with a family crest, or with symbolic carvings. In front of a tomb of the
humblest class, having no mizutame, water is placed in cups or other
vessels,-- for the dead must have water. Flowers also must be offered to
them; and before every tomb you will find a pair of bamboo cups, or other
flower-vessels; and these, of course, contain water. There is a well in the
cemetery to supply water for the graves. Whenever the tombs are visited by
relatives and friends of the dead, fresh water is poured into the tanks and
cups. But as an old cemetery of this kind contains thousands of mizutame,
and tens of thousands of flower-vessels the water in all of these cannot be
renewed every day. It becomes stagnant and populous. The deeper tanks
seldom get dry;-- the rainfall at Tokyo being heavy enough to keep them
partly filled during nine months out of the twelve.


Well, it is in these tanks and flower-vessels that mine enemies are born:
they rise by millions from the water of the dead;-- and, according to
Buddhist doctrine, some of them may be reincarnations of those very dead,
condemned by the error of former lives to the condition of Jiki-ketsu-gaki,
or blood-drinking pretas... Anyhow the malevolence of the Culex fasciatus
would justify the suspicion that some wicked human soul had been compressed
into that wailing speck of a body...



Now, to return to the subject of kerosene-oil, you can exterminate the
mosquitoes of any locality by covering with a film of kerosene all stagnant
water surfaces therein. The larvae die on rising to breathe; and the adult
females perish when they approach the water to launch their rafts of eggs.
And I read, in Dr. Howard's book, that the actual cost of freeing from
mosquitoes one American town of fifty thousand inhabitants, does not exceed