180 On the Campus 



plums at all; they are not even anything like plums; 

 some are the fruits of an ancient conifer, and represent 

 perhaps a one-seeded cone. They are Ginkgo berries. 

 They have persimmons which are a cultivated variety of 

 a species akin to ours; but in the western world few 

 people eat persimmons and none attempt their cultiva- 

 tion. The Japanese also has his own vegetables, his own 

 grains, chiefly millet and rice, the use of which he shares 

 with his cousin, the Chinaman ; these brown men discov- 

 ered both. 



But the most wonderful triumph of the little brown 

 man is not in his fruits, he has on his "tight little 

 island " small room for fruit but in his flowers. No 

 cultivated flowers of the world surpass those of Japan. 

 Think of your chrysanthemum, the pearly white, the 

 silken violet or purple, the perfect gold; think of your 

 roses, the crimson rambler, the yellow climber, the weich- 

 urian creeper; think of your flowering plums that fruit 

 not, your flowering cherries, that never bear, your flow- 

 ering apples, without pomes, flowering quince all these 

 are the responses the plant world of Japan has made to 

 the homely little gardeners that for centuries have moved 

 in and out amid the forests and meadows of Nippon. 

 Every dooryard in Japan, small though it be, is filled 

 with shrubs that bloom ; and when in April the blossoms 

 come, the whole world as we know goes into ecstasies, 

 celebrating out of doors the feast of flowers; not the 

 formal easter of our western coldness, the advent of 

 spring, the revival of life wherein we hardly dare fore- 

 cast a life to be ; but the feast of life that really blooms, 

 wherein life not only returns again but returns in pur- 



