It is five minutes before the last slow solemn stride takes him beyond our sight. Then hour-glass drum, the flute, the two tambourine-like instruments that wail, shake out their last weird tuneless tune. The chant of the chorus ends on a note that to us is a middle--and stops. My ears still wait the end of the phrase when the hush of intense silence dissolves. There is a rustle in each square shallow box, a lighting of tiny bronze pipes and cigarettes, a filling of tea-cups, a tapping of chopsticks. The _Nō_ is over. NOTE.--In quoting from this _Nō_, “The Robe of Feathers,” I have followed Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s translation in “The Classical Poetry of the Japanese.” IX A JAPANESE BANK-HOLIDAY The bulletins grew longer, and all the world waited and watched. The Japanese papers were full of minute descriptions and hopeful prognostications. The cherry-trees were doing well; they were expected to bloom next week. Then came a cold wind and rain; “for flowers,” as the proverb says, “bring showers.” And the bulletins became paragraphs. But the sky grew blue again, and even the foreign papers broke through their Western disdain, and announced that “Marquis Itō had gone to Kyoto to see the cherry-trees.” Imagine the _Times_ gravely recording amongst its official intelligence that “Mr. Balfour had gone to Devonshire (not a third of the journey) to see the apple-blossoms”! But the Japanese are, of course, uncivilised! On Easter Monday the trees were out, and all the world with them. The two long miles of river-bank at Mukojima were crowded. The river itself was thick with _sampan_. And still all Tokyo pours itself out over the bridges, across the canals, out under the long double line of cherry-trees. The chrysanthemum may well be the Imperial crest; the cherry-tree is the national emblem, and its flowering a national _fête_--a Japanese Bank Holiday, with Mukojima for its Hampstead Heath. The two long miles of raised bank is a sea of heads, a second black river set between pale pink banks; and it washes slowly, undisturbedly onwards. Nobody pushes, nobody shouts, nobody calls rude remarks. And the blue-tuniced coolies, like Florentine noblemen out at elbows, with the work-a-day blue towel round their heads replaced by a pink one, the very shade of the cherry-blossoms above, say polite “_Go men nasai_” (“I beg your honourable pardon”) if in looking upwards they stumble against each other.