I hid me promptly by the bureau, under the bed. I shut my eyes, praying: “Namu Daijingu, don’t let her find me!” 13th—Last midnight (O voicelessness of the hillside yonaka!) I woke up. The moon peeped into my sitting-room. She laid a square looking-glass on the floor. I abandoned my bed, and sat by the glass. I spread on it the letter from my sweetheart. I read it over and over, till I couldn’t read any more, the moon being kidnapped by the cloud-highwayman. “O Oscar!” I cried in the darkness. I could not slumber all the night, on account of my thought of him. A letter was written to him to-day. Nature and love! I am now living with them. 14th—I elaborated a nosegay. The poet and uncle dignified themselves in frock-coats. The coming of the coffin was slow. Mr. Poet had proffered his own graveyard to let an unknown poet lodge there. “Is it because you want some one to greet you when you die?” I said in laughter. I seated myself by a creek. I entered involuntarily into the riddle of Life and Death. The water under my feet rolled down, positively not knowing why nor whence. The wind passed, “willy-nilly blowing.” I wondered whither it went. Mr. Omar is unquestionably a true poet. The petals of a rose before me fell. I murmured: “Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?” I was crying in sadness when the coffin arrived. Mr. Heine and my uncle lifted it by either edge. The neighbouring farmers and two sardonically cool gentlemen from the undertaker’s aided them. The jaw-fallen papa of the dead carried all the posies. And Miss Morning Glory (who is the belle of Tokio) shouldered a bench for the purpose of sustaining the coffin when they were tired. The hill is precipitous. The gentlemen stopped numberless times, before they stationed themselves on the top. The grave was hollowed behind Mr. Poet’s monument. They sank the coffin. What a tremor of silence sharpened the air! I was shaking. The poor papa read a chapter from the Bible. He described his loving son’s life, in doleful honourableness. “There are a thousand flowers in Spring,”—the poet spoke—“whose repute is not extensively spoken, like that of the rose or violet. Some of them are not given even a name. They spend their smile and odour into the breeze, and die without any repining. They are content, because they are true to God. So a poet’s life should be. What is celebrity? Keats was told of his beautiful graveyard, and he said: ‘I have already seemed to feel the flowers growing over me.’ If this poet, whom we now bury, had been told of this hill, he might have said: ‘I see already the butterflies beaming over my head.’ Spring is coming. The poppies and buttercups shall dress the hill.” A church-bell chimed from the valley. We left the buried to his solitude. * * * * * My uncle and I sat under an acacia tree, silent for some time.