"Stop! You forget yourself; the taiko still lives: it is he that we serve." The festal day coming on, and all in readiness, Sen-no-rikyu apparently took his place at the bowl. No man had greater fame than he. There had been brewers of a superior flavor, but none ever reached the excellence of Hideyoshi's day and favor, save Sen-no-rikyu, and he alone. Famed as no man had been at cha-no-yu, trusted as only a Hideyoshi knew how to trust, truant or designer, patronized by an age famed above all others in the wealth and luxury and refinement and indulgence of a nobility unsurpassed in the annals of time, this, the supposed Sen-no-rikyu, but in fact substitute tea-server, a scion of all that had gone before and a deceiver among adepts, may have rightly thought himself, too, a master, undiscovered and immune. Had not these lords and ladies, serving and served, the kuge and the bakufu, come or remained there to partake of a hospitality made possible only by the perfection of an art, a crafthood not comparable to the deftness of his hand, with the cunning of his brain, against the force of his will? What mattered if he traduced as others reviled? "The hand that rules is not the one who feeds," argued he, to himself, as the guests gathered in anticipation of all that Hideyoshi, the greatest of them, had thought to develop in life or fought to leave at death. And they did patronize thus in gorgeous splendor. Silks soft to the touch and pleasing to behold covered these people, whose bodies bore no taint of coarse, close-fitting and ill-shaped garments. The great chamber in which they lounged comfortably or demeaned themselves gracefully bespoke cycles of rigid aesthetics; the crude walls and hard-made floors, cumbersome furniture and meaningless ornaments of earlier days had long ago succumbed to oblivion's kindlier grace. The food they ate, and the tea they drank--only a god could brew and serve it as they wot. Seated there as placed, no sense of man disturbed them--the animal had been subdued in times gone by--thought, too, lost all sway, and only the soul called down from ethereal realms a glory that made earth in truth a heaven. A careful hand filled the fated cup. Nature-clad messengers bore it toward the taiko. The cha-no-yu had begun. Two simply-robed humans, no different except in degree, sat at the head of this vast compulsorily punctilious assemblage--the one at the other's side. The messengers came on, and no sound issued or lip as much as moved. Hideyoshi raised his hand to take the coveted draught, but Yodogima, instead, seized the cup and, raising it to her lips, a mighty confusion broke forth, from Ishida to her husband, over that beaten and mystified audience--Sen-no-rikyu was nowhere there; Ishida sat in his place! "What? Would you, even you, deny me first--Yodogima?" tremblingly asked the taiko.