A JAPANESE MEDLEY 139 



So we came presently to the spot where the sacred 

 ceremony of cutting the deer's horns was to take 

 place, and to the stone palisade. 



The origin of the rite I could not discover ; it 

 was old every one agreed, but precisely how old no 

 one seemed to know, perhaps the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century. The crowd became thicker and 

 a network of bamboo scaffolding showed through the 

 trees. Suddenly in our midst appeared a debased 

 and wild-eyed stag. Ichabod ! his glory had de- 

 parted, for from his skull where branching antlers 

 should have lent him pride were naught but two 

 white shining discs surmounting the burr. The crowd 

 laughed, and, feeling his shame yet greater, he gave a 

 leap and disappeared among the trees. Then through 

 a gate, where smiling officials in badly-made frock- 

 coats took tickets, and up a slippery bamboo ladder 

 to a narrow platform some ten feet above the ground. 

 It formed one side of an enclosure, three hundred 

 feet long by forty wide, or thereabouts. At either 

 end was a matting-covered opening; above each a 

 raised dais. One was occupied by two Shinto priests 

 in full canonicals ; the other was empty. 



In the arena were a score or so of men, clad in 

 blue with yellow cloths about their heads. Con- 

 ventionalised antlers, worked in white, adorned their 

 coats, and in their hands were rope nets strung on 

 frames of bamboo. With these they captured the 

 deer, entangling the beasts' horns in the nets as they 

 rushed past. 



