children? Have n’t they got any?” But at New Year’s we found out that they had. This 
Japan’s Blossom-time. is the great holiday of all the year in China, when everybody hangs out flags and colored lanterns and sets off fire-crackers, (We borrowed our custom of fire-crackers for the Fourth of July from Chinese New Year’s.) All the people put on their very best clothes, and the children the best of all, jackets and trousers of bright blue or green or yellow or purple, the boy’s and the girl’s so much alike that you can only tell them apart by their hair, The boy’s, of course, is braided in a pigtail, and the girl’s is done up on her head with silver pins, or, if she ’s a very grand little girl, with gold or jade. Thus decked out, the children go walking with their proud papas and mamas, and often go to the theater, which is a rare treat for them.
Perhaps Chinese children have romping plays together, but they always look as if they were born grown up.
In Korea the little folks were by no means so prim. In that country everybody wears white clothes, but no one seems to say to the children, “Now, mind, don’t play in the dirt." Nearly everybody is poor in Korea, and so the children look poor and out-at-elbows. When we were taking a picture of an old, old monument inscribed with the history of a battle so long ago that the letters cut in the hard marble are almost worn away, two children came racing across the field to get into the photograph. Please don’t ask, “Boys or girls?” That ’s always such a hard question to answer in the East.
Posing for their picture by the old monument
If the children are too much looked after in China, and not enough in Korea, the place where child life seems an all-the-year-round picnic is Japan.
Little children in Japan wear all the fine clothes for the family. The grown-ups never dress in bright colors, because it is n’t thought proper, any more than it would be proper for