ions to buy the macaroni. Jiurozayemon all
this while was thinking of the pleasure he would have in laughing at
Chobei for offering him a mean and paltry present; but when, by
degrees, the macaroni began to be piled mountain-high around the
tea-house, he saw that he could not make a fool of Chobei, and went
home discomfited.

[Footnote 25: _Token_, a nickname given to Gombei, after a savage dog
that he killed. As a Chonin, or wardsman, he had no surname.]

It has already been told how Shirai Gompachi was befriended and helped
by Chobei.[26] His name will occur again in this story.

[Footnote 26: See the story of Gompachi and Komurasaki.]

At this time there lived in the province of Yamato a certain Daimio,
called Honda Dainaiki, who one day, when surrounded by several of his
retainers, produced a sword, and bade them look at it and say from
what smith's workshop the blade had come.

"I think this must be a Masamune blade," said one Fuwa Banzayemon.

"No," said Nagoya Sanza, after examining the weapon attentively, "this
certainly is a Muramasa."[27]

[Footnote 27: The swords of Muramasa, although so finely tempered that
they are said to cut hard iron as though it were a melon, have the
reputation of being unlucky: they are supposed by the superstitious to
hunger after taking men's lives, and to be unable to repose in their
scabbards. The principal duty of a sword is to preserve tranquillity
in the world, by punishing the wicked and protecting the good. But the
bloodthirsty swords of Muramasa rather have the effect of maddening
their owners, so that they either kill others indiscriminately or
commit suicide. At the end of the sixteenth century Prince Tokugawa
Iyeyasu was in the habit of carrying a spear made by Muramasa, with
which he often scratched or cut himself by mistake. Hence the Tokugawa
family avoid girding on Muramasa blades, which are supposed to be
specially unlucky to their race. The murders of Gompachi, who wore a
sword by this maker, also contributed to give his weapons a bad name.

The swords of one Toshiro Yoshimitsu, on the other hand, are specially
auspicious to the Tokugawa family, for the following reason. After
Iyeyasu had been defeated by Taketa Katsuyori, at the battle of the
river Tenrin, he took refuge in the house of a village doctor,
intending to put an end to his existence by _hara-kiri,_ and drawing
his dirk, which was made by Yoshimitsu, tried to plunge it into his
belly, when, to h