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There lives a great painter, Joan, who paints pictures that nobody else in the wide world can paint. He is growing old, but he is not too old to take trouble still. Once, when he was a young man, he drew a lemon-tree far away in Italy.
Then the man ran on; and the Buso came nearer and nearer, searching behind every rock as he rushed along, and spying up into every tree, to see if, perchance, the man were concealed there. At last the man came to the lemon-tree called kabayawa, that has long, sharp thorns on its branches.
The clear tanks, full of ever-running water and lined with maiden-hair fern, moved with gold-fish, which matched the oranges; a pet monkey played amongst the lemons on a lemon-tree; a green parrot nodded to us from a bower of pink almond blossom.
I shall never forget how you walked bare-footed to the Black River, to ask pardon for the poor run-away slave. Here, my beloved, take this flowering branch of a lemon-tree, which I have gathered in the forest: you will let it remain at night near your bed. Eat this honey-comb too, which I have taken for you from the top of a rock. But first lean on my bosom, and I shall be refreshed."
He was but just recovered from an illness, or he had gone also in chains to die for he knew not what, leaving behind without hope all that he loved: "How has the cloud fallen, and the leaf withered on the tree, The lemon-tree, that standeth by the door. The melon and the date have gone bitter to the taste, The weevil, it has eaten at the core The core of my heart, the mildew findeth it.
In a little mildewed court, where one patch of light did indeed slope upon a lemon-tree loaded with fruit and flowers, I found my man in a droll pass with his young wife. He was, in fact, tiring her hair in the open: nothing more; nevertheless there was that air of mystery in the performance which made me at once squeamish of going further, and afraid to withdraw.
It was only a little lemon-tree, but the artist rose morning after morning and drew it leaf by leaf, twig by twig, until every leaf and bud and lemon and bough had appeared. It was not labored and false; it was grand because it was true: a joy forever; work Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost Oriental.
Soon the woman sat down on the big rice mortar, and said to Lumabat, "Now I am going down below the earth, down to Gimokudan. Down there I shall begin to shake the lemon-tree. Whenever I shake it, somebody up on the earth will die. If the fruit shaken down be ripe, then an old person will die on the earth; but if the fruit fall green, the one to die will be young."
Stars that looked upon her early in the night had gone down into blue abysms below the horizon, and the midnight song of a mocking-bird, swinging in a lemon-tree beneath her window, had long since hushed itself with the chirp of crickets and gossip of the katydids. A tap on the facing of her open door finally aroused her, and she hastily attempted to hide her work, as Dr. Grey asked,
Thus every stomach in the tribe becomes, in effect, a sort of family burial-plot. I was unable to ascertain why the victim is compelled to throw himself from a lemon-tree. It struck me that some taller tree, like a palm, would better accomplish the desired result. A matter of custom, doubtless. Perhaps that explains why we dub persons who are passé "lemons."
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