expressed, in the fourth line. The word _shiraga_, "white-hair,"
suggests _shirazu_, "not knowing."]

Tamakushigé
Futatsu no sugata
Misénuru wa,
Awasé-kagami no
Kagé no wazurai.

[_If, when seated before her toilet-stand, she sees two faces
reflected in her mirror,--that might be caused by the
mirror doubling itself under the influence of the
Shadow-Sickness._[31]]

[Footnote 31: There is in this poem a multiplicity of suggestion
impossible to render in translation. While making her toilet, the
Japanese woman uses two mirrors (_awasé-kagami_)--one of which, a
hand-mirror, serves to show her the appearance of the back part of
her coiffure, by reflecting it into the larger stationary mirror. But
in this case of Rikomby[=o], the woman sees more than her face and
the back of her head in the larger mirror: she sees her own double.
The verses indicate that one of the mirrors may have caught the
Shadow-Sickness, and doubled itself. And there is a further suggestion
of the ghostly sympathy said to exist between a mirror and the soul of
its possessor.]


III. [=O]-GAMA

In the old Chinese and Japanese literature the toad is credited with