65



Diaries of Court Ladies

fleeted in the mirror offered to the Hase Temple
[about twenty-five years before by her mother] where
some one was seen weeping in agony. The reflection of
the happier one had not been reaUzed. That could
never be in the future.
On the twenty-third we burnt his remains with de-
spairing hearts, my boy, who went down with him
last Autumn, being dressed exquisitely and much at-
tended, followed the bier weeping in black clothes with
hateful things [mourning insignia] on them. My feel-
ing when I saw him going out can never be expressed. I
seemed to wander in dreams and thought that human
life must soon cease here. If I had not given myself
up to idle fictions [she herself had written several]
and poetry, but had practised religious austerities
night and day, I would not have seen such a dream-
world.
At Hase Temple a cedar branch was cast down to
me by the Inari god and this thing [the loss of her
husband] would not have happened if I had visited
the Inari shrine on my way home. The dreams which
I had seen in these past years which bid me pray to
the Heaven Illuminating Honoured Goddess meant
that I should have been in the Imperial Court as a
nurse, sheltered behind the favour of the King and
Queen — so the dream interpreter interpreted my
dream, but I could not realize this. Only the sorrow-
ful reflection in the mirror was realized unaltered. O
pitiful and sorrowful I ! Thus nothing could happen as
I willed, and I wandered in this world doing no vir-
tuous deed for the future life.
