not of this time and sun, but of a world forgotten, that never knew steam
or electricity or magnetism or -- kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big
bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely
far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind
stirrings of them make me afraid,-- deliciously afraid. Never do I hear
that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in
the abyssal part of my ghost,-- a sensation as of memories struggling to
reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and
births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... And, considering
the possibility of being doomed to the state of a Jiki-ketsu-gaki, I want
to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame,
whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some
people that I know.




ANTS

I


This morning sky, after the night's tempest, is a pure and dazzling blue.
The air -- the delicious air! -- is full of sweet resinous odors, shed from
the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the neighboring
bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises the Sutra of
the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the south wind. Now the
summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies of queer Japanese
colors are flickering about; semi (1) are wheezing; wasps are humming;
gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy repairing their damaged