We follow, drifting with the surging crowd, borne along by it.  There are groups of women of every age, decked out in their smartest clothes, crowds of mousmes with aigrettes of flowers in their hair, or little silver topknots like Oyouki—­pretty little physiognomies, little, narrow eyes peeping between their slits like those of new-born kittens, fat, pale, little cheeks, round, puffed-out, half-opened lips.  They are pretty, nevertheless, these little Nipponese, in their smiles and childishness.

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, amid the foliage of which dangle all sorts of curious lanterns in the shapes 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 and 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, among 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 were gobbling amid the crowd, 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 can not 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 through the midst of their mirth and their laughter without understanding the wherefore, so totally do they differ from our own.

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