A Muramasa Blade by Louis Wertheimber — Read

Under such surroundings grew up the fairest maiden to be found in the province of Kuwana. All who had seen her were unanimous in according this tribute to O Tetsu. The people often wondered how such a beautiful, lovely being could spring from such a coarse, knotted stock, even when her mother's fair, delicate nature was grafted upon it. There are many points of beauty for which the daughters of Japan have always been favored beyond those of most other nations. In no country probably will there be found so many possessing those delicate hands and feet, that gloriously beautiful neck, and those bright, shining eyes which seem to be the birth-right of the maidens of the Land of the Rising Sun. All these advantages and many others were found to perfection in O Tetsu; and she added to them a grace of movement and a witchery of manner which caused the poets of the court to lament the poverty of their language, because it failed to supply them with adequate terms to describe all these endearing qualities to their satisfaction. Fair and fresh and beautiful as a summer morn, graceful as a Japanese lily, with wonderful eyes, lustrous and brilliant, and shining with a peculiar humid brightness which suffused or rather covered them as if with a refulgent and yet a transparent veil, and with a voice whose sweet melody, if you were young and impressionable, lingered in your ears for days and weeks after you heard it, O Tetsu might well lay claim to be considered peerless throughout the land.

Her hands and feet might have belonged to a child half her age, and her form was slight and delicate; yet she was no tender, hothouse plant, but in reality strong and robust. When on cold, frosty winter mornings, the ground being covered with snow, she walked out with her bare feet thrust into high-heeled _getas_, her rich, warm blood mantling neck and face, she looked a picture of physical health, and formed a striking contrast to many damsels whose coarser build did not prevent them from shivering, and showing hands and feet and noses that were blue and ugly with the cold. In spite of her generally mild and demure looks, there was something of her father's nature in her after all,-a certain imperious way, which, rarely displayed, might have been taken for a faint, a very faint, counterpart of the old smith's headstrong obstinacy. There was some slight resemblance between them also in outward looks,-a resemblance in general hardly conceivable, but which became apparent in O Tetsu when her eyes were momentarily closed. Then her small mouth and chin showed its resolute cast, and the whole outline of the face was not lacking in a certain determined look, which, as shrewd observers said, would have developed into something of a temper if circumstances had favored it. All these latent traits, however, were not visible, or failed to be noticed, when you saw her eyes-those beautiful eyes, with their unfathomable depth of bright, roguish tenderness. Although her father doted on her, yet the stern, fierce nature of his strong and powerful individuality rendered disobedience or self-willed pertinacity an impossibility, and the girl's feminine graces were thus saved from being marred by tendencies which a different education might have aggravated into faults.