other a beautiful bamboo grove, quite a little forest of perpendicular glossy green trunks with their notched rings at regular intervals and overshadowed by feathery clumps of grass-like leaves, in their effect as soft as clouds,-this is what is first seen. Then there opens out a wide park encircled by dense trees, mostly pines, cryptomerias, and evergreen oaks, but representative of most of the species found in Japan,-and having a racecourse marked round its edge with low white palings. Off this lies an artificial lake of about half a mile in circumference, at one end overshadowed by a thick wood, up into the recesses of which a footpath winds picturesquely from the rocky shore, and at the other reflecting soft grassy banks and hillocks, decked with shrubbery of all shapes and colours. Here, too, a little stream enters the lake, its channel crossed by stepping - stones, which are continued across the sward to a pleasure-house.

This differs little from many an ordinary Japanese dwelling. It is entirely of wood. The roof, daintily covered with shingles, considerably overhangs the walls, its eaves being supported by

number of thin wooden pillars arranged at intervals of about four yards. Within these a narrow verandah, laid with exquisitely polished boards, runs round the building at a height of about a foot and a half from the ground. There are no

A Summer House.

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windows, properly speaking, the walls through which there is communication with the outside being fitted with sliding panelled shutters filled in with paper. Within, the floors are laid with thick soft mats, each five feet nine inches by three feet, and closely fitting into its place. These are kept scrupulously clean, the shoes being removed before entering. The tidy straw-coloured surface is varied by the strips of embroidered silk which border the different mats. Connecting the various rooms are sliding shutters unpanelled, but decorated with paintings of birds, flowers, or landscapes. ceilings are of plain unvarnished wood; beneath them and above the inner screens, the walls are enriched with open wood-carving portraying with marvellous skill not only trees, birds, and flowers, Beside but even mountains, clouds, and streams.

The

one of the inner corners of each of the main rooms is a recess with a floor of polished wood, on which rests a porcelain vase with a flower, while on the wall above hangs a kake-mono, a long silk picture mounted like a wall-map. The side of this recess further from the corner may be supported, not by a perpendicular polished beam, but by a quaintly crooked tree-stem. Furniture there is none, for the floor is alike chair, table, and bedstead.

Such in its main features is the summer-house which looks out on this landscape garden; and

there are others like it all through the castlegrounds and, indeed, as we shall find, throughout Japan. The Shogun's palace itself was burned shortly after the Mikado took possession of it on his removal from Kiyôto in 1868. But even if this remained, we should find in it few features not present in miniature in the summer-house we have endeavoured to describe. Japanese buildings are all alike extremely simple in their construction, however elaborate the art which in certain cases may have been expended upon details. But of this

more anon.

To return to the park. Here and there steep thatched roofs emerge from thick foliage. At length there bursts upon us a vision of fairy-land. A rivulet leaps about thirty feet over the most picturesquely arranged rocks, here gliding over slippery moss, there glancing through the tracery of overspreading branches, finally plunging into a green pool, and coursing quietly among pebbles into a little lake, where its current gently waves. the water-lilies or wets the tips of the overdrooping willows. Around are lawns, here and there darkened by the blue shadows of shrubbery, amid which are glades where satyrs might have danced. And that summer-house might almost have been reared by fairy hands, so slender are its wooden pillars, its shingle roof is so shapely,