"Why, those are not horrible," I answered. “We think those drawings very good."

"But the faces! There cannot really be such faces in the world."

"We think those are ordinary men. Really horrible faces we very seldom draw."

He stared in surprise, evidently suspecting that I was not in earnest.

To a little girl of eleven I showed some engravings representing famous European beauties.

"They do not look bad," was her comment. "But they seem so much like men, and their eyes are so big! ... Their mouths are pretty."

The mouth signifies a great deal in Japanese physiognomy, and the child was in this regard appreciative. I then showed her some drawings from life, in a New York periodical. She asked, "Is it true that there are people like those pictures ?"

"Plenty," I said.

"Those are good, common faces,

-mostly country folk, farmers."

"Farmers! They are like Oni (demons) from the

jigoku (Buddhist hell).”

"No," I answered, "there is nothing very bad in those faces. We have faces in the West very much worse."

"Only to see them," she exclaimed, "I should die! I do not like this book."

I set before her a Japanese picture-book,—a book of views of the Tokaido. She clapped her hands joyfully, and pushed my half-inspected foreign magazine out of the way.

VI.

NINGYO-NO-HAKA.

MANYEMON had coaxed the child indoors, and made her eat. She appeared to be about eleven years old, intelligent, and pathetically docile. Her name was Iné, which means "springing rice"; and her frail slimness made the name seem appropriate.

When she began, under Manyemon's gentle persuasion, to tell her story, I anticipated something queer from the accompanying change in her voice. She spoke in a high thin sweet tone, perfectly even,- a tone changeless and unemotional as the chanting of the little kettle over its charcoal bed. Not unfrequently in Japan one may hear a girl or a woman utter something touching or cruel or terrible in just such a steady, level, penetrating tone, but never anything indifferent. It always means that feeling is being kept under control.

"There were six of us at home," said Iné,-"mother and father and father's mother, who was very old, and my brother and myself, and a little sister.

Father was

a hyōguya, a paper-hanger: he papered sliding-screens and also mounted kakemono. Mother was a hair-dresser. My brother was apprenticed to a seal-cutter.

"Father and mother did well: mother made even more money than father. We had good clothes and good food; and we never had any real sorrow until father fell sick.

"It was the middle of the hot season. Father had always been healthy: we did not think that his sickness was dangerous, and he did not think so himself. But the very next day he died. We were very much surprised. Mother tried to hide her heart, and to wait upon her customers as before. But she was not very strong, and the pain of father's death came too quickly. Eight days after father's funeral mother also died. It was so sudden that everybody wondered. Then the neighbours told us that we must make a ningyo-no-haka at once, or else there would be another death in our house. My brother said they were right; but he put off doing what they told him. Perhaps he did not

have money enough, I do not know; but the haka was

"What is a ningyō-no-haka?" I interrupted.

"I think," Manyemon made answer, "that you have seen many ningyō-no-haka without knowing what they were; they look just like graves of children. It is believed that when two of a family die in the same year, a third also must soon die. There is a saying, Always three graves. So when two out of one family have been buried in the same year, a third grave is made next to the graves of those two, and in it is put a coffin containing only a little figure of straw,-wara-ningvō; and over that grave a small tombstone is set up, bearing a kaimyō.* The priests of the temple to which the graveyard belongs write the kaimyō for these little gravestones. By making a ningyō-no-haka it is thought that a death may be prevented. We listen for the rest, Iné."

The child resumed:

*The posthumous Buddhist name of the person buried is

chiselled upon the tomb or haka.