Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/58

 missing. Of a sunny day it seems that it is only the currents bubbling and gurgling and breaking on the boulders: but if the day be cloudy, at twilight, or especially of a night, no one can question the reality of the voice counting the washed clothes and in the end bursting into desperate lamentation. There were many who even saw the Phantom Washer-woman; and several of them paid for their inquisitiveness in one way or another. For the Phantom Washer-woman takes vengeance on those who cross the plank singing gaily. Once a certain honorable samurai of the neighborhood purposely did not heed the advice given him by his carriers, and being somewhat exuberant after having imbibed too freely, he not only sang on his way across the bridge, but actually had his sedan-chair stop in the middle of the plank, and sneered at the Phantom Washer-woman, adding the names of ludicrous objects to the names of the numbers as she recited them and finally mimicking her wails. Nothing happened, and he covered also his carriers and guides with biting ridicule. But when they were nearing home a comely maiden stepped into their way and handed the samurai a bamboo casket, with the alleged message of her mistress “that his good humor return whenever he looked at her present”. She made an obeissance and disappeared among the camellia bushes; and opening the casket, the samurai found the bloody and mutilated head of a little child. Dark forebodings came over him, and jumping out of the he hurried home to his family only to find there the headless body of his youngest son. The Phantom Washerwoman had revenged herself

“Sitting in a (a sedan) does not entitle anyone to irritate  (shades, superhuman powers)”, gravely observed the, and the old man repeated this pun in his mind so that he could flaunt it on occasion. It was clear to him that this “wave-man” was a wise and discrete person; and it pleased him that he was not altogether uninquisitive. For in the next moment he asked why the Phantom Washerwoman counted her pieces of laundry and always burst into lamentations when she reached the number seventeen.

»She used to wash for the household of a rich yeoman,« he explained obligingly,« and most likely once some valuable piece was carried away by the current, or stolen by the treacherous ghost-fox. And because for former smaller losses she had suffered humilationhumiliation [sic] at the hands of the cruel yeoman, she was overwhelmed with fear, counted her pieces again and again, and not being able to find the missing one, in the end threw herself into the river. Her body was mangled among the boulders just under the bridge. And because her own life had dragged by too gloomily for her to sing at her work,