Thus was it that these little songs, composed in different generations
and in different parts of Japan by various persons, seemed to shape
themselves for me into the ghost of a romance,--into the shadow of a
story needing no name of time or place or person, because eternally the
same, in all times and places.
*
Manyemon asks which of the songs I like best; and I turn over his
manuscript again to see if I can make a choice. Without, in the bright
spring air, the washers are working; and I hear the heavy _pon-pon_
of the beating of wet robes, regular as the beating of a heart.
Suddenly, as I muse, the voice of the boy soars up in one long, clear,
shrill, splendid rocket-tone,--and breaks,--and softly trembles down
in coruscations of fractional notes; singing the song that Manyemon
remembers hearing when he himself was a boy:--
_Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:_
_The flowing of water, the Way of Love._
"I think that is the best," I said. "It is the soul of all the rest."
"Hin no nusubito, koi no uta," interpretatively murmurs Manyemon. "Even
as out of poverty comes the thief, so out of love the song!"