Yoshitomo of the Minamoto clan, who had sided with Kiyomori in the recent dynastic conflict was a brother of the Tametomo just mentioned. He was greatly offended by the violent use which Kiyomori made of the power which had come into his hands. With all the Minamoto and Fujiwara he conspired to overthrow the victorious and arrogant Taira. But Kiyomori suspecting the plans of his enemies took measures to counteract them and suddenly fell upon them in the city of Kyōto. Yoshitomo was obliged to save himself by fleeing to Owari, where he was assassinated by the agents of Kiyomori. The death of the head of the Minamoto only made the tyrant more determined to crush all opposition. Even the ex-Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who was a son-in-law of Kiyomori, but who showed some signs of disapproval, was sent into exile. Several of the sons of Yoshitomo were put to death; but Yoritomo then a boy of thirteen was saved by the interference of the mother-in-law of Kiyomori, and was sent into exile in the province of Izu, and put into the safe-keeping of two faithful Taira men, one of whom Hōjō Tokimasa will be heard of hereafter. Besides the four sons of Yoshitomo by his wife, he had also three sons by a concubine named Tokiwa. She was a woman of great beauty, and for that reason as well as because she was the mother of the romantic hero Yoshitsuné, she has often been chosen by Japanese artists as the subject of their pictures. Tokiwa and her three children, of whom Yoshitsuné was then an infant at the breast, fled at the breaking out of the storm upon Yoshitomo and the Minamoto clan. They are often represented as wandering through a storm of snow, Yoshitsuné being carried as an infant on the back of his mother, and the other two little ones pattering along with unequal steps at her side. In this forlorn condition they were met by one of the Taira soldiers, who took pity on them and gave them shelter. From him they learned that Kiyomori had taken the mother of Tokiwa prisoner, and held her in confinement, knowing that this would surely bring back to him the fair fugitive and her children. In the Chinese teachings of that day, in which Tokiwa had been educated, the duty of a child to its mother was paramount to that of a mother to her child. So Tokiwa felt that it was unquestionably her duty to go back at once to the capital and surrender herself in order to procure the release of her mother. But her maternal heart rebelled when she remembered that her babes would surely be sacrificed by this devotion. Her woman’s wit devised a scheme which might possibly furnish a way between these terrible alternatives. She determined to surrender herself and her children to Kiyomori, and depend upon her beauty to save them from the fate which had been pronounced upon all the Minamoto. So with her little flock she went back and gave herself up to the implacable tyrant. Softened by her beauty and urged by a number of his