Heaven’s mercy, the noise that the tea-kettle made! Bang! bang! Thud! thud! thud!
The novices soon stopped laughing. One of them slid aside the kara-kami and peeped through.
“Arah, the devil and all’s in it!” he cried. “Here’s the master’s old tea-kettle turned into a sort of a badger. The gods protect us from witchcraft, or for certain we shall be lost!”
“And I scoured it not an hour since,” said another novice, and he fell to reciting the Holy Sutras on his knees.
A third laughed. “I’m for a nearer view of the hobgoblin,” he said.
So the lot of them left their books in a twinkling, and gave chase to the tea-kettle to catch it. But could they come up with the tea-kettle? Not a bit of it. It danced and it leapt and it flew up into the air. The novices rushed here and there, slipping upon the mats. They grew hot. They grew breathless.
“Ha, ha! Ha, ha!” laughed the tea-kettle; and “Catch me if you can!” laughed the wonderful tea-kettle.
Presently the priest awoke, all rosy, the holy man.
“And what’s the meaning of this racket,” he says, “disturbing me at my holy meditations and all?”
“Master, master,” cry the novices, panting and mopping their brows, “your tea-kettle is bewitched. It was a badger, no less. And the dance it has been giving us, you’d never believe!”