person gave a wornout summer-robe (katabira) to wrap her body in;
and she was interred near Arashiyama at a spot still pointed out to
travellers as the "Place of the Katabira" (Katabira-no-Tsuchi).


Incense

I see, rising out of darkness, a lotos in a vase. Most of the vase
is invisible, but I know that it is of bronze, and that its
glimpsing handles are bodies of dragons. Only the lotos is fully
illuminated: three pure white flowers, and five great leaves of gold
and green,--gold above, green on the upcurling under-surface,--an
artificial lotos. It is bathed by a slanting stream of sunshine,--
the darkness beneath and beyond is the dusk of a temple-chamber. I
do not see the opening through which the radiance pours, but I am
aware that it is a small window shaped in the outline-form of a
temple-bell.

The reason that I see the lotos--one memory of my first visit to
a Buddhist sanctuary--is that there has come to me an odor of
incense. Often when I smell incense, this vision defines; and
usually thereafter other sensations of my first day in Japan
revive in swift succession with almost painful acuteness.


It is almost ubiquitous,--this perfume of incense. It makes one
element of the faint but complex and never-to-be-forgotten odor
of the Far East. It haunts the dwelling-house not less than the
temple,--the home of the peasant not less than the yashiki of the
prince. Shinto shrines, indeed, are free from it;--incense being