THE CHILD OF THE THUNDER.

In among the hills of Echizen, within sight of the snowy mountain called
Hakuzan, lived a farmer named Bimbo. He was very poor, but frugal and
industrious. He was very fond of children though he had none himself. He
longed to adopt a son to bear his name, and often talked the matter over
with his old dame. But being so dreadfully poor both thought it best not
to adopt, until they had bettered their condition and increased the area
of their land. For all the property Bimbo owned was the earth in a little
gully, which he himself was reclaiming. A tiny rivulet, flowing from a
spring in the crevice of the rocks above, after trickling over the
boulders, rolled down the gully to join a brook in the larger valley
below. Bimbo had with great labor, after many years, made dams or
terraces of stone, inside which he had thrown soil, partly got from the
mountain sides, but mainly carried in baskets on the backs of himself and
his wife, from the valley below. By such weary toil, continued year in
and year out, small beds of soil were formed, in which rice could be
planted and grown. The little rivulet supplied the needful water; for
rice, the daily food of laborer and farmer, must be planted and
cultivated in soft mud under water. So the little rivulet, which once
leaped over the rock and cut its way singing to the valley, now spread
itself quietly over each terrace, making more than a dozen descents
before it reached the fields below.

Yet after all his toil for a score of years, working every day from the
first croak of the raven, until the stars came out, Bimbo and his wife
owned only three _tan_ (3/4 acre) of terrace land. Sometimes a summer
would pass, and little or no rain fall. Then the rivulet dried up and
crops failed. It seemed all in vain that their backs were bent and their
foreheads seamed and wrinkled with care. Many a time did Bimbo have hard
work of it even to pay his taxes, which sometimes amounted to half his
crop. Many a time did he shake his head, muttering the discouraged
farmer's proverb "A new field gives a scant crop," the words of which
mean also, "Human life is but fifty years."

One summer day after a long drought, when the young rice sprouts, just
transplanted were turning yellow at the tips, the clouds began to gather
and roll, and soon a smart shower fell, the lightning glittered, and the
hills echoed with claps of thunder. But Bimbo, hoe in hand, was so glad
to se