I remember once passing a temple, an ancient Shinto temple called “Kamogamo”; it was a sacred temple and very popular, being much frequented for picnics. On this particular day there was going on one of the two important picnics or festivals of the year; the great ground of the temple and the playground were enclosed about with straw ropes on bamboo poles, to separate one from another. It was a festival for girls under ten, and there were hundreds of children, all with their kimonos tucked up, showing their scarlet petticoats, and looking for all the world like a mass of poppies. The scarlet in the petticoats was universally repeated in neck and hair; but their kimonos varied much, and were of almost every shade and texture of Japanese cloth and silk crepe imaginable. There were luminous greens, fawns, stripes, golden browns shading into lemon-yellows, harmonies in brown and violet, and dresses striped and chequered in tones of almost every conceivable value. Two rows or armies of these girls were placed several yards distant from each other in this long emerald-green field; and in the space between them stood two servants, each holding a long bamboo pole, fresh and green, being evidently just cut down for the fair, and suspending from its top a flat shallow drum covered with tissue paper. Presently two young men teachers appeared on the scene carrying two baskets of small many-coloured balls, which they threw down on the grass between the children and the drums. Then a signal was given, and all the girls started running down the field at full tilt towards one another, pouncing on the balls as they ran, and throwing them with all their force up at the paper drums. The great majority of them missed their aim altogether, and flew either above or below the drums, some of the mites getting so excited that they threw the balls forty or fifty yards in mid air. After a time, when a perfect shower of balls had passed through the tissue drums, quite demolishing them, a shower of coloured papers, miniature lanterns, paper umbrellas, and flags came slowly fluttering down among the children on to their jet-black bobbing heads, and into their eager outstretched hands. Never have I seen anything more beautiful than these gay, brightly-clad people, packed closely together like a cluster of flowers in the brilliant sparkling sunshine, with their pretty upturned faces watching the softly falling rain of coloured toys. I strolled through the temple grounds, passed this brilliant stream of colour and lovely laughing children, passed the cherry-trees and dainty tea-houses, and in a few minutes found myself in a cool grey-green forest of bamboo, an academic bamboo grove looking like a pillared temple, sunless and silent. It was here that the philosophers of old taught and meditated, and it seemed a place to meditate in—so quiet, so sombre, shut off from the world with its endless lofty pillars of grey luminous green—silent, a world apart.
THE CHILD AND THE UMBRELLA
WORKERS