The ink-stone was buried with him. But before the funeral ceremonies it was examined by experts, who said that it had been made in the period of Jō-an(1169 A.D.), and that it bore the seal-mark of an artist who had lived in the time of the Emperor Takakura.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
It was a perfect West Indian day. My friend the notary and I were crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through gold-green slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade winds. All the morning we had been ascending,—walking after our carriage, most of the time, for the sake of the brave little mule;—and the sea had been climbing behind us till it looked like a monstrous wall of blue, pansy-blue, under the ever heightening horizon. The heat was like the heat of a vapor-bath, but the air was good to breathe with its tropical odor,—an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo.
My friend stopped the carriage before a gateway set into a hedge full of flowers that looked like pink-and-white butterflies. "I have to make a call here," he said;—"come in with me." We dismounted, and he knocked on the gate with the butt of his whip. Within, at the end of a shady garden, I could see the porch of a planter's house; beyond were rows of cocoa palms, and glimpses of yellowing cane. Presently a negro, wearing only a pair of canvas trousers and a great straw hat, came hobbling to open the gate,—followed by a multitude, an astonishing multitude, of chippering chickens. Under the shadow of that huge straw hat I could not see the negro's face; but I noticed that his limbs and body were strangely shrunken,—looked as if withered to the bone. A weirder creature I had never beheld; and I wondered at his following of chickens.
"Eh!" exclaimed the notary, "your chickens are as lively as ever!... I want to see Madame Floran."
"Moin ké di," the goblin responded huskily, in his patois; and he limped on before us, all the chickens hopping and cheeping at his withered heels.
"That fellow," my friend observed, "was bitten by a fer-de-lance about eight or nine years ago. He got cured, or at least half-cured, in some extraordinary way; but ever since then he has been a skeleton. See how he limps!"