It is thirty years ago now. But the legend of the noseless Jizō and his fight with the _Onigo_ (the devil in the shape of a child) is still told in the villages around Negishi. The other day Richard heard it himself. VIII THE TEMPLES OF SHIBA A matchless blue sky overarches the world, pale, clear, intense, and the twisted green boughs of the Japanese pine throw their gaunt, black arms up into the blue, in the vain endeavour of a hundred years to reach it. The hush of cloistered calm in which the trees grew up is still here, although the Tokyo citizen walks and rides where once none but Buddhist priests might linger. The Red Gateway, with the tent curves of its roof petrified into grey tiles, still claims for all within Buddha as its master. And the hush of cloistered calm grows stiller. Through a wide space open to the sky, a space paved with rounded pebbles, water-washed for many years ere they floored the courtyard of the House of God, believing and unbelieving feet have beaten smooth a wide, brown pathway. All around, and arranged in serried rows, stand a myriad grey-stone lanterns, the pious gifts of dead _daimyō_. Between these tall stone emblems of the five elements the pathway runs; cupola, crescent, pyramid, sphere, cube--ether, air, fire, water, earth--and the crude shapes of the primitive elements, touched and altered by generations of artists, are turned to curves of quaintest beauty. Diagonally across the space goes the black pathway, the standing rows of tall lanterns thickly set on either side, until beneath another gate it makes a pause. A gate of red lacquer this, with carvings of gilded wood on ceiling and wall. Carvings full of that oriental luxuriance of colour and line which half shocks our sober northern senses; so shocks them sometimes that we call it scornfully “barbaric,” until we grow wiser with much looking and learn to see the truth and beauty of this exuberant splendour.