in volume by the rains, forces itself through gates of brightly-
coloured rock, by which its progress is repeatedly arrested, and
rarely lingers for rest in all its sparkling, rushing course. It
is walled in by high mountains, gloriously wooded and cleft by dark
ravines, down which torrents were tumbling in great drifts of foam,
crashing and booming, boom and crash multiplied by many an echo,
and every ravine afforded glimpses far back of more mountains,
clefts, and waterfalls, and such over-abundant vegetation that I
welcomed the sight of a gray cliff or bare face of rock. Along the
path there were fascinating details, composed of the manifold
greenery which revels in damp heat, ferns, mosses, confervae,
fungi, trailers, shading tiny rills which dropped down into
grottoes feathery with the exquisite Trichomanes radicans, or
drooped over the rustic path and hung into the river, and overhead
the finely incised and almost feathery foliage of several varieties
of maple admitted the light only as a green mist. The spring tints
have not yet darkened into the monotone of summer, rose azaleas
still light the hillsides, and masses of cryptomeria give depth and
shadow. Still, beautiful as it all is, one sighs for something
which shall satisfy one's craving for startling individuality and
grace of form, as in the coco-palm and banana of the tropics. The
featheriness of the maple, and the arrowy straightness and
pyramidal form of the cryptomeria, please me better than all else;
but why criticise? Ten minutes of sunshine would transform the
whole into fairyland.

There were no houses and no people. Leaving this beautiful river
we crossed a spur of a hill, where all the trees were matted
together by a very fragrant white honeysuckle, and came down upon
an open valley where a quiet stream joins the loud-tongued