ck the cries of that strange bird, which cry he
had heard on that fearful night in Rokjio, and the subject recurred to
his mind once more, and he said to Ukon, "How old was she?"

"Nineteen."

"And how came you to know her?"

"I was the daughter of her first nurse, and a great favorite of her
father's, who brought me up with her, and from that time I never left
her. When I come to think of those days I wonder how I can exist
without her. The poet says truly, 'The deeper the love, the more
bitter the parting.' Ah! how gentle and retiring she was. How much I
loved her!"

"That retiring and gentle temperament," said Genji, "gives far greater
beauty to women than all beside, for to have no natural pliability
makes women utterly worthless."

The sky by this time became covered, and the wind blew chilly. Genji
gazed intently on it and hummed:--

"When we regard the clouds above,
Our souls are filled with fond desire,
To me the smoke of my dead love,
Seems rising from the funeral pyre."

The distant sound of the bleacher's hammer reached their ears, and
reminded him of the sound he had heard in the Yugao's house. He bade
"Good-night" to Ukon, and retired to rest, humming as he went:--

"In the long nights of August and September."

On the forty-ninth day (after the death of the Yugao) he went to the
Hokke Hall in the Hiye mountain, and there had a service for the dead
performed, with full ceremony and rich offerings. The monk-brother of
Koremitz took every pains in its performance.

The composition of requiem prayers was made by Genji himself, and
revised by a professor of literature, one of his intimate friends. He
expressed in it the melancholy sentiment about the death of one whom
he had dearly loved, and whom he had yielded to Buddha. But who she
was was not stated. Among the offerings there was a dress. He took it
up in his hands and sorrowfully murmured,

"With tears to-day, the dress she wore
I fold together, when shall I
Bright Elysium's far-off shore
This robe of hers again untie?"

And the thought that the soul of the deceased might be still wandering
and unsettled to that very day, but that now the time had come when
her final destiny would be decided,[59] made him pray for her more
fervently.

So closed the sad event of Yugao.

Now Genji was always thinking that he should wish to see his beloved
in a dream.

The evening after his visit to the Hokke