man hardly feels that he has the right to call himself a gyōja at all, as one of the class humbly informed me. He blushed, he said, when he thought of the austerities of the olden time. A modern gyōja was little more austere than a shinja who made his summer pilgrimages when he could. This was perhaps a gloomy view to take of the situation, for one usually finds the past not so superior to the present as report represents. But even at its worst, the deterioration would seem a case only for professional sympathy. For whatever the regimen may have been, there is at all events enough severity left it to satisfy any decent desire for self-martyrdom.
That mountains should be deemed peculiarly good points for entering another world is not unnatural. With inclines incapable of cultivation, they do not conduce to sociability, but enable the dweller there the more effectively to meditate himself into inanity. Unjogged by suggestion, the average mind lapses into a comatose condition, till the man comes eventually to exist upon the borderland of trance. But as it is not convenient for everybody to retire to the hills for three
