Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/337

 leaves, that were soon dried enough to suffice for the home market.

Although secular occupations prosper, and Nara cutlery and ink rank high in public favor, the temple life of Nara is its real existence. Every day pilgrims and tourists passed before us in processions whose variety of people and costumes was endless. Yet in all the weeks the European coat and trousers only once appeared in those sacred aisles. Every morning two or more of the little red-robed priestesses came, hand in hand, to spend an hour or two beside my friend’s easel. The old priests, in their white gowns and purple skirts, were very courteous and hospitable, and as our stay lengthened we grew to feel ourselves a part of the sacred community. The little priestesses carried us to their homes to drink tea, and the priests brought their friends to watch the methods of the foreign artist. Among the sight-seers and visitors to the Shinto shrines and their guardians were many Budddhist priests, whose shaved heads and black or yellow gauze gowns made them conspicuous. The priests of the two faiths seemed to fraternize and to treat each other with the greatest consideration. Their speech, as we heard it, was always so formal, so gentle, and so loaded with honorifics and the set phrases of politeness that there could never have been any theological controversies. A few Buddhist nuns, also, made pilgrimage to Kasuga's ancient groves; creatures unfeminine and unbeautiful enough in appearance to be saintly in the extreme. They wear white kimonos under gauze coats, with a skirt plaited to the edge of them—the same costume that priests wear—and they shave their heads with the same remorseless zeal. These bald-headed women give one a strange sensation, for in the absence of their dusky tresses their eyes appear too prominent, and it is easy to perceive an unnatural, snaky glitter in them. There are several nunneries near Nara and one 321