Elfishly small my habitation might be, but never too small, because I should have neither size nor form. I should be only a vibration,--a motion invisible as of ether or of magnetism; though able sometimes to shape me a shadow-body, in the likeness of my former visible self, when I should wish to make apparition.
As air to the bird, as water to the fish, so would all substance be permeable to the essence of me. I should pass at will through the walls of my dwelling to swim in the long gold bath of a sunbeam, to thrill in the heart of a flower, to ride on the neck of a dragon-fly.
Power above life and power over death would be mine,--and the power of self-extension, and the power of self-multiplication, and the power of being in all places at one and the same moment. Simultaneously in a hundred homes I should hear myself worshiped, I should inhale the vapor of a hundred offerings: each evening, from my place within a hundred household shrines, I should see the holy lights lighted for me in lamplets of red clay, in lamplets of brass,--the lights of the Kami, kindled with purest fire and fed with purest oil.
But in my yashiro upon the hill I should have greatest honor: there betimes I should gather the multitude of my selves together; there should I unify my powers to answer supplication.
From the dusk of my ghost-house I should look for the coming of sandaled feet, and watch brown supple fingers weaving to my bars the knotted papers which are records of vows, and observe the motion of the lips of my worshipers making prayer:--
_--"Harai-tamai kiyomé-tamaé!_ ... We have beaten drums, we have lighted fires; yet the land thirsts and the rice fails. Deign out of thy divine pity to give us rain, O Daimyōjin!"
_--"Harai-tamai kiyomé-tamaé!_ ... I am dark, too dark, because I have toiled in the field, because the sun hath looked upon me. Deign thou augustly to make me white, very white,--white like the women of the city, O Daimyōjin!"
_--"Harai-tamai kiyomê-tamaé!_... For Tsukamoto Motokichi our son, a soldier of twenty-nine: that he may conquer and come back quickly to us,--soon, very soon,--we humbly supplicate, O Daimyōjin!"
Sometimes a girl would whisper all her heart to me: "Maiden of eighteen years, I am loved by a youth of twenty. He is good; he is true; but poverty is with us, and the path of our love is dark. Aid us with thy great divine pity!--help us that we may become united, O Daimyōjin!" Then to the bars of my shrine she would hang a thick soft tress of hair,--her own hair, glossy and black as the wing of the crow, and bound with a cord of mulberry-paper. And in the fragrance of that offering,--the simple fragrance of her peasant youth,--I, the ghost and god, should find again the feelings of the years when I was man and lover.