In their eagerness to enlist the sympathy of their audience, the authors of the play have brought love-interest into his story and weakened his character by attributing to him an act of disloyalty. Still, his failure in duty in the third act for the love of a woman was necessary for showing his deep repentance in the fifth act and its incidental consequences, the sale of his wife and his tragic end in the sixth, which lend peculiar pathos to Okaru’s story in the seventh act. AMANOYA RIHEI. Amanoya Rihei was a merchant of Osaka, whose family had for generations enjoyed the patronage of the lord of Ako. When the loyal retainers held council after their lord’s death, Rihei hied to Ako to offer his services. And when they had formed the plan for the revenge, they kept it strictly secret from all except Rihei; and later Oishi secretly asked Rihei to procure all the weapons and other implements that were needed for the night-attack. The retainers lay concealed in Kyoto, Osaka, and Yedo; and Rihei in Osaka, went himself, without the knowledge of his family and servants, to different shops and works to have the necessary weapons made, and as soon as they were ready, he forwarded them to Yedo. One of the smiths reported to the authorities that he had received an order for a special description of weapons; and Rihei was soon after arrested and examined. Rihei replied that the weapons of the special make had been invented by a certain samurai; and other smiths, upon hearing of Rihei’s arrest, also reported that they had received orders from him. Rihei was, then, put to the torture; but still he would not tell the truth. His wife and children were also tortured; but they all answered that they knew nothing. Rihei told the prison officers that his family knew nothing of his purchases and begged them to torture him instead of his family. He was then put to such tortures that he was more than once on the point of death. He told the officers that he had from the first been prepared for death when he entered upon the undertaking, but that when the new year came, he would confess all or submit to any punishment they might inflict. He spoke with such composure that they took his word and refrained from further tortures. When the new year came, the revenge of the Ako retainers was everywhere talked of; and when Rihei heard of it in prison, he went up to the officers and confessed that as his family had for generations enjoyed the patronage of the lord of Ako, he had been asked by Oishi to procure the weapons for their night-attack upon Kira’s mansion, and it was for that revenge that he had ordered the smiths to make weapons for him, and now that the revenge had been successfully carried out, the time had come for him to receive his just punishment; and he added that from fear of the plot being discovered and of the punishment for his offence being extended to innocent persons, he had concealed it from his