is truly heart-rending. Trousers and ham sandwiches take away all the poetry of the poetically inspired festival; wooden fences keep the hoi polloi from the enclosure of Royalty; champagne and claret cup are served in place of the prescribed saké; and, instead of writing verses to hang on the grey, rose-clouded branches, a crowd of tired, blasé foreigners, “who have not spent a year in Japan,” and of Japanese—yearning for the comfort of kimonos—wander dejectedly about, wondering if it will be over in time to catch the five o’clock train back to Yokohama.
How different if the Feast of the Cherry-viewing is confined to their own people, done in their own way!—the whole nation out for the day (and no ‘benk ’olidi’ sort, either) and en fête, the flowers divinely beautiful. Then all Japan is half child and half poet, as always at heart—only on this day they let themselves go. Wherever the trees are (and where are they not?) there are crowds of happy, but not boisterously happy, people in holiday attire, walking about and gazing at the blossoming trees,—for in this land there are no warnings to ‘keep off the grass.’ There is but little grass, to be sure, but it is not that that makes the difference. There are brightly draped little booths, erected near all the finest view-places, where tea and saké and little cakes, stamped or iced in the image of the festal bloom,
