ships. The trees are alive with good and evil spirits. Animals are endowed with human speech on occasion, and for special purposes they become the friends or enemies of man, pressing into their service the fruits, flowers, and grain. These in their turn, acquire a language of their own, are metamorphosed into dwarfs, gnomes, or goodly human shapes, and so play their several parts in the great drama of life.

It is easy to see how, with such a mythology, and such a store of legendary lore

in the moon." The badger expressed a desire to accompany his ancient enemy on this voyage, but the wary little fellow pushed off without him. The badger then built a boat of baked clay and followed, determined on further mischief. Overtaking the hare, he sculled alongside, when the hare, dexterously pushing the side of his wooden craft against the brittle prow of his enemy's boat of clay, which had now begun to dissolve in the water, caused it to break up; and so the wicked badger miserably perished.

to suggest subjects for the pencil, the imagination of the Japanese artist may run riot without ever once producing any fancy unworthy of popular acceptance. As I have said, his favorite class of subjects is found among the animals. These he deliberately endows with reason and sometimes with a semi-human form. To them he ascribes human motives and sentiments. The vast volume of Japanese fable furnishes him with an inexhaust ible store of these subjects for illustration. The story of the "Crackling Mountain," for example, relates how the hare befriended, and the badger persecuted, a worthy couple. After innumerable adventures and conflicts, in which the man and his wife were destroyed, the badger saw the hare launching a wooden boat. "Where are you going, my friend?" asked the deceitful badger. The hare replied politely, "To the moon." This was not a joke, for the Japanese affect to see a hare where we discover "the man

Observe the comical, semi-human attitude of the hare boatman. He is meek, but determined; his long, inoffensive ears almost protest against the violence on which his determined little legs are resolved. The badger is just the brutal fellow which his long life of viciousness and cruelty has prepared us to expect him to be. In this, as in most of the other pictures reproduced in this paper, the artist puts his title in a few characters near the figures. The translation is given below.

The adventures of animals often, in the hands of Japanese artists, assume a purely human interest. These unconscious actors are made to represent the trials, troubles, foibles, and labors of mankind. In the story of the accomplished and lucky tea-kettle there is much hidden wisdom. The kettle had the power of turning into a badger at will, and its antics were made a source of great profit to its owner. The story of the

books, or on fans, trays, and screens, the career of the accomplished tea-kettle.

We may say that these pictures, as well as most popular Japanese drawings, are pervaded with a spirit of caricature. In nearly all of them, the artist appears to stand off from his work and laugh with the observer. He is never unconscious of the fun which he is making. In the picture of the little hattomoto asking for work, which I have given as a specimen of a popular subject in the classic style, we have a very bold caricature. The rank of the boar is high; he wears the noble cap or toque of a great functionary. The hattomoto, or wandering retainer, is a harmless and timid hare. The abasement of the poor little fellow in quest of employment, and the brutal imperiousness of the great personage, tell their own story too well for us to suppose that the purpose of the artist was not instantly appreciated in feudal Japan.

While the hare is a favorite figure with Japanese artists who desire to illustrate amiable traits of character, the fox and the badger

tutelary divinities of Japanese mythology. He is more than Reynard the Fox, of German fable. He is hated and despised as a mischief-maker and a liar, coaxed and cajoled as a powerful instrument for good or evil, worshiped as the source of all luck, and heartily enjoyed as the inventor of fun, practical jokes, and various little games. A poor woman, weeping over her dead child, asks why she is thus bereft. The funeral lamp casts her shadow grotesquely on the wall. She sees that it assumes the outline of a fox; and she has her answer. The ignis fatuus floating over the swamp is the light of the fox going to a feast of witches. The rain falling in the sunshine is the foxes' wedding. And this common meteorological phenomenon is a favorite topic for illustration. It recalls a good story.

A certain white fox of high degree, and without a black hair upon him, sought and obtained the hand of a young female fox who was renowned for her personal beauty and her noble connections. The wedding was to be a grand affair; but, unhappily,

eyes half closed and his mouth wide open, is evidently singing an improper song. A couple of passing revelers dance to his music, for he accompanies himself on a sort of mandolin. Another drops a bit of coin into the musician's tray as he passes; and a couple of women, abashed at so much naughtiness, pause, and regard the scene curiously over the tops of the fans with which they hide their blushes. Then we have a votive bonfire in a grave-yard. It is cold, and the mourners, who warm their fingers by its cheerful blaze, are unconscious of the shadowy procession of lame, halt, and blind, who hover near the warmth. We barely see the vague outlines of these ghosts, printed in a tint so fine that they seem like "water-marks" in the fabric of the paper.

Here, too, we find a group of mice engaged in the rice trade. In his admirable work on Japan, M. Humbert, adopting this popular picture, calls it "The Rat Rice

Merchants." It is known in Japan as "The Hiding Place," and it gives us a glimpse into the imaginary doings of these pilferers from storehouses and barns. Below, a party of mice-porters are tugging at a sack of rice, the fruits of a night's foraging. Above, and at the left, the rice is packed in mats, and heaped up for storage, and on the stack sits an accountant with his bead reckoning-frame. The whole scene, with the porters staggering along under the weight of baskets of copper coin, principals examining their books, and customers waiting near by, is charmingly done. It is impossible not to admire the gentle humor with which this semblance of real life is pictured.

For obvious reasons, birds are not so available for purposes of caricature and airy fun as animals. The Japanese draughtsman is often puzzled to extract from the inexpressive countenances of the featured tribes that half-human gleam of intelligence with which he endows the beasts of the forest and the field. But the noble picture of a hawk, a spirited drawing in ink, which forms a frontispiece to an illustrated book on hawking, is a fair example of serious work of this sort. The book is called "A Picture Mirror of Hawking," and it is a panorama of the adventures of a hawking party, from the beginning of the hunt until the return at night. The noble pastime of hawking, or falconry, was peculiar to the feudal age in Japan, as it was to the medieval age of Europe. Marco Polo describes the fowling of Kublai Khan with "trained eagles," when that mighty personage, too lame with gout to travel in any other way, was borne to the hunt in a gold-incrusted chamber, carried on the backs of four elephants. The Emperors of Japan had less pretentious outfittings; but the book before me gives illustrations of the handsome trappings of one of these dignitaries, whose adventures furnish the material and title of the work.

Birds form a conspicuous feature in the more refined popular art of Japan, as they do in Japanese poetry. One of the native traditions of the origin of man is to the effect that the two divinities, previously alluded to as the primal pair of earth, were once standing on the bridge of Heaven, when a pair of wagtails, fluttering in the air, engaged their attention. Pleased by the amorous dalliance of these feathered lovers, the deities invented the art of love, which

art.

they took with them to the earth beneath. The subject is often found penciled or painted in the innumerable works of Japanese artists. Flowers and birds combine to form some of the happiest conceits of Oriental poetry and With these, in Japanese as in Persian verse, the poet woos or bewails, finds his sweetest solace and his purest joys. The Japanese song-writers make pictures in their verses, and these again find expression in the drawings which amuse and refine the commonest people of the Empire.

Japanese fans have made us familiar with all of the best-known varieties of flowers of Japan. Here we have the convolvulus, double and single pinks, azaleas, honeysuckle, fruit blossoms, and an inexhaustible sheaf of blooms unknown to American gardens. The bamboo, with its tender shoots, graceful stalks, and feathery foliage, is a favorite subject for pen and pencil. A rugged pine, which is sometimes dwarfed and grown in flower-pots, is another capital study for the draughtsman, and a combination of these two species of arboreal growth forms the title-page and frontispiece of one of the popular picture-books of Japan. This design, which we have borrowed for a frontispiece to this paper, fairly shows the lightness and grace which the native artist brings to his work, even when the product of his skill is not for the delectation of connoisseurs in high art, but for the fly-leaf of an humble book of drawings for "the million."

In the original print of this design, by the way, the title of the book was printed exactly as an ingenious home artist has designed our title, "Some Pictures from Japan," though it is needless to say that the original inscription was something quite different. A native Japanese student, attempting to read the imitation of Japanese printed in this design, gave it up as an unknown character, not being able to advance beyond the second letter of the last word, "a" in "Japan." This sign stands for " moon in Japanese writing. He had begun to read, of course, from right to left, down each column. When asked to try by reading, "English fashion," from left to right, he struck the meaning suddenly, and said, with infinite amusement: "Oh! that is what you call a sell!"

Fairy tales and stories of Buddhist mythology are the very first books put into the hands of the Japanese children. We may be sure that the picture-books, however, are early thumbed by the rising generation of the Empire of the Sun. The cheapest of these are printed on mulberry-bark paper in two tints from wooden blocks. How such delicate and thoroughly artistic work can be executed with such simple means our plate printers ought to discover. For example, in "The Feast of Abis-ko," herewith reproduced, the Japanese artist was given a soft but well-defined outline, filled in with black and two neutral tints, each so delicately