Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/164

150 with lights. They have stall-like extensions, encroaching upon the roadway, all of them piled up with astonishing sweetmeats of brilliant hues, toys, flowers, and hideously grotesque masks.

Aki is so attracted by the latter that we make scarcely any progress. Mousmé, who is getting impatient, makes a brilliant suggestion.

“Cy-reel, buy Aki a mask. He will never cease gazing at them or come along if you don’t. And we shall never reach the temple. No one can see my obi and dress here.”

I laugh quietly to myself at this last remark. The woman had popped out unwittingly.

I buy my little brother-in-law a most monstrous head. He is in raptures, and Mousmé and I are in convulsions of laughter at the hideous god into which little Aki is at once transformed. We get on famously