But the greatest disillusionment was the Akasaka garden.  Geoffrey was resigned to be bored by everything else.  But his wife had grown so enthusiastic about the beauties of the Fujinami domain, that he had expected to walk straight into a paradise.  What did he see?  A dirty pond and some shrubs, not one single flower to break the monotony of green and drab, and everything so small.  Why, he could walk round the whole enclosure in ten minutes.  Geoffrey Barrington was accustomed to country houses in England, with their broad acres and their lavish luxuriance of scent and blossom.  This niggling landscape art of the Japanese seemed to him mean and insignificant.

* * * * *

He much preferred the garden at Count Saito’s home.  Count Saito, the late Ambassador at the Court of St. James, with his stooping shoulders, his grizzled hair, and his deep eyes peering under the gold-rimmed spectacles, had proposed the health of Captain and Mrs. Barrington at their wedding breakfast.  Since then, he had returned to Japan, where he was soon to play a leading political role.  Meeting Geoffrey one day at the Embassy, he had invited him and his wife to visit his famous garden.

It was a hanging garden on the side of a steep hill, parted down the middle by a little stream with its string of waterfalls.  Along either bank rose groups of iris, mauve and white, whispering together like long-limbed pre-Raphaelite girls.  Round a sunny fountain, the source of the stream, just below the terrace of the Count’s mansion, they thronged together more densely, surrounding the music of the water with the steps of a slow sarabande, or pausing at the edge of the pool to admire their own reflection.

Count Saito showed Geoffrey where the roses were coming on, new varieties of which he had brought from England with him.

“Perhaps they will not like to be turned into Japanese,” he observed; “the rose is such an English flower.”

They passed on to where the azaleas would soon be in fiery bloom.  For with the true gardener, the hidden promise of the morrow is more stimulating to the enthusiasm than the assured success of the full flowers.

The Count wore his rustling native dress; but two black cocker spaniels followed at his heels.  This combination presented an odd mixture of English squire-archy and the daimyo of feudal Japan.

On the crest of the hill above him rose the house, a tall Italianate mansion of grey stucco, softened by creepers, jessamine and climbing roses.  Alongside ran the low irregular roofs of the Japanese portion of the residence.  Almost all rich Japanese have a double house, half foreign and half native, to meet the needs of their amphibious existence.  This grotesque juxtaposition is to be seen all over Tokyo, like a tall boastful foreigner tethered to a timid Japanese wife.

Geoffrey inquired in which wing of this unequal bivalve his host actually lived.