There were weeping willows with light-green feathery foliage, such as sorrowing fairies might plant on the grave of some Taliessin of Oberon’s court.  There was a double cherry in belated bloom; its flowers of natural size hung amid the slender branches like big birds’ nests.  There was a stunted oak tree, creeping along the earth with gnarled and lumpy limbs like a miniature dinosaur; it waved in the air a clump of demensurate leaves with the truculent mien of boxing-gloves or lobsters’ claws.  In the centre of the rectangle formed by this audience of trees, and raised on a long table, was a tiny wisteria arbour, formed by a dozen plants arranged in quincunx.  The intertwisted ropes of branches were supported on shining rods of bamboo; and the clusters of blossom, like bunches of grapes or like miniature chandeliers, still hung over the litter of their fallen beauty, with a few bird-like flowers clinging to them, pale and bleached.

“They are over two hundred years old,” said their proud owner, “they came from one of the Emperor’s palaces at Kyoto.”

But the pride of the collection were the conifers and evergreens—­trees which have Japanese and Latin names only, the hinoki, the enoki, the sasaki, the keyaki, the maki, the surgi and the kusunoki—­all trees of the dark funereal families of fir and laurel, which the birds avoid, and whose deep winter green in the summer turns to rust.  There were spreading cedar trees, black like the tents of Bedouins, and there were straight cryptomerias for the masts of fairy ships.  There was a strange tree, whose light-green foliage grew in round clumps like trays of green lacquer at the extremities of twisted brandies, a natural etagere.  There were the distorted pine-trees of Japan, which are the symbol of old age, of fidelity, of patience under adversity, and of the Japanese nation itself, in every attitude of menace, curiosity, jubilation and gloom.  Some of them were leaning out of their pots and staring head downwards at the ground beneath them; some were creeping along the earth like reptiles; some were mere trunks, with a bunch of green needles sprouting at the top like a palm; some with one long pathetic branch were stretching out in quest of the infinite to the neglect of the rest of the tree; some were tall and bent as by some sea wind blowing shoreward.  Streaking a miniature landscape, they were whispering together the tales of centuries past.

The Japanese art of cultivating these tiny trees is a weird and unhealthy practice, akin to vivisection, but without its excuse.  It is like the Chinese custom of dwarfing their women’s feet.  The result is pleasing to the eye; but it hurts the mind by its abnormality, and the heart by its ruthlessness.

Asako’s admiration, so easily stirred, became enthusiastic as Countess Saito told her something of the personal history of her favourite plants, how this one was two hundred years old, and that one three hundred and fifty, and how another had been present at such and such a scene famous in Japanese history.