s and pleadings were alike useless, and
finally one night as he was taking leave, the bonze told the maid that he
had paid his last visit. Kiyohime then utterly forgetting all womanly
delicacy, became so urgent that the bonze tore himself away and fled
across the river. He had seen the terrible gleam in the maiden's eyes,
and now terribly frightened, hid himself under the great temple bell.

Forthwith Kiyohime, seeing the awful moment had come, pronounced the
spell of incantation taught her by the mountain spirit, and raised her
T-shaped wand. In a moment her fair head and lovely face, body, limbs and
feet lengthened out, disappeared, or became demon-like, and a
fire-darting, hissing-tongued serpent, with eyes like moons trailed over
the ground towards the temple, swam the river, and scenting out the track
of the fugitive, entered the belfry, cracking the supporting columns made
of whole tree-trunks into a mass of ruins, while the bell fell to the
earth with the cowering victim inside.

Then began the winding of the terrible coils round and round the metal,
as with her wand of sorcery in her hands, she mounted the bell. The
glistening scales, hard as iron, struck off sparks as the pressure
increased. Tighter and tighter they were drawn, till the heat of the
friction consumed the timbers and made the metal glow hot like fire.

[Illustration: THE SORCERESS MELTING THE BELL.]

Vain was the prayer of priest, or spell of rosary, as the bonzes
piteously besought great Buddha to destroy the demon. Hotter and hotter
grew the mass, until the ponderous metal melted down into a hissing pool
of scintillating molten bronze; and soon, man within and serpent without,
timber and tiles and ropes were nought but a few handfuls of white ashes.

THE FISHERMAN AND THE MOON-MAIDEN.

Pearly and lustrous white, like a cloud in the far-off blue sky, seemed
the floating figure of the moon-maiden, as she flew to earth. She was one
of the fifteen glistening virgins that wait attendant upon the moon in
her chambers in the sky. Looking down from her high home to the earth,
she became enraptured with the glorious scenery of Suruga's ocean shore,
and longed for a bath in the blue waters of the sea.

So this fairy maid sped to the earth one morning early, when the moon
having shone through the night was about to retire for the day. The sun
was rising bright and red over the eastern seas, flushing the mountains
and purpling the valleys. Ou