detectives, I am told, apologised humbly for their shabby conduct. My uncle begged a grace of half an hour to fix his belongings that he had left at the temple; and as he had promised, he surrendered himself to them gently when the time was up. And he was sent under guard to the prison at Nagoya

at once.

Daishun's mother, my dear grandmother, whose sweet memory has yet to be told, was terribly dejected when the news of her son's temporary imprisonment at Nagoya, and the general rumour that she must now prepare for his death, reached her; but when she gained slowly a strength from her conviction that he had done no cowardly crime, although it might not be admirable in all ways round, and that at least it was manly and romantic, her motherly love of a countrywoman, simple and straight, only feared if he might not be hungry in the cell. The day of Daishun's departure for Yedo was announced; my grandmother rose before dawn and filled a large basket with persimmons from the garden, and with the chestnuts she had cooked the night before, and some sort of cake which she thought he would like (it was made, indeed, with her tears). She walked eighteen

miles toward Nagoya, and waited for her

son's tomaru kago or palanquin to pass, under the pine forest by the country road a little off Nagoya, at the place generally known as Kasa Dera, as there the Kwannon goddess wearing a bamboo hat stands. The autumnal sun began to sink; her senses, like the trees and grasses turned gold in the falling light, were perfectly numbed in anxiety and tears. I can well believe that she was almost blind when the palanquin approached like a ghost looming out of mist; her eyesight at once returned with the greatest pain when she saw right before herself, within a palanquin, her very son joining his hands in appeal of pardon, with his face toward his mother. She stumbled forward, bursting into tears, and practically checked the procession. The guards with two swords, more that fifteen, examined her, but her expression of mother's love inspired sympathy in their cold hearts. It is said that even a kind word was spoken to her by them; and her basket was promised to be given to the prisoner. She did not know how she returned home; and she cried and cried over the white palanquin, which was the acknowledged sign of death in those days. But, in fact, it was blue.

He escaped capital punishment from the reason of his being a priest, as a special

mitigation was given to the priestfolk; his religious work was worthy of note after his serving a long imprisonment. It is said when he died suddenly in his thirty-third year, that his writing of three hundred pieces of Chinese four-line poems in one night was the main cause of his death. The book of his poems will be published presently; the selection of phrases to be carved on the monument which is soon going to be put up has been entrusted to my hand.

I do not know exactly what was the true motive of his treason; the acknowledged history of the earliest Meiji period only contains two or three lines in vague indifference. And the fact that I did not know him with my living eye, as he died when I was merely four or five years old, only helps to make him shadowy and unreal. But whenever I think of his joining his hands toward his mother in appeal of pardon from his palanquin, he becomes most strikingly a man of reality, all tender and human.

Oh, where is the thing more real than the love between mother and son? "Here lies the son who loved at least his own mother" is the line that might be carved on his tomb.

X

THE LANTERN CARNIVAL

THE evening that flowed out from the forests of Tado Mountain already besieged the valley, in whose shade Tsushima, a town of a few thousand people, laid her soul and body to rest and prayer, when my train dropped me there quite informally some ten years ago. My mind was all uneasy with my rising joy, as it was my first return home after more than ten years of Western life. At the station I frightened my old father; he looked so happy when he made sure that I was his son, real and true-not the foreigner whom he took me for at first. "We must go straight," he said, in a tone that I could not oppose, "to the shrine, and report to the god your safe return. How glad am I that my prayer has been thus answered!" Although I wished in my heart of hearts. to see my aged mother first, I could not but obey him, and followed toward the sacred ground. He told me on the way how he

lighted a sacred lantern every night for my welfare, and that he had never missed even one day, during those long years of my absence, to pay the god a visit of devotion. It seemed he thought that all my health, all my success, whatever it were, should be attributed to the divine help of the god -I had no quarrel with him about it, of course-and by the god he meant Gozu Tenno, of Tsushima, classically speaking, the Town of Purple Waves. I felt awe-struck, even ashamed, to think that I had neglected to look back to the town god with thanks during many, many years when I stepped into the grounds where the sad loneliness moved like mists, and the holy watch-fire woke the darkness now and then to flight, and the burning lanterns swung as if they were stray ghosts. My old sense of reverence towards this particular god, whom I was taught to revere since my earliest childhood-for I was born here at Tsushimasuddenly returned, and I thought that again the rise and fall of my own life was in his grasp. And how thankful I was for his mercy and divine will!

When I reached home my father lighted those little stone lanterns of the garden dedicated to the god, that is, Gozu Tenno,