Perhaps Japanese cheap pleasures might be broadly divided into those of time and place furnished by nature with the help of man, and those of time and place invented by man at the suggestion of nature. The former class can be found in every province, and yearly multiply. Some locality is chosen on hill or coast, by lake or river: gardens are made, trees planted, resting-houses built to command the finest points of view; and the wild site is presently transformed into a place of pilgrimage for pleasure-seekers. One spot is famed for cherry-trees, another for maples, another for wistaria; and each of the seasons--even snowy winter--helps to make the particular beauty of some resort. The sites of the most celebrated temples, or at least of the greater number of them, were thus selected,--always where the beauty of nature could inspire and

aid the work of the religious architect, and where it still has power to make many a one wish that he could become a Buddhist or Shinto priest. Religion, indeed, is every, where in Japan associated with famous scenery: with landscapes, cascades, peaks, rocks, islands; with the best places from which to view the blossoming of flowers, the reflection of the autumn moon on water, or the spark. ling of fireflies on summer nights.

Decorations, illuminations, street displays of every sort, but especially those of holy days, compose a large part of the pleasures of city life which all can share. The appeals thus made to aesthetic fancy at festivals represent the labor, perhaps, of tens of thousands of hands and brains; but each individual contributor to the public effort works according to his particular thought and taste, even while obeying old rules, so that the total ultimate result is a wondrous, a bewildering an incalculable variety. Anybody can contribute to such an occasion; and everybody does, for the cheapest material is used. Paper, straw, or stone makes no real difference: the art sense is superbly independent