The infant is expected not to be able to walk in less than a twelvemonth; but if it toddles within a year, a bag holding about three pints of uncooked rice is laid on its back, and the child is made to stumble and fall, because to walk before the first birthday augurs, according to one authority, early death and according to another, residence in a distant land. There are many other superstitions connected with infancy. Thus, a child that begins to suck its fingers before the thumb which represents the parents in Japanese palmistry, will not be an encumbrance upon its father when it grows up; if it pushes itself out in sleep beyond the head of its bed, it will rise in the world, while a downward course is in store for the one that slips in under its bed-clothes. The baby which eats fish before it can say _toto_, the child’s name for fish, will stammer when it talks. In a family in which children have one after another died in infancy, the birth of a healthy infant is ensured by such charms as making a dress for it with thirty-three pieces of cloth collected from as many families, shaving the child’s head till its seventh year, and giving a boy a girl’s name and _vice-versa_. A sovereign remedy for prickly heat is to hang over the front door by a piece of red thread a small egg-plant before any member of the family eats one that season. Crying at night is stopped by suspending over the child’s bed a picture of a devil beating a prayer-gong. Immunity from measles is secured by putting over the child’s head for a moment the rice-pot still hot after the removal of the rice, while a similar treatment with the bucket for feeding the sacred horse at a shrine is said to be equally efficacious against small-pox. The child’s face is wiped with a wet scrubbing-cloth to cure it of shyness before strangers. For whooping-cough there are several remedies: for instance, a wooden spatula with the child’s name and an invocation against the disease is nailed over the front door; the inked string used by carpenters for marking lines is tied loosely round the neck; a slender piece of nandina wood, just long enough for the child to grasp, is hung by a red thread to its neck; or a pair of small square wooden blocks are obtained from a temple dedicated to Jizo, the protector of children, when the child is suffering from whooping-cough and clapped whenever it coughs, and when it has recovered, the blocks are returned to the temple with another pair bearing the child’s name. If the infant stands up and bending down its head, peeps from between its legs, another child will soon be born in the family; and if it has a single streak on its thigh as a birth-mark, the next to be born will be a boy, but if the streaks are double, the next will be a girl. Mothers are especially warned against leaving their children’s clothes out to dry at night, for the souls of women dying at child-birth fly in the form of birds at dead of night and if they see children’s