TWO:They had three or four hours to spare before sunset, and at once set about the business of sight-seeing. Their first visit was to the temple on the island, and they were followed from the landing by a crowd of idle people, who sometimes pressed too closely for comfort. There was an avenue of trees leading up to the temple, and before reaching the building they passed under a gateway not unlike those they had seen at the[Pg 406] temples in Kioto and Tokio. The temple was not particularly impressive, as its architectural merit is not of much consequence, and, besides, it was altogether too dirty for comfort. There was quite a crowd of priests attached to it, and they were as slovenly in appearance as the building they occupied. In the yard of the temple the strangers were shown the furnaces in which the bodies of the priests are burned after death, and the little niches where their ashes are preserved. There were several pens occupied by the fattest pigs the boys had ever seen. The guide explained that these pigs were sacred, and maintained out of the revenues of the temple. The priests evidently held them in great reverence, and Frank intimated that he thought the habits of the pigs were the models which the priests had adopted for their own. Some of the holy men were at their devotions when the party arrived, but they dropped their prayer-books to have a good look at the visitors, and did not resume them until they had satisfied their curiosity."I sha'n't be gone long, Mary, and I'll bring you such lots of nice things when I come back." Then there was another kiss, and Mary concluded she would have her cry some other time.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla pretium lectus vel justo iaculis blandit. Nulla facilisi. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.
THREE:She was passing through the disused graveyard of the Cathedral where the clipped hedge of hornbeam bounded the asphalt path. The browned leaves still clung to the trees, and she suddenly remembered how she had passed down this path with Charles, and had said how distasteful it was to work for a cad. Her own words to hang on the air, even as the leaves still clung to the hedge, and she tried in vain to remember the mood in which those words were{196} green as the hornbeam leaves had then been, instead of being brown and lifeless. Lifeless they were, there was no vitality in them. They but clung to her memory, as the brown leaves to the hedge. She was scarcely ashamed of them: she only wondered at them, just as, in parenthesis of her thought, she wondered at the clothed twigs, when all the other trees had shed their foliage. They were not evergreen: they were just dead.- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
- Nulla lorem ipsum sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.