of Japanese
children is perhaps the prettiest sight on earth, and they themselves
are works of art, the beauty of which can scarcely be imagined. Each
head and each piquant face is but a field where the ever-present artist
can exercise his ingenuity and his skill in colour and design.
Deliberately the child's head and face are treated as subjects fit for
the most decorative of design, and the result, though quaint and formal
to the last degree, is invariably as pleasing as it is undoubtedly
startling and original. And the children themselves are no less full of
interest than their heads and faces are full of paint. I once saw a
pyramid of children gazing in at a sweet-stuff shop. They looked like
three children; but on closer inspection I discovered that one was a
doll looking about the age of a child of two, with its great head
lolling on the back of its mother, aged three. The three-year-old was a
boy, strapped to the back of his sister aged five. The doll and the
sister looked very sleepy and tired as they gazed vacantly at the rows
of tempting pink sugar-water bottles in the sweet-stuff shop; but what
arrested my attention was the alert and intelligent expression of the
three-year-old child in the middle, who, just as I took out my notebook
to sketch the group, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, holding
it between two chubby fingers, eyeing me with the peculiar introspective
look of the old hand as he both tests the excellence of the tobacco and
gives himself up to its enjoyment. As I sketched him he looked
composedly at me out of his big eyes, and posed twice without a particle
of artificiality--once with the cigarette in his mouth, and again as if
he had just taken it from his lips for a moment while he paid attention
to me.

[Illustration: A SUNNY STROLL]

I remember once passing a temple, an ancient Shinto temple called
"Kamogamo"; it was a sacred temple and very popular, being much
frequented for picnics. On this particular day there was going on one of
the two important picnics or festivals of the year; the great ground of
the temple and the playground were enclosed about with straw ropes on
bamboo poles, to separate one from another. It was a festival for girls
under ten, and there were hundreds of children, all with their kimonos
tucked up, showing their scarlet petticoats, and looking for all the
world like a mass of poppies. The scarlet in the petticoats was
universally repeated in neck and hair;