Chapter III

Thus was it that these little songs, composed in different generations and in different parts of Japan by various persons, seemed to shape themselves for me into the ghost of a romance,--into the shadow of a story needing no name of time or place or person, because eternally the same, in all times and places.

*

Manyemon asks which of the songs I like best; and I turn over his manuscript again to see if I can make a choice. Without, in the bright spring air, the washers are working; and I hear the heavy _pon-pon_ of the beating of wet robes, regular as the beating of a heart. Suddenly, as I muse, the voice of the boy soars up in one long, clear, shrill, splendid rocket-tone,--and breaks,--and softly trembles down in coruscations of fractional notes; singing the song that Manyemon remembers hearing when he himself was a boy:--

_Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:_
_The flowing of water, the Way of Love._

"I think that is the best," I said. "It is the soul of all the rest."

"Hin no nusubito, koi no uta," interpretatively murmurs Manyemon. "Even as out of poverty comes the thief, so out of love the song!"

III

NOTES OF A TRIP TO KYŌTO