f the day. The crowds kept on shifting and
mingling like ants on an ant-hill.

Enjoyment, rather than piety, was the prevailing spirit; for this was
one of the few annual holidays of the industrious Tokyo artisan.

In the central buildings, five feet above this noisy confluence of
people, where the golden images of the Buddhas are enthroned, the
mitred priests with their copes of gold-embroidered brown were
performing the rituals of their order. To right and left of the high
altar, the canons squatting at their red-lacquered praying-desks, were
reciting the _sutras_ in strophe and antistrophe. Clouds of incense
rose.

In the adjoining building an earnest young preacher was exhorting a
congregation of elderly and somnolent ladies to eschew the lusts of
the flesh and to renounce the world and its gauds, marking each point
in his discourse with raps of his fan. Foxy-faced satellites of the
abbey were doing a roaring trade in charms against various accidents,
and in sacred scrolls printed with prayers or figures of Nichiren.

The temple-yard was an immense fancy fair. The temple pigeons wheeled
disconsolately in the air or perched upon the roofs, unable to find
one square foot of the familiar flagstones, where they were used to
strut and peck. Stalls lined the stone pathways and choked the spaces
between the buildings. Merchants were peddling objects of piety,
sacred images, charms and rosaries; and there were flowers for the
women's hair, and toys for the children, and cakes and biscuits,
_biiru_ (beer) and _ramune_ (lemonade) and a distressing sickly drink
called "champagne cider" and all manner of vanities. In one corner of
the square a theatre was in full swing, the actors making up in
public on a balcony above the crowd, so as to whet their curiosity and
attract their custom. Beyond was a cinematograph, advertised by lurid
paintings of murders and apparitions; and farther on there was a
circus with a mangy zoo.

The crowd was astonishingly mixed. There were prosperous merchants of
Tokyo with their wives, children, servants and apprentices. There were
students with their blue and white spotted cloaks, their _kepis_ with
the school badge, and their ungainly stride. There were modern young
men in _y[=o]fuku_ (European dress), with panama hats, swagger canes
and side-spring shoes, supercilious in attitude and proud of their
unbelief. There were troops of variegated children, dragging at
their elders' hands or kimonos