Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/83

boyhood days, particularly the fourteenth of December of more than twenty years ago, when we little boys used to gather in the prayer-room of Kojoji Temple, and read, all through the night, the whole history of the loyal spirits of those forty-seven ronins under the candle lights which burned well to encourage us. How we cried in reading the part of Chikara Oishi, a slip of a boy of sixteen, who, with his father Kuranosuke, most composedly accomplished harakiri after the revenge was realised; we could not help feeling ashamed before him. When the night and also the reading had advanced, the Father of the temple used to offer us rice gruel, as the custom, to warm us up; what a difference between that rice gruel and the roast-beef of the present day! The rice gruel became, it is said, a customary treat (oh, this fourteenth night of December!) for the boys’ party gathered to read about the forty-seven ronins ever since, as history or story tells us, Matsudaira Mutsu no Kami, the Prince of Sendai, first treated the ronins to rice gruel at dawn, that is on the fifteenth, when they passed before his palace