and a good rest to either, declared when we were half-way up his intention of stopping at the next tea-house we came to. Made of warm, orange-toned new wood, we saw the gleam of it through the trees, but long before we reached it the old woman who owned the place, hearing a child’s voice with ours, had run down to meet and greet us on our way. It was hard, with her excited Japanese and our very limited command of the language, to understand her, and my five-year-old boy was rather frightened when she wanted to carry him on her back up the rest of the way. But after a time we made out that she had a little shrine dedicated to Gisu, the god who is kind to children, and she wanted our boy to place some stones at his feet. She had lost her own son, and was a widow and childless, and this was all she could do to help his little soul in the land to which he had gone. The good Gisu—it is strange, the resemblance in sound and in character to our Name, (for there is no other)—would guard her child, if other living children showed him their love and devotion. Such a pathetic little garden it was, made under the shelter of a great overhanging rock, with rough stone lanterns beside the tiny shrine, and wild flowers and ferns, carefully tended, put where they might catch a hold in the sparse soil. Our little chap brought a cartload of small stones to build up before the altar, and put all the loose change
