“None whatever. What would you have done?”
“What would I have done? Why it is easy enough. I would have made sweethearts of both Sasada Otoko and Sasabe Otoko.”
“Both?”
“Yes, yes.”
“You are great.”
“Not great at all; but only natural.”
“Now I see, you can thus get along without flying into the land of fleas or the land of mosquitoes?”
“You see, you can live on without feeling like a crab?”
“Hoh ho-ke-kyo,” the warbler recovered its note, which it had almost lost, and vindicated the fact with loudness that was wholly unexpected. Once recovered, the song seemed to flow out of its own accord, as the bird held down its head, quivered its swelling throat, opened its mouth as wide as it could, and kept on:
“Hoh ho-ke-kyo. Hoh hokke-kyo....”