asting with sleds, building snow-forts
and fighting mimic battles with snow-balls, they make many kinds of
images and imitations of what they see and know. In America the boy's
snow-man is a Paddy with a damaged hat, clay pipe in mouth, and the
shillelah in his hand. In Japan the snow-man is an image of Daruma.
Daruma was one of the followers of Shaka (Buddha) who, by long
meditation in a squatting position, lost his legs from paralysis and
sheer decay. The images of Daruma are found by the hundreds in
toy-shops, as tobacconists' signs, and as the snow-men of the boys.
Occasionally the figure of Geiho, the sage with a forehead and skull so
high that a ladder was required to reach his pate, or huge cats and the
peculiar-shaped dogs seen in the toy-shops, take the place of Daruma.

[Illustration: Daruma, the Snow-Image.]

Many of the amusements of the children in-doors are mere imitations of
the serious affairs of adult life. Boys who have been to the theatre
come home to imitate the celebrated actors, and to extemporize mimic
theatricals for themselves. Feigned sickness and "playing the doctor,"
imitating with ludicrous exactness the pomp and solemnity of the real
man of pills and powders, and the misery of the patient, are the
diversions of very young children. Dinners, tea-parties, and even
weddings and funerals, are imitated in Japanese children's plays.

Among the ghostly games intended to test the courage of, or perhaps to
frighten children, are two plays called respectively, the "One Hundred
Stories" and "Soul-Examination." In the former play, a company of boys
and girls assemble round the hibachi, while they or an adult, an aged
person or a servant, usually relate ghost stories, or tales calculated
to straighten the hair and make the blood crawl. In a distant dark room,
a lamp (the usual dish of oil) with a wick of one hundred strands or
piths, is set. At the conclusion of each story, the children in turn
must go to the dark room and remove a strand of the wick. As the lamp
burns down low the room becomes gloomy and dark, and the last boy, it is
said, always sees a demon, a huge face, or something terrible. In
"Soul-Examination," a number of boys during the day plant some flags in
different parts of a graveyard, under a lonely tree, or by a haunted
hill-side. At night they meet together and tell stories about ghosts,
goblins, devils, etc., and at the conclusion of each tale, when the
imagination is wrought up, t