Three years ago Yokohama was sufficiently Europeanised in its shops to suit the worst and wickedest taste.  To-day it is still worse if you keep to the town limits.  Ten steps beyond into the fields all the civilisation stops exactly as it does in another land a few thousand miles further West.  The globe-trotting, millionaires anxious to spend money, with a hose on whatever caught their libertine fancies, had explained to us aboard-ship that they came to Japan in haste, advised by their guide-books to do so, lest the land should be suddenly civilised between steamer-sailing and steamer-sailing.  When they touched land they ran away to the curio shops to buy things which are prepared for them—­mauve and magenta and blue-vitriol things.  By this time they have a ‘Murray’ under one arm and an electric-blue eagle with a copperas beak and a yellow ‘E pluribus unum’ embroidered on apple-green silk, under the other.

We, being wise, sit in a garden that is not ours, but belongs to a gentleman in slate-coloured silk, who, solely for the sake of the picture, condescends to work as a gardener, in which employ he is sweeping delicately a welt of fallen cherry blossoms from under an azalea aching to burst into bloom.  Steep stone steps, of the colour that nature ripens through long winters, lead up to this garden by way of clumps of bamboo grass.  You see the Smell was right when it talked of meeting old friends.  Half-a-dozen blue-black pines are standing akimbo against a real sky—­not a fog-blur nor a cloud-bank, nor a gray dish-clout wrapped round the sun—­but a blue sky.  A cherry tree on a slope below them throws up a wave of blossom that breaks all creamy white against their feet, and a clump of willows trail their palest green shoots in front of all.  The sun sends for an ambassador through the azalea bushes a lordly swallow-tailed butterfly, and his squire very like the flitting ‘chalk-blue’ of the English downs.  The warmth of the East, that goes through, not over, the lazy body, is added to the light of the East—­the splendid lavish light that clears but does not bewilder the eye.  Then the new leaves of the spring wink like fat emeralds and the loaded branches of cherry-bloom grow transparent and glow as a hand glows held up against flame.  Little, warm sighs come up from the moist, warm earth, and the fallen petals stir on the ground, turn over, and go to sleep again.  Outside, beyond the foliage, where the sunlight lies on the slate-coloured roofs, the ridged rice-fields beyond the roofs, and the hills beyond the rice-fields, is all Japan—­only all Japan; and this that they call the old French Legation is the Garden of Eden that most naturally dropped down here after the Fall.  For some small hint of the beauties to be shown later there is the roof of a temple, ridged and fluted with dark tiles, flung out casually beyond the corner of the bluff on which the garden stands.  Any other curve of the eaves would not have consorted with the sweep