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108 the gunwale. If haply, the lawful order of precedence be at any time violated if, for instance, No. 5 be put into the water before No. 6, or No. 4 be placed above No. 2 the rumpus that forthwith arises in that family is a sight to see and a sound to hear.

"But all this while we have been drifting down, with the boats about us, to the lower end of the course, and are again abreast of Gifu, where the whole squadron is beached. As each cormorant is now taken out of the water, the master can tell by its weight whether it has secured enough supper while engaged in the hunt; failing which, he makes the deficiency good by feeding it with the inferior fish of the catch. At length all are ranged in their due order, facing outwards, on the gunwale of each boat. And the sight of that array of great ungainly sea-birds—shaking themselves, flapping their wings, gawing, making their toilets, clearing their throats, looking about them with a stare of stupid solemnity, and now and then indulging in old-maidish tiffs with their neighbours—is quite the strangest of its little class I have ever seen, except perhaps the wonderful penguinry of the Falkland Islands, whereat a certain French philosopher is said to have even wept. Finally, the cormorants are sent off to bed, and we ourselves follow suit."

 Cremation. Cremation followed Buddhism into Japan about A. D. 700, but never entirely superseded the older Shintō custom of disposing of the dead by interment. Ludicrous as it may appear, cremation was first discontinued in the case of the Mikados on the representations of a fishmonger named Hachibei, who clamoured for the interment of the Emperor Go-Kōmei in 1644. On the 18th July, 1873, cremation was totally prohibited by the Government, whose members seem to have had some confused notion as to the practice being un-European and therefore barbarous. Having discovered that far from being un-European, cremation was the goal of European reformers in such matters, they rescinded their prohibition only twenty-two months later (23rd