shouted "Ohio's!" and all the old people laughed. The grey tree-trunks marched us solemnly along over that horrid bad road which had been mended with brushwood, and after five hours we got Nikko in the shape of a long village at the foot of a hill, and capricious Nature, to reward us for our sore bones, laughed on the instant in floods of sunshine. And upon what a mad scene did the light fall! The _cryptomerias_ rose in front of us a wall of green darkness, a tearing torrent ran deep-green over blue boulders, and between stream and trees was thrown a blood-red bridge--the sacred bridge of red lacquer that no foot save the Mikado's may press. Very cunning artists are the Japanese. Long ago a great-hearted king came to Nikko River and looked across at the trees, up-stream at the torrent and the hills whence it came, and down-stream at the softer outlines of the crops and spurs of wooded mountains. "It needs only a dash of colour in the foreground to bring this all together," said he, and he put a little child in a blue and white dressing-gown under the awful trees to judge the effect. Emboldened by his tenderness, an aged beggar ventured to ask for alms. Now it was the ancient privilege of the great to try the temper of their blades upon beggars and such cattle. Mechanically the king swept off the old man's head, for he did not wish to be disturbed. The blood spurted across the granite slabs of the river-ford in a sheet of purest vermilion. The king smiled. Chance had solved the problem for him. "Build a bridge here," he said to the court carpenter, "of just such a colour as that stuff on the stones. Build also a bridge of grey stone close by, for I would not forget the wants of my people." So he gave the little child across the stream a thousand pieces of gold and went his way. He had composed a landscape. As for the blood, they wiped it up and said no more about it; and that is the story of Nikko Bridge. You will not find it in the guide-books. I followed the voice of the river through a rickety toy-village, across some rough bottom-land, till, crossing a bridge, I found myself among lichened stones, scrub, and the blossoms of spring. A hillside, steep and wooded as the flanks of the red Aravallis, rose on my left; on my right, the eye travelled from village to cropland, crop to towering cypress, and rested at last on the cold blue of an austere hill-top encircled by streaks of yet unmelted snow. The Nikko hotel stood at the foot of this hill; and the time of the year was May. Then a sparrow came by with a piece of grass in her beak, for she was building her nest; and I knew that the spring was come to Nikko. One is so apt to forget the changes of the year over there with you in India.