ancient and honorable calling in Japan, and goes back to the sun goddess. She had a brother once who used to annoy her by killing wild animals and tossing them into her backyard. One day she got angry and ran away to a cave, leaving the earth in total darkness. Her retainers, and the brother and his retainers tried to get her out, but she refused to come out--having blocked the cave with a great stone. So they performed antics and made strange cries until, tempted by curiosity, she pushed the stone slightly away and looked out, and thereupon one Taji Karac, stamping the earth, rushed forward and tore the bowlder away, and that is why the wrestlers stamp the earth to-day. This is myth--what follows is historical. "Once upon a time," said an American correspondent, as he leaned over the bar that night at the Imperial Hotel, "a chesty noble got gay, and remarked that he was about the best on earth. The emperor heard of this, and sent a challenge broadcast. A big chap took it up, kicked in the chesty noble's ribs, and brake his bones so that he died. This was twenty-four years before celestial peace was proclaimed on earth. About nine hundred years later, two brothers claimed the throne and they agreed to wrassle for it. They did it by proxy, though, and one Korishito got the throne through his champion. In the same century there was a wrestling-match at the autumn festival of the Five Grains. The harvest was good that year, and the emperor argued thereupon that the coincident wrestling must be good, and so wrestling became a permanent national custom. When the champion Kiobashi became referee the emperor gave him a fan which proclaimed that he was the Prince of Lions. The wrestlers were divided into east and west, and that's why they come into the arena from the east and west to-day. Hollyhock is the flower of the east, the gourd-flower is symbol of the west, and the path to the stage is called the flower-path to-day. The pillars indicate the points of the compass. The next champion the emperor called the Driving Wind, and the family of the Driving Wind alone can hold the symbol of the referee to-day." These wrestlers are exempt from military service, and they constitute, I understand, a very close corporation. When an unusually large child is born in Japan, the father and mother say: "He shall be a wrestler."