The prosperity of the Tea House of the Tortoise still continued, people coming from far and near to get a glimpse of the foundling.
Every day Mac and Leslie would take her out for a walk, and she clopped beside them in her little clogs delightfully grave, and seemingly unmindful of the polite following of children that always tailed after them without appearing quite to do so. Children bouncing colored balls, playing hop scotch or what not, yet always with an eye on the child that had come out of the azaleas.
Shopping with Campanula Leslie found to be a new pleasure; a present, no matter what, was received with such deep thankfulness, such quaint expressions of gratitude.
He ordered Mother Ranunculus—requested her, rather—to get a complete new outfit for his charge, everything that money could buy, from tabi to hairpins, from kimonos to clogs. As for toys, she simply wallowed in them: bouncing balls and battledores fell round her as if from the sky, not to mention a doll as big as a baby of three, which she instantly became a mother to, carting it about on her back tucked under her kimono.
The one thing that disturbed Leslie was her seeming indifference to her own strange position. Beyond the bald statement that she had a father, she never referred to that enigmatical gentleman, nor did she grieve, outwardly at least, about her separation from him.
By the end of the week the two Scotchmen and their charge began to be welded into a corporate body—a little quaint family party. It was strange the influence of this child upon these two men whom fate had drawn together from the corners of the earth. Leslie, with newly acquired interest in life, had grown five years younger in mind, and as for Mac, he had grown ten degrees more human. His withered fatherly instincts were awakened—at least they opened one eye—and it was pretty to see him with his gnarled, horny hands and intent, weather-beaten face making chickens for the Lost One out of orange pips.
They would go out, all three, and wander about Nikko and its temples, and they would sit on grassy banks in the gardens of Dai Nichi Do, just as a father and an uncle and niece might sit on seats in Kensington Gardens, and then Leslie and his partner would discuss the future and trade, whilst Campanula played with her doll or bounced a ball.
Here one day, whilst the sun shone on the little lake and the pink and copper maples, the tiny islands and bridges and pagodas, Campanula, weary of play, told, in a sing-song voice and broken manner, the story of Momotaro, otherwise called Peachboy, and his wonderful deeds. She told it standing before them, and striking attitudes suitable to the phases of the tale.
One day, it appears, an old woman found a huge peach, and she was just going to cut it in two with a knife when the peach broke open, and out tumbled a baby. This very surprising thing happened a long time ago, but exactly when Campanula could not possibly say.
Then Peachboy grew up, and every day he grew fatter and stronger, till at last he grew so big that he determined to fight Akudogi, the king of the Ogres, who lived on an island—somewhere. And he started out, said Campanula, with a sword and a bag full of millet dumplings, each with a salted plum in the center, to fight the Ogres.