accredited to Japan. But there too it was vehemently denied; and, if any such belief in its powers of misfortune exists, our servant must be very careless for us, in running us into danger, for my entire house in Hong-Kong is decorated for six weeks in the early spring with rosy Azalea branches, brought in from the hill-side by our Chinese gardener. Moreover, in Japan my little Japanese maid kept fresh red and pink Azaleas in my room, and, still more to the point, in my children’s day nursery, as long as they lasted. The white Azalea, they told me, was the returned soul of a woman who had died of love, and a wicked friend asked if the yellow flower was the soul of a Chinaman who had not.
Of other ill omens about flowers I may say here that the alleged aversion of the Japanese to the so-called ‘Death Lily’ (the Nerine) is greatly exaggerated. One reads constantly that it is never seen in the peasants’ houses, or anywhere except, disregarded, at the edges of rice-fields. I can state emphatically that I have frequently seen it in bamboo vases in the niche of small shopkeepers’ houses; I have seen the children gathering great bunches of the blood-red blooms; and I have been given nosegays of the fatal flower by good old country-folk who, if they had had so baleful a superstition about it, would be the last to offer me such a gift. I do not imagine, however, that they care particularly themselves for these Lilies. Red,
