A wall has certainly more possibilities than a rice-field, but our modern walls, the high brick atrocity of a prison or an embankment, is not usually beautiful. We make spasmodic attempts to beautify their monotonous ugliness with creepers or other coverings. That is, we do not beautify the wall, we take something less ugly and conceal it. Now the Japanese beautify the wall. (We are only considering here walls of mere utility, where all decoration or ornamentation is out of the question.) Except for the brick walls of the foreign buildings, walls in Japan are made of hewn stone usually shaped like pyramids and hammered base outwards into a bank of earth. In a country whose architecture, from the most glorious of its temples to the humblest of its houses, is all of wood, a clumsiness, a _gaucherie_ in its stonework might be well excused, yet Japanese walls are a wonder to all who see them, for the hard enduring granite is plastic beneath their fingers. Their walls are never dead straight. The line always curves softly outward as it touches the ground. And this not only in the strong walls of the _daimyō’s_ castle, or the long moat walls of the Mikado’s palace, but in the embankment walls of the tiniest shrine, in the modern walls of the modern temple of the modern coaling port of Moji. To beautify a useful object indirectly by decoration is a great deal easier, at any rate the means and the possibility of doing so are more apparent; and yet, do we draw designs on our sacks, on our flour sacks, grain sacks, potato sacks, as they do in Japan? For many months I passed regularly every day through a street of warehouses where sacks of all kinds, and containing all sorts of produce, were lying on the ground, were being carried into the _godown_ or were loading or unloading. It was some time before it really struck me that the sacks were decorated, that their blank yellow sides were made beautiful with a design; but when I had once realised it, I used to look carefully to see if I could find sacks without. They were extremely rare. The designs varied considerably. A flower, conventional or natural, a maple leaf, a broken branch of plum-or cherry-blossom, the delicate outline of the bamboo in a thousand different shapes, were the most common, but there were others, birds, geometrical patterns, rice-ears, Fujiyama. These designs were with true decorative feeling in one corner, rarely in the exact centre, and admirably proportioned to the size of the sack. They were mostly drawn in, in soft blues--the commonest colour in the Far East--sometimes in a pale but very beautiful green; colours which, on the unbleached cotton or pale yellow matting of the sack, made complete harmonies.