kinds of dressing-tables are also provided, containing many of the above-mentioned articles; also a number of other housekeeping utensils. When these things are ready, the mediator and his wife are invited to the house of the bride’s father, and entertained there. A lucky day is selected for sending the above-mentioned articles, accompanied by a written list, to the bridegroom’s house. The mediator is present to assist in receiving them, and a formal receipt is given, as well as refreshments and presents to the bearers in proportion to the value of the articles brought. On the day fixed for the marriage, an intelligent female servant of the second class[75] is sent to the house of the bride to attend her, and the bride’s father, having invited all his kinsfolk, entertains them previous to the bride’s departure. The bridal party sets out in norimono, the mediator’s wife first, then the bride, then the bride’s mother, and, finally, her father. The mediator has already preceded them to the bridegroom’s house. The bride is dressed in white (white being the color for mourning among the Japanese), being considered as thenceforward dead to her parents. If all the ceremonies are to be observed, there should be stationed, at the right of the entrance to the house of the bridegroom, an old woman, and on the left an old man, each with a mortar containing some rice-cakes. As the bride’s norimono reaches the house, they begin to pound their respective mortars, the man saying, “A thousand years!” the woman, “Ten thousand!”—allusions to the reputed terms of life of the crane and the tortoise thus invoked for the bride. As the norimono passes between them, the man pours his cakes into the woman’s mortar, and both pound together. What is thus pounded is moulded into two cakes, which are put one upon another and receive a conspicuous place in the toko[76] of the room where the marriage is to be celebrated. [Illustration: A SCENE IN THE HOUSE OF A NOBLE From _Official History of Japan_] The norimono is met within the passage by the bridegroom, who stands in his dress of ceremony ready to receive it. There is also a woman seated there with a lantern, and several others behind her. It was, as already mentioned, by the light of this lantern that formerly the groom first saw his bride, and, if dissatisfied with her, exercised his right of putting a stop to the ceremony. The bride, on seeing the bridegroom, reaches to him, through the front window of her norimono, her _mamori_,[77] and he hands it to a female servant who takes it into the apartment prepared for the wedding and hangs it up. The bride is also led to her apartment, the woman with the lantern preceding.