dhist temples attached to them;--and that would mean
the disparition of so many charming gardens, with their lotus-ponds and
Sanscrit-lettered monuments and humpy bridges and holy groves and
weirdly-smiling Buddhas! So the extermination of the Culex fasciatus
would involve the destruction of the poetry of the ancestral
cult,--surely too great a price to pay!...

Besides, I should like, when my time comes, to be laid away in some
Buddhist graveyard of the ancient kind,--so that my ghostly company
should be ancient, caring nothing for the fashions and the changes and
the disintegrations of Meiji (1). That old cemetery behind my garden
would be a suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty
of exceeding and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been
shaped by some old, old ideal which no longer exists in any living
brain; even the shadows are not of this time and sun, but of a world
forgotten, that never knew steam or electricity or magnetism
or--kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big bell there is a
quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from
all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings
of them make me afraid,--deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that
billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the
abyssal part of my ghost,--a sensation as of memories struggling to
reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and
births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... And,
considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a
Jiki-ketsu-gaki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some
bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my
thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.

ANTS

I

This morning sky, after the night's tempest, is a pure and dazzling
blue. The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odors,
shed from the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In
the neighboring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that
praises the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of
the south wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us:
butterflies of queer Japanese colors are flickering about; semi (1) are
wheezing; wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants
are busy repairing their damaged habitations... I bethink me of a
Japanese poem:--

Yuku e naki:
Ari n