f old bronze mirrors contributed for such a purpose. The largest
collection of this kind that I ever saw was in the court of a temple of
the Jodo sect, at Hakata, in Kyushu: the mirrors had been given for the
making of a bronze statue of Amida, thirty-three feet high.]

There was at that time a young woman, a farmer's wife, living at
Mugenyama, who presented her mirror to the temple, to be used for
bell-metal. But afterwards she much regretted her mirror. She
remembered things that her mother had told her about it; and she
remembered that it had belonged, not only to her mother but to her
mother's mother and grandmother; and she remembered some happy smiles
which it had reflected. Of course, if she could have offered the
priests a certain sum of money in place of the mirror, she could have
asked them to give back her heirloom. But she had not the money
necessary. Whenever she went to the temple, she saw her mirror lying in
the court-yard, behind a railing, among hundreds of other mirrors
heaped there together. She knew it by the Sho-Chiku-Bai in relief on
the back of it,--those three fortunate emblems of Pine, Bamboo, and
Plumflower, which delighted her baby-eyes when her mother first showed
her the mirror. She longed for some chance to steal the mirror, and
hide it,--that she might thereafter treasure it always. But the chance
did not come; and she became very unhappy,--felt as if she had
foolishly given away a part of her life. She thought about the old
saying that a mirror is the Soul of a Woman--(a saying mystically
expressed, by the Chinese character for Soul, upon the backs of many
bronze mirrors),--and she feared that it was true in weirder ways than
she had before imagined. But she could not dare to speak of her pain to
anybody.

Now, when all the mirrors contributed for the Mugenyama bell had been
sent to the foundry, the bell-founders discovered that there was one
mirror among them which would not melt. Again and again they tried to
melt it; but it resisted all their efforts. Evidently the woman who had
given that mirror to the temple must have regretted the giving. She had
not presented her offering with all her heart; and therefore her
selfish soul, remaining attached to the mirror, kept it hard and cold
in the midst of the furnace.

Of course everybody heard of the matter, and everybody soon knew whose
mirror it was that would not melt. And because of this public exposure
of her secret fault, the po