Here on a street corner squats a blue-robed boy behind a low wooden
table, selling wooden boxes about as big as match-boxes, with red paper
hinges. Beside the piles of these little boxes on the table are shallow
dishes filled with clear water, in which extraordinary thin flat shapes
are floating--shapes of flowers, trees, birds, boats, men, and women.
Open a box; it costs only two cents. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper,
are bundles of little pale sticks, like round match-sticks, with pink
ends. Drop one into the water, it instantly unrolls and expands into the
likeness of a lotus-flower. Another transforms itself into a fish. A
third becomes a boat. A fourth changes to an owl. A fifth becomes a tea-
plant, covered with leaves and blossoms. . . . So delicate are these
things that, once immersed, you cannot handle them without breaking
them. They are made of seaweed.

'Tsukuri hana!--tsukuri-hana-wa-irimasenka?' The sellers of artificial
flowers, marvellous chrysanthemums and lotus-plants of paper, imitations
of bud and leaf and flower so cunningly wrought that the eye alone
cannot detect the beautiful trickery. It is only right that these should
cost much more than their living counterparts.

6

High above the thronging and the clamour and the myriad fires of the
merchants, the great Shingon temple at the end of the radiant street
towers upon its hill against the starry night, weirdly, like a dream--
strangely illuminated by rows of paper lanterns hung all along its
curving eaves; and the flowing of the crowd bears me thither. Out of the
broad entrance, over a dark gliding mass which I know to be heads and
shoulders of crowding worshippers, beams a broad band of yellow light;
and before reaching the lion-guarded steps I hear the continuous