the man's whole body was thin and worn, and the eyes sunken and dim;
and in that poor ghost that was before him he recognised the very priest
whom he had thrown into the sea at Kuana. Chilled with horror, he looked
again, and saw that the priest was smiling in scorn. He would have fled
into the house, but the ghost stretched forth its withered arm, and,
clutching the back of his neck, scowled at him with a vindictive glare
and a hideous ghastliness of mien so unspeakably awful that any ordinary
man would have swooned with fear. But Tokubei, tradesman though he was,
had once been a soldier, and was not easily matched for daring; so he
shook off the ghost, and, leaping into the room for his dirk, laid about
him boldly enough; but, strike as he would, the spirit, fading into the
air, eluded his blows, and suddenly reappeared only to vanish again;
and from that time forth Tokubei knew no rest, and was haunted night and
day.

At length, undone by such ceaseless vexation, Tokubei fell ill, and
kept muttering, "Oh, misery! misery! the wandering priest is coming to
torture me!" Hearing his moans and the disturbance he made, the
people in the house fancied he was mad, and called in a physician, who
prescribed for him. But neither pill nor potion could cure Tokubei,
whose strange frenzy soon became the talk of the whole neighbourhood.

Now it chanced that the story reached the ears of a certain wandering
priest who lodged in the next street. When he heard the particulars,
this priest gravely shook his head as though he knew all about it,
and sent a friend to Tokubei's house to say that a wandering priest,
dwelling hard by, had heard of his illness, and, were it never so
grievous, would undertake to heal it by means of his prayers; and
Tokubei's wife, driven half wild by her husband's sickness, lost not
a moment in sending for the priest and taking him into the sick man's