were fatal! You must bid each other good-bye." Without a word, Ito made ready to depart. He vaguely understood the warning uttered, and resigned himself wholly to destiny. His will belonged to him no more; he desired only to please his shadowy bride.

She placed in his hands a little suzuri, or inkstone, curiously carved, and said:

"My young lord and husband is a scholar; therefore this small gift will probably not be despised by him. It is of strange fashion because it is old, having been augustly bestowed upon my father by the favor of the Emperor Takakura. For that reason only, I thought it to be a precious thing."

Itō, in return, besought her to accept for a remembrance the kōgai1 of his sword, which were decorated with inlaid work of silver and gold, representing plum-flowers and nightingales.

Then the little miya-dzukai came to guide him through the garden, and his bride with her fostermother accompanied him to the threshold.

As he turned at the foot of the steps to make his parting salute, the old woman said:

"We shall meet again the next Year of the Boar, at the same hour of the same day of the same month that you came here. This being the Year of the Tiger, you will have to wait ten years. But, for reasons

1 This was the name given to a pair of metal rods attached to a swordsheath, and used like chop-sticks. They were sometimes exquisitely ornamented.

which I must not say, we shall not be able to meet again in this place; we are going to the neighborhood of Kyōto, where the good Emperor Takakura and our fathers and many of our people are dwelling. All the Héïké will be rejoiced by your coming. We shall send a kago 1 for you on the appointed day.”

1

Above the village the stars were burning as Itō passed the gate; but on reaching the open road he saw the dawn brightening beyond leagues of silent fields. In his bosom he carried the gift of his bride. The charm of her voice lingered in his ears and nevertheless, had it not been for the memento which he touched with questioning fingers, he could have persuaded himself that the memories of the night. were memories of sleep, and that his life still belonged to him.

But the certainty that he had doomed himself evoked no least regret: he was troubled only by the pain of separation, and the thought of the seasons that would have to pass before the illusion could be renewed for him. Ten years! - and every day of those years would seem how long! The mystery of the delay he could not hope to solve; the secret ways of the dead are known to the gods alone.

Often and often, in his solitary walks, Ito revisited the village at Kotobikiyama, vaguely hoping to obtain another glimpse of the past. But never again, 1 A kind of palanquin.

by night or by day, was he able to find the rustic gate in the shadowed lane; never again could he perceive the figure of the little miya-dzukai, walking alone in the sunset-glow.

The village people, whom he questioned carefully, thought him bewitched. No person of rank, they said, had ever dwelt in the settlement; and there had never been, in the neighborhood, any such garden as he described. But there had once been a great Buddhist temple near the place of which he spoke; and some gravestones of the temple-cemetery were still to be seen. Ito discovered the monuments in the middle of a dense thicket. They were of an ancient Chinese form, and were covered with moss and lichens. The characters that had been cut upon them could no longer be deciphered.

Of his adventure Ito spoke to no one. But friends and kindred soon perceived a great change in his appearance and manner. Day by day he seemed to become more pale and thin, though physicians declared that he had no bodily ailment; he looked like a ghost, and moved like a shadow. Thoughtful and solitary he had always been, but now he appeared indifferent to everything which had formerly given him pleasure even to those literary studies by means of which he might have hoped to win distinction. To his mother who thought that marriage might quicken his former ambition, and revive his interest in life - he said that he had made a vow to

-

marry no living woman. And the months dragged by.

At last came the Year of the Boar, and the season of autumn; but Ito could no longer take the solitary walks that he loved. He could not even rise from his bed. His life was ebbing, though none could divine the cause; and he slept so deeply and so long that his sleep was often mistaken for death.

Out of such a sleep he was startled, one bright evening, by the voice of a child; and he saw at his bedside the little miya-dzukai who had guided him, ten years before, to the gate of the vanished garden. She saluted him, and smiled, and said: “I am bidden to tell you that you will be received to-night at Öhara, near Kyōto, where the new home is, and that a kago has been sent for you." Then she disappeared.

Itō knew that he was being summoned away from the light of the sun; but the message so rejoiced him that he found strength to sit up and call his mother. To her he then for the first time related the story of his bridal, and he showed her the ink-stone which had been given him. He asked that it should be placed in his coffin- and then he died.

The ink-stone was buried with him. But before the funeral ceremonies it was examined by experts, who said that it had been made in the period of Jo-an (1169 A.D.), and that it bore the seal-mark of an artist who had lived in the time of the Emperor Takakura.

VI

STRANGER THAN FICTION

It was a perfect West Indian day. My friend the notary and I were crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through goldgreen slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade winds. All the morning we had been ascending - walking after our carriage, most of the time, for the sake of the brave little mule; - and the sea had been climbing behind us till it looked like a monstrous wall of blue, pansy-blue, under the ever heightening horizon. The heat was like the heat of a vapor-bath, but the air was good to breathe with its tropical odor- an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo.

My friend stopped the carriage before a gateway set into a hedge full of flowers that looked like pinkand-white butterflies. "I have to make a call here," he said; "come in with me." We dismounted, and he knocked on the gate with the butt of his whip. Within, at the end of a shady garden, I could see the