A little while we proceed along the main street; then, traversing a narrow passage between two houses, we find ourselves in a great open space flooded by moonlight. This is the dancing-place; but the dance has ceased for a time. Looking about me, I perceive that we are in the court of an ancient Buddhist temple. The temple building itself remains intact, a low, long peaked silhouette against the starlight; but it is void and dark and unhallowed now; it has been turned, they tell me, into a schoolhouse. The priests are gone; the great bell is gone; the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas have vanished, all save one,--a broken-handed Jizo of stone, smiling with eyelids closed, under the moon. In the centre of the court is a framework of bamboo supporting a great drum; and about it benches have been arranged, benches from the schoolhouse, on which the villagers are resting. There is a hum of voices, voices of people speaking very low, as if expecting something solemn; and cries of children betimes, and soft laughter of girls. And far behind the court, beyond a low hedge of sombre evergreen shrubs, I see soft white lights and a host of tall gray shapes throwing long shadows; and I know that the lights are the _white_ lanterns of the dead (those hung in cemeteries only), and that the gray shapes are the shapes of tombs. Suddenly a girl rises from her seat, and taps the huge drum once. It is the signal for the Dance of Souls. II Out of the shadow of the temple a professional line of dancers files into the moonlight and as suddenly halts,--all young women or girls, clad in their choicest attire; the tallest leads; her comrades follow in order of stature. Little maids of ten or twelve years compose the end of the procession. Figures lightly poised as birds,--figures that somehow recall the dreams of shapes circling about certain antique vases; those charming Japanese robes, close-clinging about the knees, might seem, but for the great fantastic drooping sleeves, and the curious broad girdles confining them, designed after the drawing of some Greek or Etruscan artist. And, at another tap of the drum, there begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal,--a dance, an astonishment.