Page:Tales from old Japanese dramas (1915).djvu/280

210 "Oho!" returned the priest, with a laugh. "Even our sober-sides unbends! You seem to have developed a great interest in music. Ah, well, but what a ninny I am! I have clean forgotten an important service to be held this very night. With your permission I will take myself off. See that you enjoy yourself. Good-bye," and with this cheery parting the priest hurried off to his temple duties.

The singer in the boat was a girl of seventeen endowed with surpassing beauty. She was Miyuki ("Deep-Snow"), the only daughter of Akizuki Yuminosuké, at one time chief adviser of the Kishido Clan in Aki, a province which lies adjacent to that from which Asojirō hailed. Circumstances had obliged him to resign his post and he was then living at Kyōto in comfortable retirement.

Now the strains of Miyuki's guitar had ceased. Asaka ("Light Fragrance"), her nurse, picked up the tanzaku, which had lodged on the gunwale of the boat, and handed it to her young mistress who perused it with curiosity. The beauty of the poem and of the handwriting excited her admiration, and in obedience to an involuntary impulse she looked up to the bank above. Her