Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/251

Rh little false shame as Nausicaa attended Odysseus. Observing that he seemed anxious to learn the language, which she was quite incompetent to teach, she managed, with much laughter and many misunderstandings, to increase his vocabulary. She was particularly proud of having interpreted two inscriptions which hung framed in the vestibule of the hotel. One, equivalent to "Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest," was thus worded :

More literally it reads, " At morning, honourably send on his way; at hot-water time, honourably receive." The other was more difficult to render. We disputed two versions, of which I commended the first to M. Beauregard's notice, while preferring the second in our common interest. Like many maxims, it was plausibly vague:

Could it mean "Love without naughtiness"? Or had it the particular application of "Hospitality without fraud"? I hoped the latter.

We remained for seven days at Ishinomaki, charmed with the busy life of the place, which owes its prosperity to slate-quarries and salmon-fisheries, with the boats for ever passing up and down the Kitakami, with Kinkwa-zan, "the golden-flower mountain," that sacred island on which in ancient times no women might set foot, though the deer roam freely round the pilgrim's circuit or ascend to the shrine of Watazumi-no-Mikoto, the Shintō god of the sea. During this week two circumstances revealed to my French friend the fact that O Maru was actuated by quite as much