comparable Fugiyama.

II

As he peered into its transparent depths, with his vision focused upon
the spot of light where the rays of the setting sun touched it into
flame, he was but little surprised to discover that he could make out
tiny figures in the crystal. For the moment this strange thing seemed
to him perfectly natural. And the movements of these little men and
women interested him so much that he watched them as they went to and
fro, sweeping a roadway with large brooms. Thus it happened that the
fixity of his gaze was intensified. And so it was that in a few minutes
he saw with no astonishment that he was one of the group himself, he
himself in the rich and stately attire of a samurai. From the instant
that Cosmo Waynflete discovered himself among the people whom he saw
moving before him, as his eyes were fastened on the illuminated dot in
the transparent ball, he ceased to see them as little figures, and he
accepted them as of the full stature of man. This increase in their
size was no more a source of wonderment to him than it had been to
discern himself in the midst of them. He accepted both of these
marvellous things without question--indeed, with no thought at all that
they were in any way peculiar or abnormal. Not only this, but
thereafter he seemed to have transferred his personality to the Cosmo
Waynflete who was a Japanese samurai and to have abandoned entirely the
Cosmo Waynflete who was an American traveller, and who had just
returned to New York that Christmas morning. So completely did the
Japanese identity dominate that the existence of the American identity
was wholly unknown to him. It was as though the American had gone to
sleep in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, and had waked a
Japanese in Nippon in the beginning of the eighteenth century.

With his sword by his side--a Murimasa blade, likely to bring bad luck
to the wearer sooner or later--he had walked from his own house in the
quarter of Kioto which is called Yamashina to the quarter which is
called Yoshiwara, a place of ill repute, where dwell women of evil
life, and where roysterers and drunkards come by night. He knew that
the sacred duty of avenging his master's death had led him to cast off
his faithful wife so that he might pretend to riot in debauchery at the
Three Sea-Shores. The fame of his shameful doings had spread abroad,
and it must soon come to the ears of the man whom he wished to take
unawares. Now he w