ach, Urashima went up to them and said: "Can you tell me please
where Urashima's cottage, that used to stand here, has been moved
to?"--"Urashima?" said they; "why! it was four hundred years ago that
he was drowned out fishing. His parents, and his brothers, and their
grandchildren are all dead long ago. It is an old, old story. How can
you be so foolish as to ask after his cottage? It fell to pieces
hundreds of years ago."

Then it suddenly flashed across Urashima's mind that the Sea-God's
Palace beyond the waves, with its coral walls and its ruby fruits and
its dragons with tails of solid gold, must be part of fairy-land, and
that one day there was probably as long as a year in this world, so
that his three years in the Sea-God's Palace had really been hundreds
of years. Of course there was no use in staying at home, now that all
his friends were dead and buried, and even the village had passed away.
So Urashima was in a great hurry to get back to his wife, the Dragon
Princess beyond the sea. But which was the way? He couldn't find it
with no one to show it to him. "Perhaps," thought he, "if I open the box
which she gave me, I shall be able to find the way." So he disobeyed her
orders not to open the box,--or perhaps he forgot them, foolish boy that
he was. Anyhow he opened the box; and what do you think came out of it?
Nothing but a white cloud which floated away over the sea. Urashima
shouted to the cloud to stop, rushed about and screamed with sorrow; for
he remembered now what his wife had told him, and how, after opening the
box, he should never be able to go to the Sea-God's Palace again. But
soon he could neither run nor shout any more.

Suddenly his hair grew as white as snow, his face got wrinkled, and his
back bent like that of a very old man. Then his breath stopped short,
and he fell down dead on the beach.

Poor Urashima! He died because he had been foolish and disobedient. If
only he had done as he was told, he might have lived another thousand
years. Wouldn't you like to go and see the Dragon Palace beyond the
waves, where the Sea-God lives and rules as King over the Dragons and
the tortoises and the fishes, where the trees have emeralds for leaves
and rubies for berries, where the fishes' tails are of silver and the
dragons' tails all of solid gold?

_Printed by the Kobunsha in Tokyo, Japan._

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fisher-Boy Urashima, by Anonymous

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