A Servant of Satan: Romantic Career of Prado the Assassin — page 137: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

_ line the magnificent fifty-mile avenue which leads up to the sacred shrines of ‘*‘ Nikko.” The object which the Japanese - A SERVANT OF SATAN. : 129 The young man appreciated these little excursions into the country all the more since, with commendable caution, Madame Van der Beck had insisted that all the female ser- vants employed in the house should be married women. In | order to realize what this meant, it must be explained that on their wedding-day, the Japanese wives are obliged by custom and tradition to shave off their eyebrows and to stain their teeth a brilliant black, so that their husbands may have no further grounds for jealousy. ‘Their appearance is therefore scarcely prepossessing. | Nina, more and more embittered by her lover’s ever- increasing indifference, lost much of her former good humor and cheerfulness. She spent the whole day brooding alone in the gardens which surrounded her villa. These were laid out with much ingenuity and artistic feeling by one of | the most famous Japanese landscape gardeners. Miniature rivers traversed the ground in every direction, spanned by miniature bridges, and with miniature temples and pagodas on their banks. ‘T‘here were also miniature waterfalls, min- iature junks, and even miniature trees, the latter being especially curious. By some method which has been kept a profound secret by the great guild of horticulturists at Tokio, trees even two hundred and three hundred years old have been treated in such a manner as to stunt their growth and to prevent them from attaining a height of more than two or, at the most, three feet. ‘Their trunks are gnarled and twisted by age, but there is no trace of the pruning- knife, and they constitute an exact représentation in minia- ture of the grand old sycamore, oak, and cedar trees which have in view in thus stunting the growth of certain classes of their trees is the fact that owing to the want of space the inhabitants of cities are obliged to content themselves with very small gardens. In order to make these appear larger Gomichboo €o a) “S mn