* * * * *

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 _J[=o]-an_(1169 A.D.), and that it bore the seal-mark of an
artist who had lived in the time of the Emperor Takakura.

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 gold-green
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 pink-and-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 porch of a planter's house; beyond
were rows of cocoa palms, and glimpses of yellowing cane. Presently
a negro, wearing only a pair of canvas trousers and a great straw
hat, came hobbling to open the gate,--followed by a multitude, an
astonishing multitude, of chippering chickens. Under the shadow of
that huge straw hat I could not see the negro's face; but I noticed
that his limbs and body were strangely shrunken,--looked as if
withered to the bone. A weirder creature I had never beheld; and I
wondered at his following of chickens.

"Eh!" exclaimed the notary, "your chickens are as lively as ever!... I
want to see Madame Floran."

"_Moin k['e] di_," the goblin responded huskily, in his patois; and
he limped on before us, all the chickens hopping and cheeping at his
withered heels.

"That fellow," my friend observed, "was bitten by a _fer-de-lance_
about