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170
HONDA THE SAMURAI.
baked and fried fish, sake*, cakes, rice, hard-boiled
eggs, pickles, and all sorts of portable and outdoor
refreshments, the eating being interspersed with
song, jest, and dance. By the first day
of the
seventh month the temples were gayly adorned.
The priests set up their huge, long pole-banners,
decorated their grounds with flags and lanterns, and
gave their great free lunches or dinners of rice and
radishes to visiting companies of devotees coming
from a distance. About this time also the famous
makers of day fire-works entertained the people
with their exhibition on the parade-ground or pleasure
meadow. In a huge wooden mortar, like an
upright cannon, made of the hollowed trunk of a
tree bound round with bamboo hoops, a cartridge
was dropped looking like a foot of round log
sawed off and wrapped in paper. Fired off, it flew
into the air a few hundred feet and exploded into
something surprising and usually funny. Out of
the black cloud of dust that stained the air for a
few seconds would be seen shooting lines that
formed a gigantic spider, a monkey blowing little
balloons out of its mouth, an enormous cuttle-fish,
a tailless cat chasing three or four scampering mice,
a fox coming out of a tea-kettle, an old woman
hobbling on a stick, or a nest full of rats upset.
Many other familiar pictures rested a few moments
in the quiet air, printed in black and red against the
blue ether. As each scene became visible the chil-
dren, quick to recognize the subject, became uproariously
happy. Indeed, all seemed to be children
in their fullness of joy and flow of aniniiil spirits.