Echizen had furnished an adequate guard for his protection, and the students of the college, themselves samourai, or sons of samourai, were all pledged to protect the Tojin-san from harm.

Presently they arrived at the school, an enormous building, once the citadel of the Castle, and here nine hundred students received the Tojin-san with a veritable ovation.

As he stood straightly before them, looking across at that sea of bright friendly faces, is it any wonder he recalled another scene in America, so similar, yet dissimilar, and that his heart went out yearningly to the youths facing him?

These intelligent, eager-faced boys were looking to him to guide and lead them. And, in turn, already they had pledged themselves to be his vital friends and allies. He felt emboldened, courageous, proud, elated. Not for a moment would he have retraced his steps to that other land he had regretted.

VI

In the Tojin-san’s absence several aggravating accidents had happened in his house. While little Taro, the cook’s youngest child, was sitting on the doorstep in the sun, nibbling on a sammari sembei (thunder cake), suddenly from behind an adjacent pine-tree the fox-woman had appeared, and before the frightened child could open its mouth to scream she had pounced upon him, nipped the cake cleanly from his hand and was off.

In

The child’s nurse (who was none other than the fat wench of the morning), who adored her charge, and had already herself suffered at the hands of the mountain witch, rushed out valiantly at the child’s loud cry of alarm. Her fury getting the better of her fear, she started in pursuit of their tormentor.

The latter she discovered serenely seated upon the topmost bough of a bamboo-tree, where she was demolishing the rice cracknel at her leisure. From this perch she threw white pebbles, with which her sleeves seemed loaded, down upon the head of the irate Obun, and while the latter was execrating her and calling upon Ema (the Lord of Hell) to come to her assistance the fox-woman slid down the bamboo trunk so swiftly and so silently she was beside the terrified serving-maid before the latter knew. She felt her arms caught in a sudden squeezing grip. Sharp fingers sank into her thick, fat flesh, crept up along her arms to her shoulders, nipped at her breast, her neck, her cheeks, her great muscular legs, and with a last vicious tweak at her nose, the fox-woman had again vanished.

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