Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/345

 care and restoration, started a fund for that purpose, and himself took in charge the rehabilitation of one precious old screen. Many valuable paintings, tattered, mouldered, and mildewed almost to extinction, were thereby rescued. Four other contributors have since subscribed generous amounts to this fund, all of whom, by strange coincidence, were from Boston.

On a hill back of the main sanctuaries is a most curious octagonal temple, filled with the votive offerings of those who have been restored to health, or received other answers to prayer. The outside walls are half-hidden by the hundreds of six-inch-square boards, upon which are painted the suffering pilgrims who have been cured, and a ledge is heaped high with awls, the conventional offering of the deaf whose hearing has been restored. Locks of hair, short swords, daggers, steel mirrors, and devices in coins are hung on the doors. The circular altar within the stone-floored temple, containing many old statues and sacred images, has its base completely plated with overlapping sword-guards, short swords, and little steel mirrors. Helmets and bits of armor are everywhere, and the long shell hair-pins of Japanese women have been offered in such numbers that, woven together with silk cords into curtains or screens, they hang like banners before and beside the altars. All around the walls and over the rafters, as far up into the darkness as one can see, hang short swords, ranged closely side by side, overlapping mirrors, guards, bows, arrows, curious weapons and pieces of armor, coins, and hair-pins. Near this extraordinary place is a nunnery, where a family of holy women have the shaved heads and disfiguring garments of priests, their altars and images, their daily service, and the same routine of life in every way.

Rounding the last spur of hills and crossing a broad river, the road reaches the great Osaka plain, lying in a broad semicircle between the mountains and the shores 329