ecessarily elaborate; callers bring fruit of the season, cake, or
any delicacy, and a visit to a sick person must be accompanied by
something appropriate. Children visiting in the family are always given
toys, and for this purpose a stock is kept on hand. The present-giving
culminates at the close of the year, when all friends and acquaintances
exchange gifts of more or less value, according to their feelings and
means. Should there be any one who has been especially kind, and to whom
return should be made, this is the time to do so.

Tradesmen send presents to their patrons, scholars to teachers, patients
to their physicians, and, in short, it is the time when all obligations
and debts are paid off, in one way or another. On the seventh day of
the seventh month, there is another general interchange of presents,
although not so universal as at the New Year. It can easily be imagined
that all this present-giving entails much care, especially in families
of influence; and it must be attended to personally by the wife, who, in
the secret recesses of her storeroom, skillfully manages to rearrange
the gifts received, so that those not needed in the house may be sent,
not back to their givers, but to some place where a present is due. The
passing-on of the presents is an economy not of course acknowledged, but
frequently practiced even in the best families, as it saves much of the
otherwise ruinous expense of this custom.

As time passes by, occasional visits are paid by the young wife to her
own parents or to other relatives. At stated times, too, she, and others
of the family, will visit the tombs of her husband's ancestors, or of
her own parents, if they are no longer living, to make offerings and
prayers at the graves, to place fresh branches of the _sakaki_[18]
before the tombs, and to see that the priests in charge of the cemetery
have attended to all the little things which the Japanese believe to be
required by the spirits of the dead. Even these visits are often looked
forward to as enlivening the monotony of the humdrum home life.
Sometimes all the members of the family go together on a pleasure
excursion, spending the day out of doors, in beautiful gardens, when
some one of the much-loved flowers of the nation is in its glory; and
the little wife may join in this pleasure with the rest, but more often
she is the one who remains at home to keep the house in the absence of
others. The theatre, too, a source of great