Then to fill up the rhyme come the words, "Chokin, chokera, kokin, kokera," and the tale goes on; "Crossing this bridge the girl was
Girls' Ball and Counting Game.
struck here and there, and the tea-house girls laughed. Put out of countenance by this ridicule, she drowned herself in the river Karas, the body sunk, the hair floated. How full of grief the husband's heart—now the ball counts a hundred."
This they varied with another song:—
"One, two, three, four.
Grate hard charcoal, shave kiri wood;
Put in the pocket, the pocket is wet,
Kiyomadzu, on three yenoki trees
Were three sparrows, chased by a pigeon.
The sparrows said, 'Chiu, chiu,'
The pigeon said, 'po, po,'—now the
Ball counts a hundred."
The pocket referred to means the bottom of the long sleeve, which is apt to trail and get wet when a child stoops at play. Kiyomadzu may mean a famous temple that bears that name. Sometimes they would simply count the turns and make a sort of game of forfeiting and returning the number of rebounds kept up by each.
Yoshi-san had begun to think battledore and
