eyes, is suggested by it. All over the Far East it is considered very lucky, and many are the qualities with which it is supposed to endow the wearer; strength, vigour, uprightness, these are the main ones; while its constant colour suggests virtue and purity in a woman, and constancy—a rare gift, I fear, in that fair land—in a man. With the Chrysanthemum, the Plum, and the Orchid, the Bamboo forms the company of the ‘Four Floral Gentlemen’—a grouping that bears thinking on, aside from the quaint charm of the idea. In picture lore, sparrows are always put with the Bamboo, as are nightingales with the Plum, and quails with Reeds and other grasses.
My first introduction to the old stories connected with the Bamboo was in a curio-shop in Yokohama, where I was buying some beautiful old faded embroideries. The Lady from California, who had paid for her gay new work four times what I had given for my ‘washed-out old rags,’ as she called them, was very indignant that, on every subsequent visit we paid to the shop, even the proprietor, as well as every available assistant, hurried to show me old treasures the moment they spied me, while the young man who exhibited magenta Pæonies and vivid roosters to her cast constant rueful glances towards the other group. It was not that I bought much, but that a Japanese, even a shopkeeper in mercantile Yokohama, will
