Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/68

 of one of the most famous of the thirty-three famous Kwannons of the empire, the great place of worship for the masses, and the centre of a Vanity Fair unequalled elsewhere. Every street leading to the temple grounds is a bazaar and merry fair, and theatres, side shows, booths, and tents, and all the devices to entrap the idle and the pleasure-seeking, beset the pilgrim on his way to the sanctuary. In florists’ gardens are shown marvels of floriculture, in their ponds swim gold-fish with wonderfully fluted tails, and in tall bamboo cages perch Tosa chickens with tail feathers ten and twelve feet long. Menageries draw the wondering rustics, and they pay their coppers for the privilege of toiling up a wood, canvas, and pasteboard Fujiyama to view the vast plain of the city lying all around it, and on timbered slopes enjoy tobogganing in midsummer. Penetrating to the real gate way, it is found guarded by giant Nio, whose gratings are spotted with the paper prayers that the worshipful have chewed into balls and reverently thrown there. If the paper wad sticks to the grating, it is a favorable omen, and the believer may then turn the venerable old prayer-wheel, and farther on put his shoulder to the bar, and by one full turn of the revolving library of Buddhist scriptures endow himself with all its intellectual treasure.

The soaring roof of the great temple is fitly shadowed by camphor-trees and cryptomeria that look their centuries of age, and up the broad flagging there passes the ceaseless train of believers. One buys corn and feeds the hundreds of pigeons, messengers of the gods, who live secure and petted by all the crowds in the great enclosure, or pays his penny to secure the release of a captive swallow, that flies back every night to its owner. At the foot of the steps the pilgrim begins to pray, and, ascending, mumbles his way to the altar. The colossal money-box, which is said to gather in over a thousand 52