whether the boats were for men or for lice. Of course in such a plethora, scores of the pests swarmed upon their clothes. And whenever they so much as touched the skin of a man, they were straightway elated and fell to till he tingled. Had there been but some five or ten of the vermin, they might somehow or other have been brought under control, but since, as already stated, there were so many that they looked like a sprinkling of white sesame, there was no possible hope of cleaning them out. Wherefore, in the Tsukuda party and the Yamagishi party alike, the bodies of all the samurai in the boats swelled red with bites all over on breast and abdomen and everywhere, just as if they had the measles.
But impossible as it was to bring the lice under control, it was still more impossible to let them go on unmolested. So the people in the boats spent their leisure time hunting. All of them, from the chief retainers to the sandal bearers, stripped themselves and went about, each with a teacup, picking up the ubiquitous lice and putting them into it. Were he to imagine thirty-odd samurai, each dressed in but a loincloth, with his teacup in his hand, searching with all his might here and there under the rigging and beneath the anchor in each Kompira boat with sails alight in the winter sunshine of the Inland Sea, any man in these days would at once think it a great joke, but it was no less true before the Restoration than it is now that in the face of necessity everything becomes serious. So these boats full of naked samurai, each one himself like a great louse, abode the cold and went about patiently day after day diligently crushing the lice on the decks.