The equinoctial day is the middle of a week known as _higan_, or yonder shore, which is so called because prayers are said during the week for the souls of those on shore, that is, in Nirvana. During the week dumplings and rice-cakes coated with bean jam or sweetened bean-powder are offered to the dead and also sent as presents to friends and relatives. The family tombs are visited; and old-fashioned people worship in succession at the six great temples dedicated to Amitabha in the environs of the city, which entails a journey of some fifteen miles. Many old men and women visit different shrines on the equinoctial day as they have been told that if they pass through seven stone _torii_ or shrine-gates on that day, they will not suffer pain when the time comes for them to quit this world. In the latter part of this month the plum-trees are in full bloom. Though camellias are in flower earlier in the year, the plum-blossoms are the first of all the flowers to attract crowds of admirers. As plum-trees blossom sometimes while it still snows, the plum-tree blooming under a weight of snow is emblematic of faithfulness in adversity. The plum-blossom is not so popular as the cherry-blossom; and yet it is the subject of more odes and poems than the other. It possesses the grace and refinement which is lacking in the luxuriant clusters of cherry-blossoms. Its quiet hue, the delicacy of its fragrance, and the sense of loneliness it seems to impart appeal to the literary and poetical-minded, who go to a plum-garden with gourds of _sake_ and drink under the branches to which they hang slips of paper with odes written on them in praise of the blossom. It is also associated in our poetry with the Japan bush-warbler, the most prized of our singing-birds, whose clear abrupt notes certainly sound pleasant on cold, crisp mornings of early spring. Though there are many plum-gardens in Tokyo, the most noted is that on the east side of the River Sumida, where stands an aged tree, known as the Plum-tree of the Couchant Dragon from the fancied resemblance of its gnarled trunk to the sleeping form of that fabulous animal. [Illustration: CHERRY-FLOWERS AT MUKOJIMA.]