The sensation received on passing out of the bright, narrow, busy streets of shops into the mouldering courts of Tennoji is indescribable. Even for a Japanese I imagine it must be like a sensation of the supernatural,--a return in memory to the life of twelve hundred years ago, to the time of the earliest Buddhist mission work in Japan. Symbols of the faith, that elsewhere had become for me conventionally familiar, here seemed but half familiar, exotic, prototypal; and things never

before seen gave me the startling notion of a time and place out of existing life. As a matter of fact, very little remains of the original structure of the temple; parts have been burned, parts renovated. But the impression is still very peculiar, because the rebuilders and the renovators always followed the original plans, made by some great Korean or Chinese architect. Any attempt to write of the antique aspect, the queer melancholy beauty of the place, would be hopeless. To know what Tennoji is, one must see the weirdness of its decay,--the beautiful neutral tones of old timbers, the fading spectral greys and yellows of wall-surfaces, the eccentricities of disjointing, the extraordinary carvings under eaves,--carvings of waves and clouds and dragons and demons, once splendid with lacquer and gold, now time-whitened to the tint of smoke, and looking as if about to curl away like smoke and vanish. The most remarkable of these carvings belong to a fantastic five-storied pagoda, now ruinous: nearly all the brazen wind-bells suspended to the angles of its tiers of roofs have fallen. Pagoda and temple proper occupy a quadrangular

court surrounded by an open cloister. Beyond are other courts, a Buddhist school, and an immense pond peopled by tortoises and crossed by a massive stone bridge. There are statues and stone lamps and lions and an enormous temple-drum;--there are booths for the sale of toys and oddities;--there are resting-places where tea is served, and cake-stands where you can buy cakes for the tortoises or for a pet deer, which approaches the visitor, bowing its sleek head to beg. There is a two-storied gateway guarded by huge images of the Ni-O,--Ni-O with arms and legs muscled like the limbs of kings in the Assyrian sculptures, and bodies speckled all over with little balls of white paper spat upon them by the faithful. There is another gateway whose chambers are empty;--perhaps they once contained images of the Four Deva Kings. There are ever so many curious things; but I shall only venture to describe two or three of my queerest experiences.

First of all, I found the confirmation of a certain suspicion that had come to me as I entered the temple precincts,--the suspicion that the forms of worship were peculiar as the