had
long scarlet locks hanging loose over their heads, and streaming down
their backs. Their faces were flushed as if by hard drinking, and their
pimpled noses resembled huge red barnacles. No sooner did they arrive at
the great earthen jar than they ranged themselves round it. The old ones
dipped out ladles full, and drank of the wine till they reeled. The
younger ones poured the liquor into cups and drank. Even the little
infants guzzled quantities of the yellow sake from the shallow cups of
very thin red-lacquered wood.

Then began the dance, and wild and furious it was. The leather-faced old
sots tossed their long reddish-grey locks in the air, and pirouetted
round the big sake jar. The younger ones of all ages clapped their hands,
knotted their handkerchiefs over their foreheads, waved their dippers or
cups or fans, and practiced all kinds of antics, while their scarlet hair
streamed in the wind or was blown in their eyes.

The dance over, they threw down their cups and dippers, rested a few
minutes and then took another heavy drink all around.

"Now to work" shouted an old fellow whose face was redder than his
half-bleached hair, and who having only two teeth like tusks left looked
just like an _oni_ (imp.) As for his wife, her teeth had long ago fallen
out and the skin of her face seemed to have added a pucker for every year
since a half century had rolled over her head.

Then Little Silver looked and saw them scatter. Some gathered shells and
burned them to make lime. Others carried water and made mortar, which
they thickened by a pulp made of paper, and a glue made by boiling fish
skin. Some dived under the sea for red coral, which they hauled up by
means of straw ropes, in great sprigs as thick as the branches of a tree.
They quickly ran up a scaffold, and while some of the scarlet-headed
plasterers smeared the walls, others below passed up the tempered mortar
on long shell shovels, to the hand mortar-boards. Even at work they had
casks and cups of sake at hand, while children played in the empty kegs
and licked the gummy sugar left in some of them.

"What is that house for?" asked Little Silver of the sailors.

"Oh, that is the Kura (storehouse) in which the King of the Sh[=o]ji
stores the treasures of life, and health, and happiness, and property,
which men throw away, or exchange for the sake, which he gives them, by
making funnels of themselves."

"Oh, Yes," said Little Silver to herself, as she rem