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on top of which a number of dishes for mixing paint had been arranged in order. Beside them, five paintbrushes had been placed with their necks neatly lined up on the cover of an inkstone case. Right in the middle of the blanket, a sheet of brand new white paper on which nothing had been painted was spread out just as neatly. It was thought that he had been just intending to take up his brush when he remembered something he had to attend to, had stepped down into the doma , and had passed away there just like that.
    "Was Hosen-san painting pictures in his later years?'' I asked Senzo Onoe.
    "I don't think he was painting any more. But he was a painter at heart, so I guess it must have been on his mind, even when he had a hunch that he was going to die. Some people might say that he was going to paint, but he was missing three fingers, so it wouldn't have been easy to paint anything worth mentioning," he replied.
    That was the last of the counterfeiter, but there was something in that story that struck me. Onoe had said that drawing paper without a single brush stroke on it had been spread out and ready, but I had the feeling that he really had no intention of painting a picture at that time. I felt rather that he only wanted to surround himself with his painting gear.
    I listened to this tale of Hosen Hara to the end, and when I got up to leave, Senzo Onoe said, as though he had suddenly remembered something, "By the way, inside a cabinet in the storeroom of your house there are some things Uncle Hosen wrote. I think there's something he wrote about fireworks. Those things were found at the time of his funeral, and some of the young boys must have thought they might be of use some day and stored them in the Assembly Hall."
    There was one cabinet in the storeroom of the house I had rented which we had not touched and had left alone as promised when I had leased the house. I didn't know what was in it but had guessed that it must contain things that were owned jointly by the young people of the village.
    On returning home, I opened that cabinet. An account book of festival receipts, minutes of a youth conference, drafts of speeches—trash of that sort was crammed into it. In among these things, I discovered a notebook of bound Japanese rice-paper with the words Outline of Procedures Governing the Manufacture of Pyrotechnics skillfully written, by brush of course, on the cover. The title was pretentious, but these things appeared to be something like memoranda which Hosen Hara had written himself on the making of fireworks. When I opened up the notebook and looked at a page, there was a heading, "Fog Blooms; Red Fog; Snowfall," with this formula underneath:
"In order to make stars, prepare a saffron core and set it aside to dry; then add clay to chrysanthemum powder, * mix with water, add 1 magnesium, and stir in a mortar; wrap the resulting paste around the core in layers; after the core is well covered with the paste, sprinkle with a mixture made from 15 oz. of chrysanthemum and 1½ oz. of seed. ** Roll the ball well and repeat this process several times. When it gets to be four or five inches, add a booster. Be sure to dry the ball in the sun after each application. Cores of 5¾ inches and 7½ inches can be used."
    Very unclear passages like this covered three pages. Then followed paragraphs on combinations of saffron and combinations of chrysanthemum. Proportions for each kind of explosive were written by brush in red. Then followed sections on the manufacture of "Roman Candles," "Floral Cores," "Firetails," etc. Of course these were Hosen's memoranda to himself, but to me, who had absolutely no knowledge of fireworks, they were completely incomprehensible. There was a sheet of Japanese rice-paper stuffed between one set of interleaves. I opened it and looked at it. It was Hosen's own curriculum vitae , a personal statement of interest to me for very special reasons.
    "Born: October 3, 1874; Senjiro (pen-name: Hosen) Hara,"