OBSERVANCES AND PASTIMES
resplendent robes of the Palace or the glittering armour of the campaign. The game of battle-board and shuttlecock, though it engages the attention of girls of all ages, finds comparatively little favour with lads until they have reached the age when love of muscular sports begins to be supplemented by a sense of feminine graces. Kite-flying is the amusement of the boy proper. It is a curious fact, apparently inconsistent with experience in other directions, that while the kite occupies at least as large a space in the vista of Japanese as of Chinese childhood, and attracts a much greater share of adult attention in Japan than in China, the ingenious and fantastic shapes that the toy takes in the Middle Kingdom are not emulated in the island empire. The dragon, two or three fathoms long, that may be seen writhing over a Chinese village, each section of its body an independent aeroplane, becomes in Japan a single rectangular surface, generally lacking even the picturesque adjunct of a tail, and unornamented save that the figure of some renowned warrior is rudely caricatured on its face. This difference indicates simply that the Japanese boy prefers the practical to the fanciful. What he wants is, not a quaint monster undulating at a low elevation, but an object that shall soar as loftily and as perpendicularly as possible, and shall hang humming from the blue right overhead.
A digression may be made here from the routine of annual observances in order to speak
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