Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/336

 the journey for months and often years, feel it to be a solemn and sanctified service. It is pathetic to see their faces glowing and their eyes filled with tears at the fine spectacle that is so rare an event in their lives, and which crowns their summer pilgrimage to the old shrines of their faith.

the last week of June, the proprietor of the tea field beneath our veranda conducted a second picking of his stumpy little bushes. From sunrise until dusk rose a chorus of children’s voices beyond the hedge. The first and best crop having been gathered weeks earlier with the first fire-flies, this hubbub accompanied only the gleaning after the harvesters. It was a pretty picture in the foreground of the magnificent view—these little blue and white figures in huge wash bowl hats, with touches of bright red here and there in their costumes. The headman sat comfortably under a fig-tree, with no clothing to speak of, smoked his pipe, and watched the youngsters at work. When they toiled up to him with full baskets, he weighed the load with a rude steelyard and sent them back, so that some of the tea-pickers were always moving up and down the paths between the compact rows of bushes, and grouped about the patriarch under the fig-tree. The leaves were spread in the sun all day and carried off at night in large sacks and baskets. Walking out through the woods one day, with two little red-gowned priestesses from the Kasuga temple, we came upon a tiny village, and there found the same tea-leaves being toasted in shallow paper-lined baskets over charcoal fires. The attendants rubbed and tossed the  320