In fact, the name of such tales is legion. Fox stories-not necessarily vouched for, of course, but still deemed worthy of mention-are related in the same newspapers which chronicle sober facts and new scientific inventions. Nor has the twentieth century witnessed any abatement in the popular belief. The result was that the phantom was at last caught up, when, lo and behold! nothing but a crushed fox was found beneath the engine-wheels. The engine-driver of the real train, seeing all his signals to be useless, put on a tremendous speed. The phantom train seemed to be coming towards a real train which happened to be running in the opposite direction, but yet never got any nearer to it. In 1889, a tale was widely circulated and believed of a fox having taken the shape of a railway train on the Tōkyō-Yokohama line. One or two mentions of magic foxes occur in the Uji Shūi, a story book of the eleventh century and since that time the belief has spread and grown, till there is not an old woman in the land-or, for the matter of that, scarcely a man either-who has not some circumstantial fox story to relate as having happened to some one who is at least the acquaintance of an acquaintance. Chinese notions concerning the superhuman powers of the fox, and in a lesser degree of the badger and the dog, entered Japan during the early Middle Ages.
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