during their midnight devotions. A pious legend tells us that the origin of the tea-shrub was on this wise. Daruma (Dharma), an Indian saint of the sixth century, had spent many long years in ceaseless prayer and watching. At last, one night, his eyelids, unable to bear the fatigue any longer, closed, and he slept soundly until morning. When the saint awoke, he was so angry with his lazy eyelids that he cut them off and flung them on the ground. But lo! each lid was suddenly transformed into a shrub, whose efficacious leaves, infused in water, minister to the vigils of holy men.
Though encouraged from the first by Imperial recommendations, tea culture made little or no progress in Japan till the close of the twelfth century, when another Buddhist, the abbot Myōe, having obtained new seeds from China, sowed them at Toga-no-o, near Kyōto, whence a number of shrubs were afterwards transplanted to Uji, which has ever since been the chief centre of Japanese tea growing. Thenceforward the love of tea-drinking was en grained in the Japanese court and aristocracy, and the cha-no-yu, or tea ceremonies, became a national institution. But it is doubtful whether the custom of drinking tea began to spread among the lower classes till the end of the seventeenth century, which was also the time when our own ancestors first took to it. Now, needless to say that the tea-house is one of the most widely spread, socially most important, and to wayfarers most agreeable of Japanese institutions. Not but what it is a blunder to dub inns and restaurants "tea-houses," as Europeans are apt to do. The tea-house (chaya) is a thing by itself, in the country an open shed, in the towns often a pretty, but always open, house, sometimes with a garden, where people sit down and rest for a short time, and are served with tea and light refreshments only, while a few words of gossip or innocent banter are exchanged with mine hostess or her attendant smiling damsels. Of course, "en tout bien, tout honneur."
The tea-plant belongs to the same family of evergreens as the camellia, and bears small white flowers slightly fragrant. As a
