Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1898 — FOR THE CHILDREN. [ARTICLE]

FOR THE CHILDREN.

Description of a Remarkable Room in a Buddhist Temple. In Osaka is the famous temple Tennpjl, the most remarkable part of which, to Western eyes, Is Its bell-tow-er, a two-story, Cliinese-looking structure, where there is a bell called the Indo-no-Kane, or Guiding Bell, because its sound Is supposed to guide the ghosts of children through the dark. Says Lafcadio Hearn: The lower chamber of the bell-tower Is fitted up as a eliapel, and as I stopped before the entrance to observe the image in the shrine I suddenly became aware of the unfamiliar, the astonishing. On shelves and stands at either side of the shrine, and above it and below it and beyond it, were ranged hundreds of children’s mortuary tablets, and with them thousands of toys—little horses and dogs and cows, and warriors and drums and trumpets and pasteboard armor and wooden swords, and dolls and kites, and masks, and monkeys. and models of boats, and baby tea-sets and baby furniture—toys modern and toys of a forgotten fashion, toys accumulated through centuries, toys of whole generations of dead children.

From the ceiling and close to the entrance hung a heavy bell-rope, nearly four inches in diameter apd of many colors—the rope of the Indo-no-Kane. Anil that rope was made of the bibs of dead children—yellow, blue, scarlet, purple bibs, and bibs of all intermediate shades. The ceiling itself was invisible, hidden by hundreds of tiny dresses suspended there-the dresses of dead children.

Little boys and girls, kneeling or playing on the matting beside the priest, had brought toys with them to be deposited in the chapel before the tablet of some lost brother or sister. Every monient some bereaved father or mother would come to the door, pull the bell-rope, throw some copper money on the matting and make a prayer. Each time the bell sounds some little ghost is believed to hear, perhaps even to find its way back for one more look at loved toys and faces. The clanging of the bell, the deep humming of the priest's voice reciting the service, the tinkle of falling coin, the sweet, heavy smell of incense, the passionless, golden beauty of the Buddha in his shrine, tlie colored radiance of the toys, the shadowing of the baby dresses, the tariegated wonder of that bell-rope of bibs, the happy laughter of the little folks at play on the floor—all made for me an experience of weird pathos never to be for gotten.