Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/192

162 complied, repeating "Namu Amida Butsu," "I adore thee, O Eternal Buddha," in the hope that their god would understand that his claim to adoration by barbarian lips lay in the kind memorial offices which his faith inspired. Many of the graves lay so far apart that we had crossed two valleys and found ourselves some miles from home at the luncheon-hour of noon. So we entered the nearest tea-house and were served with tea and sweet cakes. As the proprietor had a small stock of sacred images for sale, I bought for a souvenir of the day two clay foxes with tails gilded at the tip, the snarling door-keepers of the rice-goddess; but Inari must have rejected in anger my mock homage, for three weeks later in a carefully packed yanagori I grieved to find chaotic "fragments of no more a" fox.

That afternoon I remarked an unusual stir and clatter of small feet below my balcony. Crowds of children, on foot or slung behind the patient backs of mother or elder sister, were making their way to the large school-house, which stood a few yards beyond and below the southern entrance of the hotel. It being holiday time, I had never seen any of the scholars, and the sole occupant of the spacious playground was a weather-beaten stone effigy of Jizō in a red cotton night-cap and yellow bib. This wet saint (nure-botoke) as the Japanese laughingly call such unhoused divinities, had always excited my sympathy, for there he stood without his five companions' society, exposed to rain and wind, disregarded even by the very infants whose patron saint he is considered to be. At any rate, I could see no pious heap of pebbles laid on his knees, though the neglectful little ones would be glad enough, on reaching the dry bed of the