And over the lake and the temples, over the cherry-trees and the tea-stalls, over the city below and the playing children within, the big bronze bell of Ueno sends forth its great booming note--that note which is outside our music, deeper, more liquid, which comes with its low, booming sway, just when daylight turns to darkness. Cast of bronze and silver, rung by a wooden beam that strikes a boss outside, the note of the great bell comes swaying as though the air were water. And slowly over the city the bell booms, trembling, and he who hears it sits still and thinks; sits lost and dreams of the song of the seven spheres. * * * * * When Ueno’s avenues of cherry-trees are pink with flowers, when the stalls beneath the trees are full of flower hairpins, then Tokyo through its gardens and its roadways blushes too, for the whole city is planted thick with cherry-trees. Not only on the river bank, where the long two-mile avenue of Mukojima is a perpetual _fête_, but everywhere, in private gardens and in public streets, the delicate, pale pink blossoms on their brown leafless branches catch the sunshine and the showers, and fall as little rosy clouds from heaven on to the ground beneath. For Tokyo is a city holding the country in its lap. Not an artificial bedded-out country, stiff as a Versailles park, but the real wayward country, though tended with a loving, understanding care. And Tokyo is a city brimful of flowers. Between the cherry-trees of April and the chrysanthemums of November most of the flowers can be seen within the city in temple courts or nursery gardens or public parks. The lake of the lotus at Ueno is famous through Japan, and in the temple of Kameido grow the age-old wistarias. Trained on horizontal trellis work, their long pale tassels hang down towards the water, stirring with each breeze. The trailing clusters of the flowers grow four feet long sometimes, and droop towards the surface of the lake in thick swaying pendants of pure colour. Behind these living curtains, in a twilight of pale mauve or soft white light, on the edge of the pond whose shape spells “heart,” sometimes afloat on the pond itself, the tables of the _chaya_ stand, and those who make holiday because the flowers are blooming, all Tokyo, sit and look, drinking wee bowls of pale green tea, or writing poems to the flowers. On the waters of this lake of the letter “heart” float the pale mauve petals and the petals of pure white, which fall and drift and sink, and fall and drift and sink, until the waters are hidden with flower flakes and the wistaria is over and gone.