he felt that the power of his million koku , of which he had been sensible up to this time, was vanishing away utterly like the smoke rising from the end of his pure gold pipe.
According to men now grown old, in the Maeda family, after Narihiro, both Nariyasu and Noriyasu used only brass pipes, and this may well have been the result of a deathbed warning left to his descendants by Narihiro, whose pure gold pipe had taught him a lesson.