e?... Me too you have
killed,--for I will not live without my husband!... Only to tell you
this I came."... Then again she wept aloud,--so bitterly that the voice
of her crying pierced into the marrow of the listener's bones;--and she
sobbed out the words of this poem:--

Hi kurureba
Sasoeshi mono wo--
Akanuma no
Makomo no kure no
Hitori-ne zo uki!

("At the coming of twilight I invited him to return with me--! Now to
sleep alone in the shadow of the rushes of Akanuma--ah! what misery
unspeakable!") [2]

And after having uttered these verses she exclaimed:--"Ah, you do not
know--you cannot know what you have done! But to-morrow, when you go to
Akanuma, you will see,--you will see..." So saying, and weeping very
piteously, she went away.

When Sonjo awoke in the morning, this dream remained so vivid in his
mind that he was greatly troubled. He remembered the words:--"But
to-morrow, when you go to Akanuma, you will see,--you will see." And he
resolved to go there at once, that he might learn whether his dream was
anything more than a dream.

So he went to Akanuma; and there, when he came to the river-bank, he
saw the female oshidori swimming alone. In the same moment the bird
perceived Sonjo; but, instead of trying to escape, she swam straight
towards him, looking at him the while in a strange fixed way. Then,
with her beak, she suddenly tore open her own body, and died before the
hunter's eyes...

Sonjo shaved his head, and became a priest.

THE STORY OF O-TEI

A long time ago, in the town of Niigata, in the province of Echizen,
there lived a man called Nagao Chosei.

Nagao was the son of a physician, and was educated for his father's
profession. At an early age he had been betrothed to a girl called
O-Tei, the daughter of one of his father's friends; and both families
had agreed that the wedding should take place as soon as Nagao had
finished his studies. But the health of O-Tei proved to be weak; and in
her fifteenth year she was attacked by a fatal consumption. When she
became aware that she must die, she sent for Nagao to bid him farewell.

As he knelt at her bedside, she said to him:--

"Nagao-Sama, (1) my betrothed, we were promised to each other from the
time of our childhood; and we were to have been married at the end of
this year. But now I am going to die;--the gods know what is best for
us. If I were able to live for some years longer, I could only continue
to b