Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/224

190 prayer. Drawing nearer, we noticed that the man was weeping and the woman held in her hands a baby's kimono of brightly coloured material, which soon after she handed to the priest with a few copper coins. He took the garment, folded it carefully, and placed it on a shelf. Then, raising our eyes from the personages in this pathetic scene, we observed for the first time the chapel itself. The altar bore no image of Buddha flanked by gilt lotus or vases of natural flowers, but from cloth to ceiling it was covered with a bewildering pyramid of dead toys. Almond-eyed mannikins and stiff-jointed maidens, dolls of all classes, richly or penuriously dressed, seemed to stretch imploring arms and to fix hallucinating eyes on the beholder; drums and trumpets, paper ships and indiarubber balls, masks and picture-books and rattles—all the motley companions of vanished children were huddled together like contorted imps in a chaotic pantomime. Massed and motionless in the twilight of their recess, they had the air of dead things—the shells and figments of faithful toys, whose spirits had followed the babies' souls to paradise, that the little hands which had clasped them night and day in "this miserable, fleeting world" might not be quite comfortless in their strange new nursery. The lesson would not be lost on heartbroken mothers who parted here from their own most cherished hopes more fragile than these brittle playthings. The roof was hung, the side shelves were piled, with tiny dresses, pendent or folded; and, most curious of all, the bell-rope, that summoned Shotoku Taishi, the saintly prince, to conduct the dead infants to God was strung with overlapping woollen bibs—yellow and red and green—the clumsy counterparts, these, of aureoles. But while