Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/86

70. The ladder measured fifteen feet in length, the rungs being about a Japanese foot, fifteen inches of our feet, apart; doubtless such distance being found in practice the most comfortable. After securely tying on the swords, blades up, the priests departed to dress for the function.

Meanwhile a capital pantomime was in progress upon the dancing-stage. A dance-hall is an invariable feature of every well-appointed Shintō temple, and is put in play on every possible occasion. The performers are sometimes girls, sometimes men, the former doing the serious dancing and the latter the jocose mimes. Both are always capital, and on this occasion I think the show outdid itself. Certainly it proved comic enough to keep the religious in roars. Three buffoons in fine pudding-faced masks engaged in turn in an altercation with an impressive gray-beard. The altercation was of an intermittent character owing to the necessity felt by the pudding-faced citizen of taking the audience into his confidence by elaborate asides of side-splitting simplicity, digressions which in no wise prevented the row's proper emotional increase, till at