[ [37] Copyright, 1901, by Little, Brown and Company.
Tombō no
Ha-ura ni sabishi,—
Aki-shiguré.(Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under-side of the leaf—Ah! the autumn-rains!)
And that verse by the mother poet, who seeing many children playing their favourite pastime of chasing butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:—
Tombō-tsuri!—
Kyō wa doko madé
Itta yara!(Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone to-day!)
Then there are the children's songs about Nature and her tiny creatures, and all their little songs for their plays; the songs which tell a story, and the sweet mother songs that lull the babies to sleep.
How we pity poor misguided O-Dai, who forgot loyalty to her ancestors to follow the teachings of the Western faith. At its bidding even the sacred tablets and the scroll were cast away. And when she had forsaken everything, and had become as an outcast with her own people, the good missionaries found they needed a more capable assistant. Poor little weak O-Dai, without the courage to fill her sleeves with stones and then slip into the river, longing for the sunlight, and so "flung into the furnace of a city's lust."
We hear the gruesome tinkle of the dead wife's warning bell, and we certainly shudder before the vision of her robed in her grave-shroud:—
"Eyeless she came—because she had long been dead;—and her loosened hair streamed down about her face;—and she looked without eyes through the tangle of it; and spake without a tongue."
Then the hideous horror of the evil crime, as this dead wife in her jealousy tore off the head of the sleeping young wife. The terrified husband following the trail of blood found
a nightmare-thing that chippered like a bat: the figure of the long-buried woman erect before her tomb,—in one hand clutching a bell, in the other the dripping head.... For a minute the three stood numbed. Then one of the men-at-arms, uttering a Buddhist invocation, drew, and struck at the shape. Instantly it crumbled down upon the soil,—an empty scattering of grave-rags, bones, and hair;—and the bell rolled clanking out of the ruin. But the fleshless right hand, though parted from the wrist, still writhed; and its fingers still gripped at the bleeding head—and tore, and mangled,—as the claws of the yellow crab fast to a fallen fruit.