Then they go away slowly. And I catch the names of Asano Takumi no Kami and Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, and I know that the little son is listening to the story of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_. For two hundred years now they have come up the pebbled pathway into the graveyard, country peasant and Tokyo gentlemen coming with incense sticks and flowering branches, to keep green the memory of the loyal retainers who died to revenge their lord: coming in _kimono_ and top-knot: still coming in foreign clothes and _shappo_, for the old spirit lives though the outer form is changing. The fierce unswerving loyalty, the utter self-sacrifice, the tenacity and strength of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ still stir the soul of the modern Japanese under their foreign envelope as it stirred the heart of those fierce old _samurai_, with their hands ever on the hilt of their long two-handed swords. “Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth as the enemy of thy father or thy master,” says the Scripture. And the Forty-Seven died, and more than died, to fulfil the commandment. In the temple below their wooden effigies stand to this day. Among them are old men and young boys--one with the grey locks of seventy-seven, one with the boyish cheeks of seventeen--but neither the old man nor the young boy faltered, through all the long months of waiting, in the dangerous moment of the struggle or after. They plotted and endured; they fought and slew; they brought the bloody head of Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, washed in the well beyond the plum-tree, here to the grave of their dead lord; they gave themselves up to Justice; they carried out the sentence of death on their own bodies with their own hands--all with the same quiet self-control which only the sense of a supreme, absorbing duty can produce. And the Forty-Seven were buried here, in the quiet cold graveyard, beside the body of their lord. And when they had been laid to rest there came a fierce two-sworded _samurai_ to the little garden, and, kneeling down in front of the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké, he took his dirk from his belt and stabbed himself above the grave. For he had insulted Oishi Kuranosuké, in the long months of the waiting, thinking he had forgotten his lord. So they buried him among the Forty-Seven, and before his tomb are flowering branches and burning incense tapers. * * * * * The two old peasants are gone, but the sound of coming steps is on the pebbled pathway. It is the feet of the nation. They come to keep their age long watch above the graves of the Loyal _Rōnin_. V THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL Enshrined in their white wooden boxes the dolls look down; and the gently drifting crowd stare their fill. It is the eve of the Dolls’ Festival, and for a hundred yards along the wide _Odōri_, the street is wreathed across and across with swaying lines of paper lanterns.