passing time." But in Riugu there is no sun to mark the day, nor moon the month, but there, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.
Hence we have one of the forms of the ubiquitous Rip Van Winkle myth which concerns itself with Riugu. Urashima the fisher boy, who treats kindly all animal life, and allows the tortoise to go free, is transported at the invitation of the daughter of Kai-Riu-ō to Riu-Gu. As favored lover, he spends what he supposes to be several happy days down amid the treasures of the realms of the deep. When, finally, moved by filial affection, he secures permission to visit his old home, he is given a casket and warned on no account to open it. Returning to his native village, where the dogs bark at him, and the children laugh at the antique figure, he finds that no one knows him. But an old man in the last stages of senility and decrepitude answers his anxious questions by telling him that, seven or eight centuries ago, a family of his name lived in the village. The house had fallen to ruins long ago, but among the mossy and lichened stones of the Temple gi-aveyard he finds, nearly obliterated, "the names he loved to hear." Overcome with loneliness, and possessed with curiosity, he opens the casket, only to find a purple vapor issuing. In a moment he becomes stiffened in senile decrepitude, a long white beard sweeps his bosom, and he discovers himself an old man and soon dies of grief.
In one case a hero descends into a submarine paradise, which, strange to say, is in fresh water and in central Japan. A great dragon-centipede which has ravaged the neighborhood of a mountain near Lake Biwa is overcome by the arrow of the invincible archer, who succeeds in killing the monster, after several arrows have bounded back harmlessly, by moistening the point of one shaft with his saliva. Here, we have an illustration of the human saliva-charm, once so common in our own country. Among the presents which he receives in the world beneath the waters are a large bronze bowl, a sword, a suit of armor, a roll of silk, which is always the same length, no matter how much is cut from it, and a bag of rice, which, though he feeds his whole concourse of retainers from it, is never exhausted while he lives.
Time and space would fail to tell the details of the set of
