The Sad Story of the Transformation
CHAPTER VI THE SAD STORY OF THE TRANSFORMATION
I soon learned to feel so much affection and admiration for Fiam that even now I never light a match without thinking of him.
“Was that the end?” I asked him.
“No; every year at that date in May there was a festival in the wood. You see, I had become a god to these people; they adored me. But as the years passed the festival grew very sad. The men became old. The army dwindled away. The musicians lost their voices, and each year the songs were slower and feebler. Prince Funato’s hair turned white, then his back was bent, then he came up the mountain leaning on a cane, then he was carried on a litter, and then he came no more.
“The first year his followers returned without him; they wept as they burned incense under my boughs. Funato was dead. From that time the pilgrimage was more and more melancholy.
“Fifty years after the battle there were left only one musician, two servants and nine soldiers. At the end of another year, that day in May, only one man came. He looked as if he were a hundred years old. He could hardly drag himself along. He laid his wrinkled forehead against me and murmured:
“‘Honorable Willow, we shall never meet again.’
“After that I saw no one; I was forgotten. How could I tell what men were doing in the valley? But I am tiring you with all these old memories.”