For her part, reared in retirement, and a stranger to town gaieties, she preferred the castle--when No-Kami was absent with his scowling retinue. Then, her own mistress, she would order her kago,--a heavy gorgeous litter, gold lacquered and emblazoned, adorned with rich curtains, and cushions, and tassels, borne on the shoulders of twelve staggering men--and penetrating, when the fancy seized her, along the centipede street of Tsu, make for a garden beyond, to which she had taken a liking. Reaching the favoured spot was the difficulty, for it was necessary to pass along two miles and more of straggling street and suburb, where poverty, if speechless, was rampant. To her pale face, though, it always showed its less hideous side, for the poor of Tsu (how many there were of them!) soon learned to adore their chatelaine. She could not with her feeble force even attempt to stem the tide of suffering due to my lord's oppression; but the crushed creatures knew right well that behind the marble mask was a deep fund of pity--that their lady would sometimes go dinnerless herself for the sake of starving children. When she passed by, the toilworn women would look up, and show their blackened teeth in a wan smile; and the brown naked children, with their comical shaved pates and elf-locks--their bat-ears, wide mouths and eyes _à fleur de tête_ like slits--would come trooping and crowing about her. She was always interested in the details of their poor homes,--ready with soothing words, and such money as she happened to possess; would converse with the old men as they wove sandals, the two straw loops caught on their great toes; criticise the painting of the ph[oe]nixes on the umbrellas of oil paper, an industry in vogue in these parts; exhort the languishing men to renewed courage and hope; and all the while her revolted soul died within her at contemplation of the wretched huts of mud and bamboo, some of them mere mats stretched on sticks, and stiffened with wire, with rotten crumbling roofs of decayed rice thatch, and mud floors that were never dry. Her heart bled for the patient, suffering people, and she was glad to get away to her garden, where the sun shone forth with halcyon brightness, and nature at least was happy. For Tsu, I would have you know, is not all ugliness. Passing out of the low-lying oozy suburb, you reach a wooden bridge over one of the numberless streams that intersect the marsh, and a little further on come to rising ground, well wooded with the luxuriant vegetation which in Japan is the lavish gift of the rain-god. At the top of the hill, under the lee of a group of ancient pines, much tossed and wind-beaten, is a summer-house. From the road it is not visible, so deeply is it embowered in cherry and maple, each so glorious and lovely in its season, the which are closely tangled and entwined with such cataracts of purple wisteria as no western mind can realise. This