burning of incense and by actual
verbal invocation of Buddha. These religious ceremonies must be
attended to by the mother or wife. She it is who sets the rice and wine
before the ancestral tablets, who lights the little lamp each night, and
who sees that at each feast day and anniversary season the proper food
is prepared and set out for the household gods.

Upon the wife, and her attention to minute and apparently trifling
details, depends much of the well-being of the family. Each child, as it
grows toward maturity, gathers from various sources a collection of
amulets, which, while worn always when the child is in full dress, are
frequently too precious for ordinary play times and the risks and perils
of every-day life. These must be kept carefully by the mother as a
safeguard against the many evils that beset child-life. I have spoken of
the amulets given at the times of the _miya mairi_,--both the first,
when the name is given to the baby, and the subsequent visits made to
the temple by the children as they pass certain stated points in their
progress toward maturity. These amulets are simply written papers or
slips of wood with the seal of the temple from which they are issued
stamped upon them. Visits to noted temples by relatives and friends
often result in additions to the child's collection. One kind of charm
is good to keep the eyes strong; another will help its possessor to that
much-prized accomplishment, a good handwriting; another acts as an
assurance against accident and saves the child from harm in case of a
fall. All these are put together by the careful mother and preserved as
jealously as Queen Althea kept the charred stick that governed the
destiny of her son. As the children arrive at years of discretion, these
treasures pass out of the mother's faithful keeping into the hands of
their actual owners, and they are usually kept stored away in some
little-used drawer or cabinet until death removes the necessity for any
further safeguards over life. Perhaps of all the curious things that go
to make up these intimate personal belongings of a Japanese man or
woman, there is none more curious than the small white parcel containing
a portion of the umbilical cord,--saved at birth and preserved until
death that it may be buried with its possessor and furnish him the means
of a new birth. These little paper packages, each marked with the name
of the child to whom it belongs, are kept by the mother.

Upon t