his parents and grandparents and ancestors had hung to its blossoming
branches, season after season for more than a hundred years, bright strips
of colored paper inscribed with poems of praise. He himself became very
old,-- outliving all his children; and there was nothing in the world left
for him to live except that tree. And lo! in the summer of a certain year,
the tree withered and died!


Exceedingly the old man sorrowed for his tree. Then kind neighbors found
for him a young and beautiful cherry-tree, and planted it in his garden,--
hoping thus to comfort him. And he thanked them, and pretended to be glad.
But really his heart was full of pain; for he had loved the old tree so
well that nothing could have consoled him for the loss of it.


At last there came to him a happy thought: he remembered a way by which
the perishing tree might be saved. (It was the sixteenth day of the first
month.) Along he went into his garden, and bowed down before the withered
tree, and spoke to it, saying: "Now deign, I beseech you, once more to
bloom,-- because I am going to die in your stead." (For it is believed that
one can really give away one's life to another person, or to a creature or
even to a tree, by the favor of the gods;-- and thus to transfer one's life
is expressed by the term migawari ni tatsu, "to act as a substitute.") Then
under that tree he spread a white cloth, and divers coverings, and sat down
upon the coverings, and performed hara-kiri after the fashion of a samurai.
And the ghost of him went into the tree, and made it blossom in that same
hour.


And every year it still blooms on the sixteenth day of the first month, in