The men, on the other hand, wear many a pot hat, pompously added to the long national robe, and giving thereby a finishing touch to their cheerful ugliness, resembling nothing so much as dancing monkeys.  They carry boughs in their hands, whole shrubs, even, amidst the foliage of which dangle all sorts of curious lanterns in the shape of imps and birds.

As we advance in the direction of the temple, the streets become more noisy and crowded.  All along the houses are endless stalls raised on trestles, displaying sweetmeats of every color, toys, branches of flowers, nosegays, and masks.  There are masks everywhere, boxes full of them, carts full of them; the most popular being the one that represents the livid and cunning muzzle, contracted as by a deathlike grimace, the long straight ears, sharp-pointed teeth of the white fox, sacred to the God of Rice.  There are also others symbolic of gods or monsters, livid, grimacing, convulsed, with wigs and beards of natural hair.  All manner of folk, even children, purchase these horrors, and fasten them over their faces.  Every sort of instrument is for sale, amongst them many of those crystal trumpets which sound so strangely,—­this evening they are enormous, six feet long at least,—­and the noise they make is unlike anything ever heard before:  one would say gigantic turkeys gobbling amongst the crowd, and striving to inspire fear.

In the religious amusements of this people it is not possible for us to penetrate the mysteriously hidden meaning of things; we cannot divine the boundary at which jesting stops and mystic fear steps in.  These customs, these symbols, these masks, all that tradition and atavism have jumbled together in the Japanese brain, proceed from sources utterly dark and unknown to us; even the oldest records fail to explain them to us in anything but a superficial and cursory manner, simply because we have absolutely nothing in common with this people.  We pass in the midst of their mirth and their laughter without understanding the wherefore, so totally does it differ from our own.

* * * * *

Chrysantheme with Yves, Oyouki with me, Fraise and Zinia, our cousins, walking before us under our watchful eye, slowly move through the crowd, holding each others’ hands lest we should lose one another.

All along the streets leading to the temple, the wealthy inhabitants have decorated the fronts of their houses with a quantity of vases and nosegays.  The peculiar shed-like buildings habitual in this country, with their open platform frontage, are particularly well suited for the display of choice objects; all the houses have been thrown open, and the interiors are hung with draperies that hide the back of the apartments.  In front of these hangings and slightly standing back from the movement of the passing crowd, the various exhibited articles are methodically placed in a row, under the full glare of hanging lamps.  Hardly