HOW CAMPANULA BROUGHT FORTUNE TO THE HOUSE OF THE TORTOISE—AND OTHER THINGS
The sun rose up and struck Nikko; struck the sacred red lacquered bridge that crosses the foaming river, and the common bridge that you and I may use, the potter’s shop, and the golden shrine of Iyeyasu.
Then temple after temple broke up from shadow as the sun reached for them and found them, and the hills took on a momentary splendor, an ethereal loveliness, evanescent as youth and never to be recaptured by the day.
In the garden of the Tea House of the Tortoise a bomb-shell full of bickering sparrows seemed suddenly to burst above the pond, the sun looked over the wall upon the dwarf maples in their blue porcelain flowerpots, a panel of the white house front slid back and a Mousmé appeared, her head tied up in a blue cotton duster; appeared another Mousmé, dragging a futon to air in the morning brightness, and yet another who came out and yawned at the sun, showing him the full extent of her pink gullet, and every one of her thirty-two white teeth.
Then Hedgehog San, a cat honored and beloved, came forth with tail erect, and a grasshopper hanging by the veranda in a tiny cage creaked forth a thin hymn of praise.
Thus started the day at the Tea House of the Tortoise.
When Leslie and M’Gourley came downstairs—a stair like a ship’s companion-way but without any balustrade—they found Campanula having her obi tied by Fir-branch (she who had yawned at the sun), and Leslie was informed through his partner that the dragon had been found and that he had grown; this statement, with some confidential information concerning a thunder-cat of which she had dreamed, Mac translated from the original with a serious face.
Up to this he had treated the Lost One as an adult, and as a most undesirable adult, with whom he wished to have nothing to do. But Campanula, fresh and spruce in the light of morning, chattering over her shoulder to you about thunder-cats, whilst Fir-branch tied her obi in a huge bow, was a person whose charm was not to be denied, and Mac began to thaw.
“What’s a thunder-cat?” asked Leslie.
“Lord only knows! some contraption in the shape of an animal that makes thunder. The Japs are full of supersteetions about animals. Wull we out before breakfast?”