June 2.—Early they rose, and though I took about an hour leisurely eating my breakfast, it was finished before half-past eight. I went to the cycad trees for a while and worked at them. How huge they are! The one on which I am now sitting, eight feet or so above the ground, spreads all round me like a grove of trees, but is only one much-branched individual. At my feet, in the main trunk of the tree, is a minute temple, but I think the gods have deserted it, for within is only one image half a foot high, from which the paint has worn away.
THE CURIOUS BENT CYCAD IN THE TEMPLE GROUNDS.
Opposite me is a funny old cycad, not branched at all but bent. It grows on a slope, and is propped up with legs here and there. In the morning I saw Mount Fuji quite magnificently. She stands alone in the sky, three times higher in appearance (and more in fact) than any hill near, with a coronet of snow, and a cloak of clouds round her shoulders, which cut her off from the earth. Immensely more impressive than when seen from Tokio.
What a peaceful day! I stop in the midst of my examination of the cycads to fall into an aimless reverie, and am waked up by a frog croaking from a porcelain-green throat at my side. Big black butterflies come lumbering along, and one thinks they are stupid birds till they settle on a crimson azalea flower, and coming up from the rice fields is a low-toned rattling chorus of frogs and semi. Just before supper I went up the next little hill to see the temple of Kwannon on its top. There are 270 solid stone steps up to the temple, all neatly squared and nearly 8 feet wide—but the temple itself is built of mouldering wood. It commands a splendid view of the rice and barley fields, and then the sea, which lies but a mile away. Behind the temple is a hilly country with many trees and little cultivated patches here and there. There are lots of white Canterbury bells among the tall grasses, and the wild Fuji wistaria branches climb round many a trunk.
After supper the moon rode high in the pale grey sky—but it is so small even now, only what I would have thought was a first day moon in England. Perhaps the brilliantly clear air of Japan last night allowed me to see the crescent before it was really a moon at all, but was the soul of a moon before it was born.
June 3.—To get me to the station by 8.30 the good people started getting up at 5, and talked so that I could hear every word, repeating again and again the time that they must wake me. But once they had “waked” me, not a word did they say, and crept about like mice. The contrariness of the Japanese is incomprehensible. The kuruma came an hour before I ordered it—and I kept him waiting more than an hour by their clock, and then got to the station sixty-five minutes too soon for the train!
After a few stations, I was struck by a pretty beach, and hopped off the train, determined to have a bathe and go on by the next, whenever it might be, to-day or to-morrow. The station-master was very nice, and took charge of my luggage, from which I extracted a towel. The village—Kanbara by name—was very small, and there were a good many fishing-boats at intervals along the shore, but they were nearly deserted. The water was just delicious, so warm that one could not feel it at all, I never bathed in such a perfect temperature, but I expect our creeping cold water is more bracing. I sunned on the beach for a while, and found a train at midday that will take me a good deal quicker than the one I left, as it is a semi-express.
I had to wait about twenty minutes on the platform for it, and was of course gazed at solemnly by a number of small children who did not offer a remark, they were so young that very likely I was the first foreigner they had really seen at close quarters. There was a good deal of difference of opinion as to my sex. My panama hat always bewilders them, as only men wear them here.