wned nowhere.

"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the
policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be
painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her
back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that
she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of
Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful
Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side;
and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight
hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_
(vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or
more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog;
but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.

His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of
newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the
garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the
little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on
"Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?

"The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from
the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the
neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises
the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the
South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies
of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing;
wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy
repairing their damaged habitations....

"... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy.
They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great
trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads
washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other
visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean
town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to
attempt an essay on Ants."

After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful
woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants,
and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his
ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants'
talk, he wou