tiful miko of the sixteenth century; but then I put aside the thought as romantic and on the whole unfounded. When we entered the wood, the sweet buzzing sound which filled the perfumed air turned my thoughts into other channels. How strange that this woody nook, with vegetation in reality little different from that of Central Europe, is so unmistakably Japanese, I said to myself; almost every tree, every piece of sod, every bush tries to express exactly what the art of this nation does; and everything is stylized . . .
The shadow of the wood was pleasantly cool; hard by a pheasant made itself heard; the mournful song of a bird resounded for a while in a thicket. Then the path flowed into the remains of the cryptomeria grove like a brook into a lake. The mighty pillarlike trunks rose high above the rest of the trees, here sparser, and in places large open spaces were thus formed, looking like air-bubbles filled with a delicate, diffused green. But presently there appeared bubbles tinged with a salmon-orange hue. Like clouds alight with a wonderfully beautiful fire there floated high above us the blossoming crowns of giant azaleas.
My companion turned to me, interrupting our silence, of which I had not even been aware up to that moment. »These tsutsudji were blossoming here already at the time when people on their way to Kaze-no miya told each other how they looked forward with delight to beholding the dances of the most charming pet of the gods who ever graced the festivals of the Temple of the Winds. Today there exist no larger azaleas in the whole of Japan, except in Yamoto.« He cast a slow side-long glance at me, from which I felt that his thoughts were wandering far away from me in time, and still near in space. »And hither used to come Masushige, a young samurai, wounded with love for the comely temple dancer . . .« He laughed somewhat absently, and it seemed as if his lips were still whispering though he had already come to a full stop.
And before I could answer, the thicket opened and before us there appeared the melancholy ruins of the Temple of the Winds, here and there invaded by different plants. Only the torii, the Shinto gate resembling a great Chinese ideograph, was almost new while the rest was time worn, falling to decay.
»Look, yonder is the platform on which O-Take used to dance her miko-kagura,« he remarked in a somewhat shaken voice. »And in the background, where now bamboo is growing, you can see the last remains of the so colled miko-yashiki, where the darlings of the gods used to be shut up for the night. Would you believe that when I stand here I can imagine so vividly and in such detail the original appearance of the temple and all the rest of
