The sun set in glory. The valley folk crept softly from the shrine and went down to their own homes. The cold moon and the stars shone upon the Lone Pine and the Floating Bridge and the sea. Through a rent in the shrine’s roof they illumined the face of Kwannon the Merciful, and made visible her manifold arms of love. Yet Saion Zenji, her servant, stood before her singing in an ecstasy, with tears upon his face:

“O wonder-woman, strong and beautiful,
Tender-hearted, pitiful, and thousand-armed!
Thou hast fed me with thine own flesh—
Mystery of mysteries!
Poor dead dappled hind thou cam’st to me;
In the deep of mine own heart thou spoke to me
To keep, yet break, and breaking, keep thy law—
Mystery of mysteries!
Kwannon, the Merciful Lady, stay with me,
Save me from the perils of illusion;
Let me not be afraid of the snow or the Lone Pine.
Mystery of mysteries—
Thou hast refused Nirvana,
Help me that I may lose the world, content,
And sing the Divine Song.”

The Espousal of the Rat’s Daughter.—P. 171.

XXII
THE ESPOUSAL OF THE RAT’S DAUGHTER

Mr. Nedzumi, the Rat, was an important personage in the hamlet where he lived—at least he was so in his own and his wife’s estimation. This was in part, of course, due to the long line of ancestors from whom he was descended, and to their intimate association with the gods of Good Fortune. For, be it remembered, his ancestry went back into a remote past, in fact as far as time itself; for had not one of his race been selected as the first animal in the cycle of the hours, precedence being even given him over the dragon, the tiger, and the horse? As to his intimacy with the gods, had not one of his forebears been the chosen companion of the great Daikoku, the most revered and the most beneficent of the gods of Good Fortune?

Mr. Rat was well-to-do in life. His home had for generations been established in a snug, warm and cosy bank, hard by one of the most fertile rice-fields on the country-side, where crops never failed, and where in spring he could nibble his fill of the young green shoots, and in autumn gather into his storerooms supplies of the ripened grain sufficient for all his wants during the coming winter.

For his needs were not great. Entertainment cost him but little, and, unlike his fellows, he had the smallest of families, in fact a family of one only.