JAPANESE ART.
Some of our young ladies have a pretty art of constructing miniature
landscapes out of pebbles and mosses, strips of glistening paper for
brooks, little fuzzy pine sticks painted green for trees, and animals
and Swiss cottages from the toy-shop. Could these amateur artists once
see how the Japanese do this thing, they would abandon their mosses
and pebbles in despair. A late traveler in Japan says of one of these:
"It was a fairy-like landscape seen through a spy-glass reversed."
Some of the details were real trees dwarfed to pigmies by the art of
the Oriental florist. There were limpid lakes peopled with gold-fish;
grottos and summer-houses of exquisite finish draped with growing
verdure and large enough to shelter a small company of rabbits: lovely
walks winding through groves, lawns and by miniature parterres of
flowers, and finally, liliputian canals, spanned by elegant bridges
wide enough for the passage of a large rat.
* * * * *
Among the "Notes" in the New York _Nation_ of May 6th is the
following:
"In the new edition of Prescott's complete works (Lippincott) we have
remarked that the introduction to _Charles V.
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