that this is where the club puts up. It is the inn asterisk in the pilgrim Baedeker.
The pilgrims are very free with these certificates of club satisfaction. On any fairly good inn you shall count from fifty to an hundred of them, and with hostelries of exceptional entertainment the inn's eaves fail to accommodate all its pious indorsements, and stout poles planted in the street in front fly the overplus. Landlords spare no pains to display them, for the pilgrim patronage is individually not unlavish, and collectively is enormously large.
The sight of such banner-bedizened inns will probably be the foreigner's first introduction to Japanese pilgrims, unless the equally striking spectacle of itinerants distinguished by—and well-nigh extinguished under—huge toad-stool hats have already caused him to mark such plants as men walking. Once recognized, he will find both phenomena everywhere, for they form a regular part of the scenery.
Now some of these pilgrim clubs turn out to play a most important rôle in god-possession, being, in fact, clubs for the purpose. Some general account of them becomes, therefore, germane to our subject.
