someone to weave cloth for you,” said the girl. “Won’t you please let me live here and weave for you?”
Yosaku was very pleased because he did need someone to help him. He showed the girl the weaving room and she started to work at the loom with cotton. At the end of the day Yosaku went to see what she had done, and was very surprised to find that she had woven eight long pieces of cloth, enough to make eight kimono. He had never known anyone could weave so much in a single day.
“How ever did you weave so much cloth?” he asked the girl.
But instead of answering him, she said, “You mustn’t ask me that. And you must never come into the weaving room while I am at work.”
But Yosaku was very curious. So one day he slipped quietly to the weaving room and peeped in the window. What he saw really surprised him! It was not the girl who was seated at the loom, but a large spider, weaving very fast with its eight legs, and for thread it was using its own spider web, which came out of its mouth.
Yosaku looked again and saw that it was the same spider that he had saved from the snake. Then he understood. The spider had been so thankful that it had wanted to do something to help him. So it had turned itself into a beautiful girl to help him weave cloth. By eating the cotton that was in the weaving room, it could spin it into thread and weave it into cloth very, very quickly.
Yosaku was very grateful for the spider’s help. He saw that the cotton was almost used up, so the next morning he set out for the nearest village, on the other side of the mountains, to buy some more. He bought a big bundle of cotton and started home, carrying it on his back.
Along the way a terrible thing happened. As Yosaku sat down to rest, the same snake that he’d driven away from the spider came and slipped inside the bundle of cotton. But Yosaku didn’t know about this. So he carried the cotton home and gave it to the girl.
She was very glad to get the cotton, because she had now used up all the cotton that was left. So she took it and went to the weaving room.
As soon as the girl was inside the weaving room she turned back into a spider and began eating the cotton so that she could spin it into thread. The spider ate and ate and ate, and then suddenly, when it had eaten down to the bottom of the bundle—the snake jumped right out of the cotton and straight at her!
The snake opened its mouth wide to swallow the spider. The spider was very frightened and jumped out the window, but the snake went wriggling after it. But the spider had eaten so much cotton that it couldn’t run fast, and the snake soon caught up with it. Again the snake opened its mouth wide to gulp the spider down. But just then a wonderful thing happened.
Old Man Sun, up in the sky, had been watching what was happening. He knew how kind the spider had been to Yosaku and he felt very sorry for the poor little spider. So he reached down with a sunbeam and caught hold of the end of the web that was sticking out of the spider’s mouth, and he gently lifted the spider high up into the sky, where the snake couldn’t reach her.
The spider was very grateful to Old Man Sun for saving her from the snake. And so she used all the cotton inside her body to weave many beautiful, fleecy clouds high up in the sky.
This is the reason, they say, why clouds are soft and white like cotton, and also why a spider and a cloud are both called by the same name in Japan—kumo.
Little One-Inch
There was once a kindly couple who had no children. One day they went to a shrine and prayed for a baby, saying, “Oh, please give us a child. We want a child very badly.”
On their way home from the shrine, they heard a tiny crying sound coming from a patch of grass. They looked in the grass, and there they found a tiny little baby boy, wrapped in a bright red blanket. “This child has come in answer to our prayers,” they said. So they took the little baby home with them and raised him as their son.
Now this baby was so tiny that he wasn’t as large as your thumb, and even as he grew older he stayed the same size. He was just about an inch tall, so the couple named him Little One-Inch.
One day, when he had grown older, Little One-Inch said to his mother and father, “Thank you very much for raising me so well. But now I must go out into the world and make my fortune.”
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