Then I understood what the little match meant. The walls of the Japanese fortresses are painted white, and he had taken my collar for a bulwark to defend my neck. I explained, and put him astride of the collar. “You are right,” he said to me as he sat serenely on the edge. “I find now that it isn’t a wall. But you see I don’t know what is little and what is big. I am so small myself that I can’t make things out. You seem to me larger than Fuji-Yama, the sacred mountain.” We began to chat. He talked so well that I listened enchanted. I already loved him. It gave me pleasure to feel on my neck the light touch of his little leg and the caress of his wooden arms on my ear calling my attention when he had something important to tell me. This little trick of his was the cause of some unfortunate incidents. Occasionally when I was absent-minded and thinking of something else, I would feel my ear being tickled and I would wave my hand as if brushing away an insect, and that would throw poor Fiam to the floor from a height that was really dangerous to him. That first day, sitting astride the “battlement,” he gave me some confidences. He told about his past so sorrowfully that it made me very sad. It was the only time Fiam ever entertained me with the story of his life in the tree; but if I should live a thousand years I could never forget a single word of it. [Illustration: About a Stork and a Battle] CHAPTER IV ABOUT A STORK AND A BATTLE This is what he told me. “My father was the geni of a maple tree. My mother was the spirit of a birch tree. They died of old age when their trees withered. I was lively and vigorous. My tree was the first one to get its leaves in the spring and the last one to lose them in the autumn. I always tried to be faithful, and after a hundred years I hadn’t a single dry branch, so attentive had I been in keeping my tree in good condition.” “Isn’t it tiresome to be a tree and always stay still and be quiet?” I interrupted. “Oh, no. I played with the wind, which would swing my branches, and I amused myself with the birds that came to me by the hundreds, and made their nests among my leaves. I was just a hundred and fifty years old when the quiet of the woods was broken by a great event. But I am afraid I am tiring you.” “No, no, go on, please tell me.” “Listen, then. One evening in May, a wonderful evening, my friend the stork arrived. He was always traveling around, and when he passed by the mountain Hamiyama he never failed to rest himself on my third branch toward the east. He was called To. He brought a lot of news from the other mountains and from the plains across which he had flown in his travels. This evening while he was still far off, he stopped in the air, poising on his wings, and looking about for his favorite branch began to cry, ‘Mikara! terrible things are happening. It is a miracle that I am still alive.’ “‘What is the matter?’ I asked.