"
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.
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