for the middle dress into seven-or eight-fold dresses;' and
the dyer said, 'I am a dyer, and therefore I will dye and stretch it.
What pattern do you wish?' The merchant replied, 'The pattern of falling
snow and broken twigs, and in the centre the curved bridge of Gojo.'"

[Illustration: Girls' Ball and Counting Game.]

Then to fill up the rhyme come the words, "Chokin, chokera, kokin,
kokera," and the tale goes on: "Crossing this bridge the girl was struck
here and there, and the tea-house girls laughed. Put out of countenance
by this ridicule, she drowned herself in the river Karas, the body sunk,
the hair floated. How full of grief the husband's heart--now the ball
counts a hundred."

This they varied with another song:--

"One, two, three, four,
Grate hard charcoal, shave kiri wood;
Put in the pocket, the pocket is wet,
Kiyomadzu, on three yenoki trees
Were three sparrows, chased by a pigeon.
The sparrows said, 'Chiu, chiu,'
The pigeon said, 'po, po,'--now the
Ball counts a hundred."

The pocket referred to means the bottom of the long sleeve, which is apt
to trail and get wet when a child stoops at play. Kiyomadzu may mean a
famous temple that bears that name. Sometimes they would simply count
the turns and make a sort of game of forfeiting and returning the number
of rebounds kept up by each.

Yoshi-san had begun to think battledore and balls too girlish an
amusement. He preferred flying his eagle or mask-like kite, or playing
at cards, verses, or lotteries. Sometimes he played a lively game with
his father, in which the board is divided into squares and diagonals. On
these move sixteen men held by one player and one large piece held by
the second player. The point of the game is either that the holder of
the sixteen pieces hedges the large piece so it that can make no move,
or that the big piece takes all its adversaries. A take can only be made
by the large piece when it finds a piece immediately on each side of it
and a blank point beyond. Or he watched a party of several, with the
pictured sheet of Japanese backgammon before them, write their names on
slips of paper or wood, and throw in turn a die. The slips are placed on
the pictures whose numbers correspond with the throw. At the next round,
if the number thrown by the particular player is written on the picture,
he finds directions as to which picture to move his slip backward or
forward to. He may, however,