As I leaned toward him he shouted at me:
“Put me on your white wall; we can talk then more easily.”
“What wall?” I asked, looking all around me. “I don’t see any.”
“I mean the battlement that defends your neck. Put me on top of that. I shall be near your ear.”
Then I understood what the little match meant. The walls of the Japanese fortresses are painted white, and he had taken my collar for a bulwark to defend my neck. I explained, and put him astride of the collar.
“You are right,” he said to me as he sat serenely on the edge. “I find now that it isn’t a wall. But you see I don’t know what is little and what is big. I am so small myself that I can’t make things out. You seem to me larger than Fuji-Yama, the sacred mountain.”
We began to chat. He talked so well that I listened enchanted. I already loved him. It gave me pleasure to feel on my neck the light touch of his little leg and the caress of his wooden arms on my ear calling my attention when he had something important to tell me. This little trick of his was the cause of some unfortunate incidents.
Occasionally when I was absent-minded and thinking of something else, I would feel my ear being tickled and I would wave my hand as if brushing away an insect, and that would throw poor Fiam to the floor from a height that was really dangerous to him.