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moreover, which had taken the head of General Sanada Saemon, belonged to Lord Tadanao. There was no doubt of that.

The flower-patterned tea canister and the title of ‘the Fan Kuai of Japan’ had made a deep impression on Lord Tadanao’s mind. He regarded them together as a twin testimonial to his pre-eminent merit.

It was exhilarating. He felt as if all 120 daimyō and lesser lords in that room were gazing upon Lord Tadanao in wide-eyed wonder and admiration.

Until now he had been proud to think himself a finer man than any of his retainers. But it was not really satisfactory, this measuring himself only by those who were his subordinates. Now, taken by the hand and cordially welcomed by no less a person than His Excellency, he was being singled out for praise before all the lords in the land.

Lords Yoshinao and Yorinobu, who were his own uncles, had won no particular distinction. Another uncle, Lord Tadateru, Chamberlain of Echigo, had failed to take any part in the fighting on the seventh and had positively fallen into disgrace. Even the honours won by the great and celebrated clans of Date, Maeda, and Kuroda paled to insignificance, to less than the gleam of fireflies before a full moon, when set beside those of the Echizen household.

When he thought in this way, Lord Tadanao’s sense of superiority, which had been momentarily unsettled on that one occasion by Ieyasu’s cutting rebuke, not only miraculously recovered all its former strength, but went on, by a process of violent reaction, to become something far more splendid and unshakeable than it had ever been before.

Thus Lord Tadanao, daimyō of Echizen, taking with him the proud consciousness of being the foremost hero in the land, withdrew from Kyoto in the eighth month of that year, and returned in a most exalted frame of mind to his castle-seat at Fukui.