1898.] ESSAYS. 95 



and put it away in a casli until it becomes so strong that it 

 would drive you out of the house. 



Here is a Japanese farmer threshing barley. You notice that 

 this man takes a sheaf of barley and pounds it upon a wooden 

 block. Here is a Japanese girl reading. Her head o-ear is 

 something enormous. Here are some Japanese wrestlers. They 

 are lusty fellows and although they look very plump and fat it 

 is all muscle. This is one of the greatest amusements. The 

 wrestlers come in, thirty or forty on a side, and as soon as one 

 falls another jumps up to take his place, and so they keep going 

 and coming. The practice of wrestling is hundreds of years 

 old and it is not considered disgraceful to be a wrestler. They 

 often wrestle before the emperor himself. 



You can always tell the widows in Japan by their short 

 cropped hair. One of the empresses of Japan, when she took 

 a husband, made a vow that she would abstain from worldly 

 pleasures. She blackened her teeth and pulled out her eye- 

 brows, and this practice became the custom for married women. 



Here is the way in which a Japanese woman salutes her 

 friends in parting, and with this in closing I salute you, thank- 

 ing you for your kind attention. 



