Yokohama
are recurrent and adequate descriptions. So well used are the subjects of it to this convict system of identification that they recognize their friends by their alias as readily as the natives do.
Upon the Bluff stand a public hall, United States and British marine hospitals, a French and a German hospital, several missionary establishments, and the houses of the large American missionary community. At the extreme west end a colony of Japanese florists has planted toy-gardens filled with vegetable miracles; burlesques and fantasies of horticulture; dwarf-trees, a hundred years old, that could be put in the pocket; huge single flowers, and marvellous masses of smaller blossoms; cherry-trees that bear no cherries; plum-trees that bloom in midwinter, but have neither leaves nor fruit; and roses—that favorite flower which the foreigner brought with him—flowering in Californian profusion. A large business is done in the exportation of Japanese plants and bulbs, encased in a thick coating of mud, which makes an air-tight case to protect them during the sea-voyage. Ingenious fern pieces are preserved in the same way. These grotesque things are produced by wrapping in moist earth the long, woody roots of a fine-leafed variety of fern. They are made to imitate dragons, junks, temples, boats, lanterns, pagodas, bells, balls, circles, and every familiar object. When bought they look dead. If hung for a few days in the warm sun, and occasionally dipped in water, they change into feathery, green objects that grow more and more beautiful, and are far more artistic than our one conventional hanging-basket. The dwarf-trees do not stand transportation well, as they either die or begin to grow rapidly.
The Japanese are the foremost landscape gardeners in the world, as we Occidentals, who are still in that barbaric period where carpet gardening seems beautiful and desirable, shall in time discover. Their genius has
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