Every passer, coming and going seemed to be the good woman’s acquaintance, since the pass lay in a single line, and all traffic must go by the humble tea-stall. All of the half-dozen drivers of pack-horses, I met on the road, must have come up or gone down the mountain, everyone of them making her think somebody was coming. I could not help wondering how often, indeed, times out of number, her ears must have caught the jingling of bells in the years past, that had turned her hair so completely grey. Oh, how long she must have lived in this little place with its lonely road, where spring had come and gone, gone and come, with no ground to walk on, lest one crushed little flowers under foot! I wrote down another “haiku” in my book:
“Mago-utaya Shiragamo
Somede Kururu Haru”[(o)]
The little verse did not quite express my poetical fancy, and I was gazing at the point of my pencil to compress into seventeen syllables the ideas of grey hair, and the cycles of years as well as the quaint tunes of a country pack-horse driver, and departing Spring, when a live bucolic individual, leading a pony, halted before the shop and greeted the old woman:
“Good day, Obasan!”[(9)]
“Why, it is you Gen-san. You are going down to the town?”
“I am, and shall be glad to get, if there be anything you want down there.”
“Let me see. Stop at my daughter’s, if you happen to go along Kajicho, and ask her to get for me a holy tablet of the Reiganji temple.”
“All right, only one, eh? Your O-Aki-san[(10)] is very lucky that she has been so well married, don’t you think so, Obasan?”
“I am thankful that she is not in want of daily needs. Maybe she is happy.”