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68 care the nurse examines the child’s head to see how the hair is coming on!

All this to make old lamps of new! and yet with mine own eyes have I seen ardent men and boys,—perhaps twenty of them,—under the direction of their head priest, scrub, with sand and soap and water, the stone torii and its two great guardian stone lanterns, just before the August matsuri at Hakone. It was a cruel blow to an artist friend, as well as to me, for we had begun a sketch of the beautiful trio, and had never done admiring the lovely silvery lichens that adorned them. But one swallow does not make a summer, and I will not believe that such a crime is often perpetrated in this age-venerating and art-loving land.

Although lanterns are primarily set up to give light, I should be wronging the reader who does not know Japan if I did not confess honestly the severe disappointment I suffered in them when I first went there—in that they are very seldom seen lighted. I have lived in close proximity to a lantern for months, in a pretty garden I know of, and while it invariably fitted in with its surroundings, in the spring giving the necessary relief to the flame-coloured Azaleas abloom at its foot, in the summer swayed over by splendid heads of