chant of my caged pet. The uguisu is very common in this province. It
haunts all the woods and the sacred groves in the neighbourhood of the
city, and I never made a journey in Izumo during the warm season without
hearing its note from some shadowy place. But there are uguisu and
uguisu. There are uguisu to be had for one or two yen, but the finely
trained, cage-bred singer may command not less than a hundred.

It was at a little village temple that I first heard one curious belief
about this delicate creature. In Japan, the coffin in which a corpse is
borne to burial is totally unlike an Occidental coffin. It is a
surprisingly small square box, wherein the dead is placed in a sitting
posture. How any adult corpse can be put into so small a space may well
be an enigma to foreigners. In cases of pronounced rigor mortis the work
of getting the body into the coffin is difficult even for the
professional doshin-bozu. But the devout followers of Nichiren claim
that after death their bodies will remain perfectly flexible; and the
dead body of an uguisu, they affirm, likewise never stiffens, for this
little bird is of their faith, and passes its life in singing praises
unto the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law.

14

I have already become a little too fond of my dwelling-place. Each day,
after returning from my college duties, and exchanging my teacher's
uniform for the infinitely more comfortable Japanese robe, I find more
than compensation for the weariness of five class-hours in the simple
pleasure of squatting on the shaded veranda overlooking the gardens.
Those antique garden walls, high-mossed below their ruined coping of
tiles, seem to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There are no
sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of semi, or, at long, lazy