a corresponding anniversary for boys. Owing to its sex, the latter
is the greater event of the two, and in consequence of its most
conspicuous feature is styled the festival of fishes. The fishes
are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six feet in length,
tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and tipped with
a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the tail enable
the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about horizontally,
swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after the manner
of a living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are set
up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born during
the year. On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into
eighty square miles of aquarium.

For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon
everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such
substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although
exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to
self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend
inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the
community.

It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact,
it is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply
made a cat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction,
entered into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage
brokers. In it he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge
for being thus bartered out of what might be the better half of his