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Show A JAPANESE GARDEN. The Sensations There Experienced Familiarity Fa-miliarity of Its Animal Inliabiruiit. Lafcadio Ilearn, in an article iu the Atlantic devoted to a Japanese garden, writes thus of his own garden aud some of its inhabitants: Those antique garden walls, liicjb-mossed liicjb-mossed below their ruined coping ot tiles, seem to shut out even the murmur mur-mur of the city's life. There no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrillinpr of semi, or, at lonpr, lazy intervals, the solitary plash of a diving frog. Xay. those walls seclude me from much more than city streets. Outside them hums the changed Japan of telegraphs, and newspapers, and steamships; within with-in dwell the all-reposing peace of nature na-ture and the dreams of the sixteenth century. There is a charm of quaint- ness in the very air; a faint sense of something viewless and sweet all about one; perhaps the gentle haunting of dead ladies who looked like the ladies of the old picture-books and who lived here when all this was new. Even in the summer light touching the gray, strange shapes of stone thrilling through the foliage of the long-loved tree.13. there the tenderness ten-derness of a phaotom caress. These are the gardens of the past. The future will know them only as dreams, creations crea-tions of a forgotten art, who-.e charm no genius may reproduce. "Of the human tenants here no creature crea-ture seems to be afraid. The little frogs resting upon the lotus leaves scarcely shrink from my touch; the lizards liz-ards sun themselves within easy reach of my hand; the water snakes glide across my shadow without fear: bands of semi establish their deafening orchestra or-chestra on a plump branch just above my head; r.nd a praying mantis insolently inso-lently poses on my knee. Swallows and sparrows not only build their nets on my roof, bat even enter my rooms without concern one swallow has actually built its nest in the ceiling of the bathroom and the weasel purloin-fish purloin-fish under my very eyes without any scruples of conscience. A wild nguisu perches on a cedar by the window, and in a burst of savage sweetness challenges chal-lenges my caged pet to a contest in song; and always through the golden air, from the green twilight of tio mountain pines, thero purls to me the plaintive, caressing, delicious csll of the yams be to. Xo European dove hs-s er.ch , a cry. He who can hear for the first time the voice of the yamabato without feeling a new sensation at his heart little lit-tle deserves to dwell in this fcappy world." |