Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm.  And verily, this is enchantment; I am bewitched, by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—­apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats.  No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this.  And with the consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitation of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place, there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted.  But no! these gracious, silent, waving, weaving shapes are not of the Shadowy Folk, for whose coming the white fires were kindled:  a strain of song, full of sweet, clear quavering, like the call of a bird, gushes from some girlish mouth, and fifty soft voices join the chant:—­

    Sorota soroimashita odorikoga sorota,
    Soroikita, kita hare yukata.

“Uniform to view [as ears of young rice ripening in the field] all clad alike in summer festal robes, the company of dancers have assembled.”

Again only the shrilling of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence, with mesmeric lentor,—­with a strange grace, which by its very naivete, seems as old as the encircling hills.

Those who sleep the sleep of centuries out there, under the gray stones where the white lanterns are, and their fathers, and the fathers of their fathers’ fathers, and the unknown generations behind them, buried in cemeteries of which the place has been forgotten for a thousand years, doubtless looked upon a scene like this.  Nay! the dust stirred by those young feet was human life, and so smiled and so sang under this self-same moon, “with woven paces and with waving hands.”

Suddenly a deep male chant breaks the hush.  Two giants have joined the round, and now lead it, two superb young mountain peasants nearly nude, towering head and shoulders above the whole of the assembly.  Their kimono are rolled about their waists like girdles, leaving their bronzed limbs and torsos naked to the warm air; they wear nothing else save their immense straw hats, and white tabi, donned expressly for the festival.  Never before among these people saw I such men, such thews; but their smiling beardless faces are comely and kindly as those of Japanese boys.  They seem brothers, so like in frame, in movement, in the timbre of their voices, as they intone the same song:—­

    No demo yama demo ko wa umiokeyo,
    Sen ryo kura yori ko ga takara.

“Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters nothing:  more than a treasure of one thousand ryo, a baby precious is.”

And Jizo, the lover of children’s ghosts, smiles across the silence.

Souls close to nature’s Soul are these; artless and touching their thought, like the worship of that Kishibojin to whom wives pray.  And after the silence, the sweet thin voices of the women answer:—­