Learning that n festival was going on these days at the Kawakami temple, five or six miles off, at the foot of the hills, I decided to give an afternoon to it. Soaway we sped in rickshas down an avenue of ragged old cryptomerins. Strings of holiday-makers were on the road, little girls gorgeous as tropical butterflies, women soberer slate-greys, pot-hatted men, schoolboys in fiat Russian caps and voluminous pleated trousers widening downward like a petticoat.
The temple stood most picturesquely on wooded hillside, over @ broad, sandy river-bed crossed by an immense length of wooden bridge. Lines of tea-houses along the water-side were decked for the gala with fringes of cryptomeria and sprays of the yellow-blossomed yamabuki. Peep-shows, toy and sweet-stalls, crowded close to the temple steps. Here and there under the trees a black-toothed old woman invited you to sit upon a table (perhaps it would be more acctiruie to call it a raised floor) covered with a cheap red rug, and partake
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.