Kobé and Arima
porcelain, lacquer, bronze, and carvings. The last room looks upon a little garden with its inevitable miniature pond crossed by a stone bridge with stone lanterns, and stunted pines on the slope of a small mountain. Beyond this garden are more stores of armor, coins, and ancient things, and a second story doubles the whole lower labyrinth of the place. An army might be equipped from this magazine of military stores, or a pantheon fitted out with Buddhas, Kwannons, Nios, lesser gods, and gilded images. All these deities are certified to have come from the Nara or Mount Hiyeizan temples, which are the miraculous sources of supply of everything sacerdotal in this part of Japan. One fortunate tourist, who bought a Buddha of Hari Shin, found that the jewel in the forehead was a diamond instead of a crystal, which, when cut in facets, proved to be worth several hundred dollars. Of this incident the old samurai prefers not to talk, and to change the subject his agile son refills the tea-cups, unrolls more kakemonos, or displays the swords and helmets “of my father’s young time.”
Through Kobé the colored straw mosaics of Tajima province on the west coast find their market, as well as the basket wares of Arima, a village lying fifteen miles inland. One goes from Kobé to Arima by jinrikisha, and starting in the dew and freshness of a summer morning at six o’clock, we reached the grateful shade of the Taiko’s maple in the tea-house garden soon after nine. As we rose by degrees through the suburbs of Kobé, and drew nearer its glorious green hill-wall, we had a superb view of the opaline bay, set with the black hulls of great merchant ships, the white ones of foreign men-of-war, and dotted with the square white sails of hundreds of junks and fishing-boats. A sudden turn in the road took us behind the sharp spur of a hill, and a narrow canon lay before us with the road clinging to one side wall. All the way we followed watercourses—the
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