Going to Kané’s house one day, and finding his brother was out, Chô took a knife and killed all the silkworms, cutting each poor little creature in two; then he went home without having been seen by anybody.
When Kané came home he was dismayed to find his silkworms in this state, but he did not suspect who had done him this bad trick, and tried to feed them with mulberry leaves as before. The silkworms came to life again, and doubled the number, for now each half was a living worm. They grew and throve, and the silk they spun was twice as much as Kané had expected. So now he began to prosper.
The envious Chô, seeing this, cut all his own silkworms in half, but, alas! they did not come to life again, so he lost a great deal of money, and became more jealous than ever.
Kané also planted the rice-seed which he had borrowed from his brother, and it sprang up, and grew and flourished far better than Chô’s had done.
The rice ripened well, and he was just intending to cut and harvest it when a flight of thousands upon thousands of swallows came and began to devour it. Kané was much astonished, and shouted and made as much noise as he could in order to drive them away. They flew away, indeed, but came back immediately, so that he kept driving them away, and they kept flying back again.
At last he pursued them into a distant field, where he lost sight of them. He was by this time so hot and tired that he sat down to rest. By little and little his eyes closed, his head dropped upon a mossy bank, and he fell fast asleep.
Then he dreamed that a merry band of children came into the field, laughing and shouting. They sat down upon the ground in a ring, and one who seemed the eldest, a boy of fourteen or fifteen, came close to the bank on which he lay asleep, and, raising a big stone near his head, drew from under it a small wooden Mallet.
Then in his dream Kané saw this big boy stand in the middle of the ring with the Mallet in his hand, and ask the children each in turn, “What would you like the Mallet to bring you?” The first child answered, “A kite.” The big boy shook the Mallet, upon which appeared immediately a fine kite with tail and string all complete. The next cried, “A battledore.” Out sprang a splendid battledore and a shower of shuttlecocks. Then a little girl shyly whispered, “A doll.” The Mallet was shaken, and there stood a beautifully dressed doll. “I should like all the fairy-tale books that have ever been written in the whole world,” said a bright-eyed intelligent maiden, and no sooner had she spoken than piles upon piles of beautiful books appeared. And so at last the wishes of all the children were granted, and they stayed a long time in the field with the things the Mallet had given them. At last they got tired, and prepared to go home; the big boy first carefully hiding the Mallet under the stone from whence he had taken it. Then all the children went away.
Presently Kané awoke, and gradually remembered his dream. In preparing to rise he turned round, and there, close to where his head had lain, was the big stone he had seen in his dream. “How strange!” he thought, expecting he hardly knew what; he raised the stone, and there lay the Mallet!
He took it home with him, and, following the example of the children he had seen in his dream, shook it, at the same time calling out, “Gold” or “Rice,” “Silk” or “Saké.” Whatever he called for flew immediately out of the Mallet, so that he could have everything he wanted, and as much of it as he liked.