compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease.
Yukiko cut off her hair, and became a mendicant-nun,—taking the religious name of Dassetsu. She had an ihai (mortuary tablet) made, bearing the kaimyō of her dead mistress,—“Myō-Kō-In-Den Chizan-Ryō-Fu Daishi”;—and this she carried about with her in all her wanderings; and every day before it she humbly besought the dead for pardon, and performed a Buddhist service in order that the jealous spirit might find rest. But the evil karma that had rendered such an affliction possible could not soon be exhausted. Every night at the Hour of the Ox, the hands never failed to torture her, during more than seventeen years,—according to the testimony of those persons to whom she last told her story, when she stopped for one evening at the house of Noguchi Dengozayémon, in the village of Tanaka in the district of Kawachi in the province of Shimotsuké. This was in the third year of Kōkwa (1846). Thereafter nothing more was ever heard of her.
