* * * * *

A terrible picture of fierce heroism which it is impossible not to admire.  In the Japanese mind this feeling of admiration is unmixed, and hence it is that the forty-seven Ronins receive almost divine honours.  Pious hands still deck their graves with green boughs and burn incense upon them; the clothes and arms which they wore are preserved carefully in a fire-proof store-house attached to the temple, and exhibited yearly to admiring crowds, who behold them probably with little less veneration than is accorded to the relics of Aix-la-Chapelle or Treves; and once in sixty years the monks of Sengakuji reap quite a harvest for the good of their temple by holding a commemorative fair or festival, to which the people flock during nearly two months.

A silver key once admitted me to a private inspection of the relics.  We were ushered, my friend and myself, into a back apartment of the spacious temple, overlooking one of those marvellous miniature gardens, cunningly adorned with rockeries and dwarf trees, in which the Japanese delight.  One by one, carefully labelled and indexed boxes containing the precious articles were brought out and opened by the chief priest.  Such a curious medley of old rags and scraps of metal and wood!  Home-made chain armour, composed of wads of leather secured together by pieces of iron, bear witness to the secrecy with which the Ronins made ready for the fight.  To have bought armour would have attracted attention, so they made it with their own hands.  Old moth-eaten surcoats, bits of helmets, three flutes, a writing-box that must have been any age at the time of the tragedy, and is now tumbling to pieces; tattered trousers of what once was rich silk brocade, now all unravelled and befringed; scraps of leather, part of an old gauntlet, crests and badges, bits of sword handles, spear-heads and dirks, the latter all red with rust, but with certain patches more deeply stained as if the fatal clots of blood were never to be blotted out:  all these were reverently shown to us.  Among the confusion and litter were a number of documents, Yellow with age and much worn at the folds.  One was a plan of Kotsuke no Suke’s house, which one of the Ronins obtained by marrying the daughter of the builder who designed it.  Three of the manuscripts appeared to me so curious that I obtained leave to have copies taken of them.

The first is the receipt given by the retainers of Kotsuke no Suke’s son in return for the head of their lord’s father, which the priests restored to the family, and runs as follows:—­

“MEMORANDUM:—­
ITEM.  ONE HEAD. 
ITEM.  ONE PAPER PARCEL. 
The above articles are acknowledged to have been received. 
Signed, { SAYADA MAGOBELI. (Loc. sigill.)
{ SAITO KUNAI. (Loc. sigill.)

“To the priests deputed from the Temple Sengakuji,
His Reverence SEKISHI,
His Reverence ICHIDON.”