the wealthier classes is kept busily at work in school until he is ready to
go to the University, but among the poorer classes he often begins to work
for his living.

The clever work executed by most tiny children is a matter of wonder and
surprise to all European travellers. Little boys are found binding books,
making paper lanterns and painting them, making porcelain cups, winding
grass ropes which are hung along the house-fronts for the first week of the
year to prevent evil spirits from entering, weaving mats to spread over the
floors, and at a hundred other occupations. It is very amusing to watch
the practice of the little boys who are going to be dentists. In Japan the
dentist of the people fetches out an aching tooth with thumb and finger,
and will pluck it out as surely as any tool can do the work, so his pupils
learn their trade by trying to pull nails out of a board. They begin with
tin-tacks, and go on until they can, with thumb and finger, pluck out a
nail firmly driven into the wood.

Luckily for them, they often get a holiday. The Japanese have many
festivals, when parents and children drop their work to go to some famous
garden or temple for a day's pleasure. Then there is the great boys'
festival, the Feast of Flags, held on the fifth day of the fifth month. Of
this festival we shall speak again.

Every Japanese boy is taught that he owes the strictest duty to his parents
and to his Emperor. These duties come before all others in Japanese eyes.
Whatever else he may neglect, he never forgets these obligations. From
infancy he is familiar with stories in which children are represented as
doing the most extraordinary things and undergoing the greatest hardships
in order to serve their parents. There is one famous old book called
"Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Virtue." It gives instances of the doings