The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea, and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly doing something, not even the children. In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes; one of them is writing a poem. And a _bourgeois_ Sabbath peace is over the land. The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack of the _musmé’s gheta_ on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers. Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend, Iris, _Hana-shōbu_. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving people alone know how to create--and how to read. For many generations have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to black or to the purest white. The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read. V THE ART OF THE PEOPLE