A Japanese miscellany - University of Oregon

244 Japanese Miscellany
The tablets and the scroll signified more to
her faith in former time — very much more —
than remembrance of a father's affection and a
mother's caress; — more than any remembrance
of the ever-loving, ever-patient, ever-smiling
elders who had fostered her babyhood, carried
her pickaback to every temple-festival, invented
her pleasures, consoled her small sorrows, and
soothed her fretfulness with song;— more than
the memory of the laughter and the tears, the
cooing and the calling and the running of the
dear and mischievous little brother ; — more than
all the traditions of the ancestors.
For those objects signified the actual viewless
presence of the lost, — the haunting of invisible
sympathy and tenderness, — the gladness and
the grief of the dead in the joy and the sorrow
of the living. When, in other time, at evening
dusk, she was wont to kindle the lamplet before
them, how often had she seen the tiny flame
astir with a motion not its own!
Yet the thai is even more than a token to
pious fancy. Strange possibilities of transmuta-
tion, transubstantiation, belong to it. It serves
as temporary body for the spirit between death