From Kurobane we go to Sesshoseki. Joboji had lent me a horse, and the man leading it said to me, "Please write down a poem for me." He seemed to me to have surprisingly refined tastes for a groom, so I wrote:

Cutting across the moor,
Draw still the horse you lead along -
Hear the wood thrush again.

Sesshoseki turned out to be slightly off toward the loom of the mountains from the Hot Springs of nasu. The stone itself retains its poisonous properties, and such insects as bees and butterflies lay dead around it so thickly that we could scarcely see the sand underneath. The willow that Priest Saigyo wrote of, "Rippling in the pure spring water," is at the village of Ashino, where it still grows on the ridge between two paddyfields. The magistrate of this area had sometimes said to me, "I wish that I could show you that will of of Saigyo's," and I had wondered just where it might be. And today I have actually come and stood in its shade.

Planted, the single field -
All too soon I must leave the shade
Of Saigyo's willow.