come out of it with their hands scratched and bleeding. Friends and relatives of both sexes join in these games in winter evenings, and some of them, it is said, consider it the best part of the game that they can touch or squeeze the hands of the players of the opposite sex by pretending to seize the same cards. For this reason, a strict paterfamilias not unfrequently forbids his household to play the game with those who are not its members. [Illustration: PLAYING ODE-CARDS.] The _uta_ or ode-cards are in two sets of a hundred each. There is a famous collection of a hundred odes composed by as many poets, which used in former days to be learnt by heart. These odes are used for the ode-cards. An ode, as has been explained in a former chapter, is made up of two couplets of five and seven syllables each, closing with a line of seven syllables. For the purposes of the cards, the odes are divided into two parts, the first comprising the first three lines, that is, the lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and the second the last two lines of seven syllables. The cards in one set give each the whole ode with the name and picture of the poet, while in those of the other set appears generally the second part, and rarely the first part, of the ode. Thus, in the first set the first ode of the hundred runs:— _Tenji Tenno_ _Aki no ta no_ _Kariho no iwo no_ _Toma wo arami_ _Waga koromode wa_ _Tsuyu ni nuretsutsu._ Emperor Tenji Decayed is the rush-thatch of the watch-shed in the autumn rice-field, And the sleeves of the robe are becoming wet with dew. And the card of the second set has the lines _Waga koromode wa Tsuyu ni nuretsu_. The game is played in the same manner as the _iroha_ cards; and the scramble for the cards is more exciting as the players do not always wait till the whole ode is read out.