“It may not be amiss to observe, that it is not an indifferent matter to travellers in this country what day they set out on their journey; for they must choose for their departure a fortunate day, for which purpose they make use of a particular table, printed in all their road-books, which they say hath been observed to hold true by a continued experience of many ages, and wherein are set down all the unfortunate days of every month. However, the most sensible of the Japanese have but little regard for this superstitious table, which is more credited by the common people, the mountain priests, and monks. “To give the more authority to this table, they say that it was invented by the astrologer Seimei, a man of great quality and very eminent in his art. King _Abeno Tashima_ was his father, and a fox his mother, to whom Abeno Tashima was married upon the following occasion. He once happened with a servant of his to be in the temple of Inari, who is the god and protector of the foxes. Meanwhile some courtiers were hunting the fox without doors, in order to make use of the lungs for the preparation of a certain medicine. It happened upon this that a young fox, pursued by the hunters, fled into the temple, which stood open, and took shelter in the very bosom of Tashima. The king, unwilling to deliver up the poor creature to the unmerciful hunters, was forced to defend himself and his fox, and to repel force by force, wherein he behaved himself with so much bravery and success that, having defeated the hunters, he set the fox at liberty. The hunters, ashamed and highly offended at the courageous behavior of the king, seized, in the height of their resentment, an opportunity which offered to kill his royal father. Tashima mustered up all his courage and prudence to revenge his father’s death, and with so much success that he killed the traitors with his own hands. The fox, to return his gratitude, appeared to him, after the victory which he obtained over the murderers of his father, in the shape of a lady of incomparable beauty, and so fired his breast with love that he took her to his wife. It was by her he had this son, who was endowed with divine wisdom, and the precious gift of prognosticating and foretelling things to come. Nor did he know that his wife had been that very fox whose life he saved with so much courage in the temple of Inari, till, soon after, her tail and other parts beginning to grow, she resumed by degrees her former shape.[10]