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neighbourhood of seven ponds in the mountains of Eniima, a 

 district of Kaga province, many strange things happened. There 

 were people who said that they had heard there the voices of.several 

 hundreds of men in the midst of the night, and that they had 

 seen these men lighting torches upon the ponds. Anglers had 

 seen the water rising without any visible reason, and the more 

 they retreated, the higher the water rose, till they at last 

 stopped angling and fled home as fast as their legs could carry 

 them. When looking back at a distance of one or two cho from 

 the ponds, they saw a silver-dragon (^^f|) in the shape of 

 a boy {ginryU no warahegata, ^ ^) appearing above the water. 

 There was a road between these ponds, from where sometimes 

 a huge face dashed forth; and one night it was as if men were 

 fighting there. 



In times of drought the people worshipped these ponds and 

 there prayed for rain. One day a little girl was found there by 

 the inhabitants' of a neighbouring monastery. They took her 

 home and educated her, but after twelve years she constantly 

 uttered the wish to make a pilgrimage to Ise, and although she 

 received the answer that this did not agree with the law of the 

 empire (as she was a woman), she persisted in speaking about 

 it. At last her foster-fathers gave in, secretly hired a sedan-chair 

 and let her go to Ise. She went off gladly, but when she came 

 at a lake, she said: "This must be my lake, take me to the 

 bank", and when the sedan-chair carriers did so, she alighted, 

 adjusted her clothes and said: "I am well acquainted here; you 

 can go home". Then with her beautiful garments on she jumped 

 into the water and disappeared in the deep. She was a beautiful 

 girl, but her face was long (a sign of something unnatural '). 

 Although the author does not state it, this was apparently a 

 female dragon, temporarily transformed into a girl. 



Another dragon-woman lived in the so-called Kope-pond (Nawa 

 ga ike, |^ >!f '/|fe^ ) in Etchti province. This was a pond in the 

 mountains, about two ri in diameter. Heavy storms and rains often 

 raged in this vicinity, when everywhere around splendid weather 

 prevailed. Down to the author's time the dragon-woman was said 

 to live in the pond and to cause its never drying up ; and his con- 

 temporaries still ascribed to her a great influence on the weather ^ 



1 Bewitching Women are often described as having extraordinarily long faces. Of. 

 Sanshu kidan, Ch. I, p. 673, where a gigantic woman with a huge face is supposed 

 to be a fox or a tanuki, at any rate the vital spirit ( y^ ) of an old creature. 



2 Ibidem, Ch. V, p. 839. 



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