can gather in), said to me, “Seems jest like Home, don’t it!” I agreed so heartily that I was soon hearing all her family history; and her son, and his wife and family of five children joined us (their ‘field’ was inland somewhere, in North China), and before we were done talking he was quoting Robert Louis and Walt Whitman, and we were old friends.
One other wild Nature garden which I must just mention was at Uraga—a shelf of blue Hydrangeas below a half-ruined, tree-embowered temple, on a cliff above the sea. The blue water, the pale strip of beach, the flowers drooping down to them—no artist but the Greatest had arranged it. I have not time or space to tell of a bamboo-shaded little dell above Hakone Lake, where the deep royal-blue of Monkshood,
