When Yama saw how earnestly she besought him, and that no entreaties of his could persuade her to stay with him, he cast down the cloak before her.
"Take it," he said, "but keep your promise, and dance for me as you would dance for the Morning Star."
So Tsuki flung the soft, white, glistening, mantle round her, and on the sandy shore beneath the pine trees, by the light of the waning moon, she began to dance.
So light was she that she looked like a blown feather of foam as she skimmed and flitted and swayed on the glistening sand, with her pale gold hair glimmering, and her white feet twinkling in the dim light. Once or twice she fell to the ground in a crumpled heap as if exhausted, but each time, as though a puff of wind had caught her up, she rose again fluttering and swiftly turning through the air. The dawn birds twittered and piped soft music for her, and the sea murmured a humming, rushing melody, and still she danced on. As she danced, there arose in the sky above—slow, bright and clear—the Morning Star. Yama saw her twinkling feet pass him as she drew nearer and nearer to the sea; and as the first pink light began to show behind the pine trees she reached the surf. Flinging her arms high above her head, she plunged in, with her snowy mantle billowing round her. Long, long Yama gazed after her, but she had disappeared utterly.
Slowly he turned from the sea. Slowly, very slowly he walked along the shore towards his cottage. Surely he must have been dreaming! But lo! close upon the shore were lying little white flakes that must have been shed from her snowy mantle as she swirled through the air.
Yama stooped to pick them up, but even as he touched them they changed to tear-drops in his hands.
As I have said before, my great-grandfather's nest was close to Yama's cottage, and in the winter evenings Yama would tell my great-grandfather over and over again how Tsuki, the Moon Maiden, had once danced for him.
He never saw her again; but she kept her promise, and every year, on a winter night, she came with her sisters and left a pile of cloaks on the top of Fuji. Every year Yama climbed Fuji to fetch them, but, alas, they always turned to tear-drops at his touch.
Sometimes, too, pieces of her mantle fell to the ground when she was dancing with her sisters to the Morning Star, but they hardly ever fell on the seashore where Yama lived.
Yama never forgot her. Years, long years afterwards, when he was an old, old man he started to climb Fuji as usual. Another bird told my father, however, that that year he never reached the top; but that Tsuki, touched with his devotion to her, had come with her maidens one night as he slept on the mountain side, and, wrapping him in their feathery mantles, had carried him, smiling in his sleep, to their home in the moon.