"This success encouraged them, and they began again in good earnest, each one in his own way, when a stranger appeared; he was armed with a long branch of a tree, which he plunged in the pond, touching the bottom and stirring up the mud, which, as it scattered, rose to the surface of the water.
"The limpidity of the water was immediately changed; one could no longer see the fish, and the fishermen decided to discontinue their sport.
"But the man only laughed at their discomfiture and, brandishing a large net, he threw it in his turn, chaffing them at the patient cunning by which they had, he said, taken such a poor haul.
"He brought up some fish, it is true, but at each haul he was obliged to lose so much time in removing the impurities, the débris, and the weeds of all kinds from the net that very soon the fishermen had the satisfaction of seeing him punished for his mean conduct.
"What he took was scarcely more than what the smartest among them had taken, and his net, filthy from the mud, torn by the roots that he was unable to avoid, was soon good for nothing."
Might it not be from this fable that we have taken the expression, "to fish in troubled waters," of which without a doubt the good Yoritomo furnished the origin many, many centuries ago?
His prophetic mind is unveiled again in the following advice that not a business man of the twentieth century would reject.
"Common sense," he says, "when it is a question of the relations of men as to what concerns business or society, ought to adopt the characteristic of that animal called the chameleon.
"His natural color is dull, but he has the gift of reflecting the color of the objects on which he rests.
"Near a leaf, he takes the tint of hope.