rest;
and the sickness will pass."...

"No, no!" she responded--"I am dying!--I do not imagine it;--I know!...
And it were needless now, my dear husband, to hide the truth from you
any longer:--I am not a human being. The soul of a tree is my
soul;--the heart of a tree is my heart;--the sap of the willow is my
life. And some one, at this cruel moment, is cutting down my
tree;--that is why I must die!... Even to weep were now beyond my
strength!--quickly, quickly repeat the Nembutsu for me... quickly!...
Ah!..."

With another cry of pain she turned aside her beautiful head, and tried
to hide her face behind her sleeve. But almost in the same moment her
whole form appeared to collapse in the strangest way, and to sank down,
down, down--level with the floor. Tomotada had spring to support
her;--but there was nothing to support! There lay on the matting only
the empty robes of the fair creature and the ornaments that she had
worn in her hair: the body had ceased to exist...

Tomotada shaved his head, took the Buddhist vows, and became an
itinerant priest. He traveled through all the provinces of the empire;
and, at holy places which he visited, he offered up prayers for the
soul of Aoyagi. Reaching Echizen, in the course of his pilgrimage, he
sought the home of the parents of his beloved. But when he arrived at
the lonely place among the hills, where their dwelling had been, he
found that the cottage had disappeared. There was nothing to mark even
the spot where it had stood, except the stumps of three willows--two
old trees and one young tree--that had been cut down long before his
arrival.

Beside the stumps of those willow-trees he erected a memorial tomb,
inscribed with divers holy texts; and he there performed many Buddhist
services on behalf of the spirits of Aoyagi and of her parents.

JIU-ROKU-ZAKURA

In Wakegori, a district of the province of Iyo (1), there is a very
ancient and famous cherry-tree, called Jiu-roku-zakura, or "the
Cherry-tree of the Sixteenth Day," because it blooms every year upon
the sixteenth day of the first month (by the old lunar calendar),--and
only upon that day. Thus the time of its flowering is the Period of
Great Cold,--though the natural habit of a cherry-tree is to wait for
the spring season before venturing to blossom. But the Jiu-roku-zakura
blossoms with a life that is not--or, at least, that was not
originally--its own. There is the ghost of a man in that tree.