=April 29.=--A quiet day’s work, the weather was bright, lovely, out of sheer perversity. My maid gave me some fritters for dinner, of a kind I had not ordered, and when I asked her what they were, she said _hassu_, that is, the lotus. The sacred flower makes delicious fritters! I daresay if one could capture the rosy-tinted evening clouds they would make good ice-cream.
=May 2.=--I went to Professor _Fw----’s_: he was kindly taking me as his guest to an afternoon luncheon-party at the Admiralty gardens. At his house I met an interesting Japanese who spoke excellent English, and who is said to be one of the greatest Japanese musicians. He invented an organ of some sort, and has had a special audience with the Kaiser Wilhelm. We drove to the Admiralty, passing safely the fierce bayoneted sentries, and across a yard hideous with brick buildings and smoky chimneys--through a gate in a high wall, and were--in a deep forest glade, under shade of palm trees and ferns, back in time three hundred years! The gardens were those of a very famous Daimio, and were laid out with the greatest care and at a boundless expense. In them are all the stages of the Tokkaido,--scenes from China, wild mountain views and iris gardens, falls of water and lakes. In fact a series of scenes of wonderful beauty, of peace and suggestion, of dreamland poetry--only the tallest of the cryptomerias and pines were standing as dead skeletons, killed by the smoky chimneys on the other side of the boundary wall. These great gardens are entirely closed, and it is very difficult even to get permission to see them, the authorities of the Admiralty are so afraid of spies.
The special party to-day was to welcome the married daughter of one of the earliest and most useful of the American missionaries, a Dr. Brown, who had had a school in Yokohama, and who had as pupils many men now very distinguished. Among other people I was introduced to a very charming, thoroughly Europeanised, and handsome man--and of course did not catch his name. He walked with me a little while through the gardens, and we talked of the beauty of Tokio and the destruction of that beauty by “reformations” some years ago, before the Japanese had learned to appreciate native art as well as they do now (though much of the same sort goes on to-day), and I quoted one of the specially terrible places, the hideous red-brick Exhibition-like buildings (Government buildings) that ruin the view of the grey moat with green banks and trees and old white and grey buildings round the palace, one of the most lovely sights any city in the world can show. I exclaimed against the vandalism, the criminal folly of the architect, whom I surmised was some second-rate foreigner. “Yes,” my companion answered, “it _is_ bad. I was the Chairman of the Building Committee at that time, but I suppose the architect was morally responsible.”