other hand, he dropped cheerful remarks about being sorry to give his disciple so much trouble every time he took his meals. In his heart, of course, he was waiting for his disciple to talk him over and get him to try it. And naturally the disciple could not be unaware of the Naigu’s scheme. But the feelings that made him adopt such a scheme must have moved the disciple’s sympathy more strongly than did his own antipathy to it. The disciple, as the Naigu had expected, began eagerly to urge him to try the method. And the Naigu himself, also in accordance with his expectation, finally followed this earnest counsel.
The method was the very simple one of just boiling his nose in hot water and letting someone trample on it.
Water was boiled daily in the temple bathroom. So the disciple poured water so hot that he could not stand his finger in it directly into a bucket and brought it from the bathroom. But there was a fear of the steam scalding the Naigu’s face if he dipped his nose directly into the bucket. So they decided to make a hole in a tray and, putting it on the bucket for a cover, to insert his nose through the hole into the hot water. If he soaked only his nose in the water, it did not feel hot at all. After a while, the disciple said,
“It must be boiled now, I think.”
The Naigu smiled a forced smile. This was because he thought that if anyone heard only that, he would never imagine that it was a remark about a nose. After being steamed in the boiling water, it itched as if it had been bitten by fleas.
When the Naigu had drawn his nose out of the hole in the tray, the disciple began with all his might to trample it, still steaming, with both his feet. The Naigu, lying on his side and stretching out his nose on the floor boards, watched the disciple’s feet moving up and down before his eyes. From time to time the disciple looked down with a pitying face on the Naigu’s bald head and said,