care the nurse examines the child’s head to see how the hair is coming on!
All this to make old lamps of new! and yet with mine own eyes have I seen ardent men and boys,—perhaps twenty of them,—under the direction of their head priest, scrub, with sand and soap and water, the stone torii[1] and its two great guardian stone lanterns, just before the August matsuri[2] at Hakone. It was a cruel blow to an artist friend, as well as to me, for we had begun a sketch of the beautiful trio, and had never done admiring the lovely silvery lichens that adorned them. But one swallow does not make a summer, and I will not believe that such a crime is often perpetrated in this age-venerating and art-loving land.[3]
Although lanterns are primarily set up to give light, I should be wronging the reader who does not know Japan if I did not confess honestly the severe disappointment I suffered in them when I first went there—in that they are very seldom seen lighted. I have lived in close proximity to a lantern for months, in a pretty garden I know of, and while it invariably fitted in with its surroundings, in the spring giving the necessary relief to the flame-coloured Azaleas abloom at its foot, in the summer swayed over by splendid heads of
