Opposite is a row of rabbit burrows, each roofed with a shelving stone; just a hole in the ground, but full of meaning to the peasant, for it is the home of the _Kitsuné_, and he crouches on the ground in front of it, his head between his knees, or thrust far into the big burrow in the eagerness of his prayer. And his face works; the priest behind him watches. _Kitsuné_ is a reality to him, a force strong as Nature’s laws, but capricious; so he prays. Then half in fear, half in reverence, he thrusts one arm as far as it will go into the hole, and scraping softly brings back a handful of brown earth. His face lights up, and the priest behind leans forward. Still on his knees the peasant wraps the magic earth in layers of clean rice-paper and puts it carefully away in the breast of his patched tunic. Then he gets up. He has his charm, a remedy against sickness and disaster, a charm for his rice-fields and himself. The priest behind reaches out his hand. He makes a keen shopkeeper, and his celestial wares are never stolen. The temple terms are “cash down, and prayers not taken in exchange.” Through the long scarlet tunnels of the _torī_, back to the ripening rice-fields the peasants go. The green point lies a henna-stained finger in the lap of the ocean. Haneda-no-Inari, the temple of the superstitious, glows a living tip of red. For its sins are as scarlet. XIII THE ALTAR OF FIRE It all happened in a suburban temple in the town of Tokyo, at the time of the blossoming cherry-trees; and the prosaic din of a modern city full of trains and tramcars hemmed us round. We had been conscious of it dimly throughout the long ceremonial within the temple, where Shintō priests in brocaded robes chanted in twos and threes, in solo and in chorus; where the old High Priest had blessed with long strange rites the four elements, earth, which is the mother of all things, fire, water, air; had blessed the rice by which the people live, salt, and _saké_; but now that we were all assembled in the outer courtyard the noise of a busy city came distinctly to the ear. Tokyo was working hard this April afternoon, and the cries of the newspaper boys pierced up shrilly from the street below. In the courtyard the ancient vestments of the priests showed strangely beside the modern frocks of American visitors, the tweed suits of a party of Cook’s tourists, even beside the _kimono_ of the Japanese crowd, so markedly Tokyo and _Meiji_ (age of enlightenment), in their felt hats, cloth caps, and “bowlers.”