8130	----	GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN First Series by LAFCADIO HEARN (dedication) TO THE FRIENDS WHOSE KINDNESS ALONE RENDERED POSSIBLE MY SOJOURN IN THE ORIENT, PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N. AND BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ. Emeritus Professor of Philology and Japanese in the Imperial University of Tokyo I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES IN TOKEN OF AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE CONTENTS PREFACE 1 MY FIRST DAY IN THE ORIENT 2 THE WRITING OF KOBODAISHI 3 JIZO 4 A PILGRIMAGE TO ENOSHIMA 5 AT THE MARKET OF THE DEAD 6 BON-ODORI 7 THE CHIEF CITY OF THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS 8 KITZUKI: THE MOST ANCIENT SHRINE IN JAPAN 9 IN THE CAVE OF THE CHILDREN'S GHOSTS 10 AT MIONOSEKI 11 NOTES ON KITZUKI 12 AT HINOMISAKI 13 SHINJU 14 YAEGAKI-JINJA 15 KITSUNE PREFACE In the Introduction to his charming Tales of Old Japan, Mr. Mitford wrote in 1871: 'The books which have been written of late years about Japan have either been compiled from official records, or have contained the sketchy impressions of passing travellers. Of the inner life of the Japanese the world at large knows but little: their religion, their superstitions, their ways of thought, the hidden springs by which they move--all these are as yet mysteries.' This invisible life referred to by Mr. Mitford is the Unfamiliar Japan of which I have been able to obtain a few glimpses. The reader may, perhaps, be disappointed by their rarity; for a residence of little more than four years among the people--even by one who tries to adopt their habits and customs--scarcely suffices to enable the foreigner to begin to feel at home in this world of strangeness. None can feel more than the author himself how little has been accomplished in these volumes, and how much remains to do. The popular religious ideas--especially the ideas derived from Buddhism and the curious superstitions touched upon in these sketches are little shared by the educated classes of New Japan. Except as regards his characteristic indifference toward abstract ideas in general and metaphysical speculation in particular, the Occidentalised Japanese of to-day stands almost on the intellectual plane of the cultivated Parisian or Bostonian. But he is inclined to treat with undue contempt all conceptions of the supernatural; and toward the great religious questions of the hour his attitude is one of perfect apathy. Rarely does his university training in modern philosophy impel him to attempt any independent study of relations, either sociological or psychological. For him, superstitions are simply superstitions; their relation to the emotional nature of the people interests him not at all. [1] And this not only because he thoroughly understands that people, but because the class to which he belongs is still unreasoningly, though quite naturally, ashamed of its older beliefs. Most of us who now call ourselves agnostics can recollect the feelings with which, in the period of our fresh emancipation from a faith far more irrational than Buddhism, we looked back upon the gloomy theology of our fathers. Intellectual Japan has become agnostic within only a few decades; and the suddenness of this mental revolution sufficiently explains the principal, though not perhaps all the causes of the present attitude of the superior class toward Buddhism. For the time being it certainly borders upon intolerance; and while such is the feeling even to religion as distinguished from superstition, the feeling toward superstition as distinguished from religion must be something stronger still. But the rare charm of Japanese life, so different from that of all other lands, is not to be found in its Europeanised circles. It is to be found among the great common people, who represent in Japan, as in all countries, the national virtues, and who still cling to their delightful old customs, their picturesque dresses, their Buddhist images, their household shrines, their beautiful and touching worship of ancestors. This is the life of which a foreign observer can never weary, if fortunate and sympathetic enough to enter into it--the life that forces him sometimes to doubt whether the course of our boasted Western progress is really in the direction of moral development. Each day, while the years pass, there will be revealed to him some strange and unsuspected beauty in it. Like other life, it has its darker side; yet even this is brightness compared with the darker side of Western existence. It has its foibles, its follies, its vices, its cruelties; yet the more one sees of it, the more one marvels at its extraordinary goodness, its miraculous patience, its never-failing courtesy, its simplicity of heart, its intuitive charity. And to our own larger Occidental comprehension, its commonest superstitions, however condemned at Tokyo have rarest value as fragments of the unwritten literature of its hopes, its fears, its experience with right and wrong--its primitive efforts to find solutions for the riddle of the Unseen flow much the lighter and kindlier superstitions of the people add to the charm of Japanese life can, indeed, be understood only by one who has long resided in the interior. A few of their beliefs are sinister--such as that in demon-foxes, which public education is rapidly dissipating; but a large number are comparable for beauty of fancy even to those Greek myths in which our noblest poets of today still find inspiration; while many others, which encourage kindness to the unfortunate and kindness to animals, can never have produced any but the happiest moral results. The amusing presumption of domestic animals, and the comparative fearlessness of many wild creatures in the presence of man; the white clouds of gulls that hover about each incoming steamer in expectation of an alms of crumbs; the whirring of doves from temple-eaves to pick up the rice scattered for them by pilgrims; the familiar storks of ancient public gardens; the deer of holy shrines, awaiting cakes and caresses; the fish which raise their heads from sacred lotus-ponds when the stranger's shadow falls upon the water--these and a hundred other pretty sights are due to fancies which, though called superstitious, inculcate in simplest form the sublime truth of the Unity of Life. And even when considering beliefs less attractive than these, superstitions of which the grotesqueness may provoke a smile--the impartial observer would do well to bear in mind the words of Lecky: Many superstitions do undoubtedly answer to the Greek conception of slavish "fear of the Gods," and have been productive of unspeakable misery to mankind; but there are very many others of a different tendency. Superstitions appeal to our hopes as well as our fears. They often meet and gratify the inmost longings of the heart. They offer certainties where reason can only afford possibilities or probabilities. They supply conceptions on which the imagination loves to dwell. They sometimes impart even a new sanction to moral truths. Creating wants which they alone can satisfy, and fears which they alone can quell, they often become essential elements of happiness; and their consoling efficacy is most felt in the languid or troubled hours when it is most needed. We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge. The imagination, which is altogether constructive, probably contributes more to our happiness than the reason, which in the sphere of speculation is mainly critical and destructive. The rude charm which, in the hour of danger or distress, the savage clasps so confidently to his breast, the sacred picture which is believed to shed a hallowing and protecting influence over the poor man's cottage, can bestow a more real consolation in the darkest hour of human suffering than can be afforded by the grandest theories of philosophy. . . . No error can be more grave than to imagine that when a critical spirit is abroad the pleasant beliefs will all remain, and the painful ones alone will perish. That the critical spirit of modernised Japan is now indirectly aiding rather than opposing the efforts of foreign bigotry to destroy the simple, happy beliefs of the people, and substitute those cruel superstitions which the West has long intellectually outgrown--the fancies of an unforgiving God and an everlasting hell--is surely to be regretted. More than hundred and sixty years ago Kaempfer wrote of the Japanese 'In the practice of virtue, in purity of life and outward devotion they far outdo the Christians.' And except where native morals have suffered by foreign contamination, as in the open ports, these words are true of the Japanese to-day. My own conviction, and that of many impartial and more experienced observers of Japanese life, is that Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose. Of the twenty-seven sketches composing these volumes, four were originally purchased by various newspaper syndicates and reappear in a considerably altered form, and six were published in the Atlantic Monthly (1891-3). The remainder forming the bulk of the work, are new. L.H. KUMAMOTO, KYUSHU, JAPAN. May, 1894. GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN by LAFCADIO HEARN Chapter One My First Day in the Orient 'Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible,' said a kind English professor [Basil Hall Chamberlain: PREPARATOR'S NOTE] whom I had the pleasure of meeting soon after my arrival in Japan: 'they are evanescent, you know; they will never come to you again, once they have faded out; and yet of all the strange sensations you may receive in this country you will feel none so charming as these.' I am trying now to reproduce them from the hasty notes of the time, and find that they were even more fugitive than charming; something has evaporated from all my recollections of them--something impossible to recall. I neglected the friendly advice, in spite of all resolves to obey it: I could not, in those first weeks, resign myself to remain indoors and write, while there was yet so much to see and hear and feel in the sun-steeped ways of the wonderful Japanese city. Still, even could I revive all the lost sensations of those first experiences, I doubt if I could express and fix them in words. The first charm of Japan is intangible and volatile as a perfume. It began for me with my first kuruma-ride out of the European quarter of Yokohama into the Japanese town; and so much as I can recall of it is hereafter set down. Sec. 1 It is with the delicious surprise of the first journey through Japanese streets--unable to make one's kuruma-runner understand anything but gestures, frantic gestures to roll on anywhere, everywhere, since all is unspeakably pleasurable and new--that one first receives the real sensation of being in the Orient, in this Far East so much read of, so long dreamed of, yet, as the eyes bear witness, heretofore all unknown. There is a romance even in the first full consciousness of this rather commonplace fact; but for me this consciousness is transfigured inexpressibly by the divine beauty of the day. There is some charm unutterable in the morning air, cool with the coolness of Japanese spring and wind-waves from the snowy cone of Fuji; a charm perhaps due rather to softest lucidity than to any positive tone--an atmospheric limpidity extraordinary, with only a suggestion of blue in it, through which the most distant objects appear focused with amazing sharpness. The sun is only pleasantly warm; the jinricksha, or kuruma, is the most cosy little vehicle imaginable; and the street-vistas, as seen above the dancing white mushroom-shaped hat of my sandalled runner, have an allurement of which I fancy that I could never weary. Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small, and queer, and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes. The illusion is only broken by the occasional passing of a tall foreigner, and by divers shop-signs bearing announcements in absurd attempts at English. Nevertheless such discords only serve to emphasise reality; they never materially lessen the fascination of the funny little streets. 'Tis at first a delightfully odd confusion only, as you look down one of them, through an interminable flutter of flags and swaying of dark blue drapery, all made beautiful and mysterious with Japanese or Chinese lettering. For there are no immediately discernible laws of construction or decoration: each building seems to have a fantastic prettiness of its own; nothing is exactly like anything else, and all is bewilderingly novel. But gradually, after an hour passed in the quarter, the eye begins to recognise in a vague way some general plan in the construction of these low, light, queerly-gabled wooden houses, mostly unpainted, with their first stories all open to the street, and thin strips of roofing sloping above each shop-front, like awnings, back to the miniature balconies of paper-screened second stories. You begin to understand the common plan of the tiny shops, with their matted floors well raised above the street level, and the general perpendicular arrangement of sign-lettering, whether undulating on drapery or glimmering on gilded and lacquered signboards. You observe that the same rich dark blue which dominates in popular costume rules also in shop draperies, though there is a sprinkling of other tints--bright blue and white and red (no greens or yellows). And then you note also that the dresses of the labourers are lettered with the same wonderful lettering as the shop draperies. No arabesques could produce such an effect. As modified for decorative purposes these ideographs have a speaking symmetry which no design without a meaning could possess. As they appear on the back of a workman's frock--pure white on dark blue--and large enough to be easily read at a great distance (indicating some guild or company of which the wearer is a member or employee), they give to the poor cheap garment a fictitious appearance of splendour. And finally, while you are still puzzling over the mystery of things, there will come to you like a revelation the knowledge that most of the amazing picturesqueness of these streets is simply due to the profusion of Chinese and Japanese characters in white, black, blue, or gold, decorating everything--even surfaces of doorposts and paper screens. Perhaps, then, for one moment, you will imagine the effect of English lettering substituted for those magical characters; and the mere idea will give to whatever aesthetic sentiment you may possess a brutal shock, and you will become, as I have become, an enemy of the Romaji-Kwai--that society founded for the ugly utilitarian purpose of introducing the use of English letters in writing Japanese. Sec. 2 An ideograph does not make upon the Japanese brain any impression similar to that created in the Occidental brain by a letter or combination of letters--dull, inanimate symbols of vocal sounds. To the Japanese brain an ideograph is a vivid picture: it lives; it speaks; it gesticulates. And the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such living characters--figures that cry out to the eyes, words that smile or grimace like faces. What such lettering is, compared with our own lifeless types, can be understood only by those who have lived in the farther East. For even the printed characters of Japanese or Chinese imported texts give no suggestion of the possible beauty of the same characters as modified for decorative inscriptions, for sculptural use, or for the commonest advertising purposes. No rigid convention fetters the fancy of the calligrapher or designer: each strives to make his characters more beautiful than any others; and generations upon generations of artists have been toiling from time immemorial with like emulation, so that through centuries and centuries of tireless effort and study, the primitive hieroglyph or ideograph has been evolved into a thing of beauty indescribable. It consists only of a certain number of brush-strokes; but in each stroke there is an undiscoverable secret art of grace, proportion, imperceptible curve, which actually makes it seem alive, and bears witness that even during the lightning-moment of its creation the artist felt with his brush for the ideal shape of the stroke equally along its entire length, from head to tail. But the art of the strokes is not all; the art of their combination is that which produces the enchantment, often so as to astonish the Japanese themselves. It is not surprising, indeed, considering the strangely personal, animate, esoteric aspect of Japanese lettering, that there should be wonderful legends of calligraphy relating how words written by holy experts became incarnate, and descended from their tablets to hold converse with mankind. Sec. 3 My kurumaya calls himself 'Cha.' He has a white hat which looks like the top of an enormous mushroom; a short blue wide-sleeved jacket; blue drawers, close-fitting as 'tights,' and reaching to his ankles; and light straw sandals bound upon his bare feet with cords of palmetto-fibre. Doubtless he typifies all the patience, endurance, and insidious coaxing powers of his class. He has already manifested his power to make me give him more than the law allows; and I have been warned against him in vain. For the first sensation of having a human being for a horse, trotting between shafts, unwearyingly bobbing up and down before you for hours, is alone enough to evoke a feeling of compassion. And when this human being, thus trotting between shafts, with all his hopes, memories, sentiments, and comprehensions, happens to have the gentlest smile, and the power to return the least favour by an apparent display of infinite gratitude, this compassion becomes sympathy, and provokes unreasoning impulses to self-sacrifice. I think the sight of the profuse perspiration has also something to do with the feeling, for it makes one think of the cost of heart-beats and muscle-contractions, likewise of chills, congestions, and pleurisy. Cha's clothing is drenched; and he mops his face with a small sky-blue towel, with figures of bamboo-sprays and sparrows in white upon it, which towel he carries wrapped about his wrist as he runs. That, however, which attracts me in Cha--Cha considered not as a motive power at all, but as a personality--I am rapidly learning to discern in the multitudes of faces turned toward us as we roll through these miniature streets. And perhaps the supremely pleasurable impression of this morning is that produced by the singular gentleness of popular scrutiny. Everybody looks at you curiously; but there is never anything disagreeable, much less hostile in the gaze: most commonly it is accompanied by a smile or half smile. And the ultimate consequence of all these kindly curious looks and smiles is that the stranger finds himself thinking of fairy-land. Hackneyed to the degree of provocation this statement no doubt is: everybody describing the sensations of his first Japanese day talks of the land as fairyland, and of its people as fairy-folk. Yet there is a natural reason for this unanimity in choice of terms to describe what is almost impossible to describe more accurately at the first essay. To find one's self suddenly in a world where everything is upon a smaller and daintier scale than with us--a world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings, all smiling at you as if to wish you well--a world where all movement is slow and soft, and voices are hushed--a world where land, life, and sky are unlike all that one has known elsewhere--this is surely the realisation, for imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a World of Elves. Sec. 4 The traveller who enters suddenly into a period of social change--especially change from a feudal past to a democratic present--is likely to regret the decay of things beautiful and the ugliness of things new. What of both I may yet discover in Japan I know not; but to-day, in these exotic streets, the old and the new mingle so well that one seems to set off the other. The line of tiny white telegraph poles carrying the world's news to papers printed in a mixture of Chinese and Japanese characters; an electric bell in some tea-house with an Oriental riddle of text pasted beside the ivory button, a shop of American sewing-machines next to the shop of a maker of Buddhist images; the establishment of a photographer beside the establishment of a manufacturer of straw sandals: all these present no striking incongruities, for each sample of Occidental innovation is set into an Oriental frame that seems adaptable to any picture. But on the first day, at least, the Old alone is new for the stranger, and suffices to absorb his attention. It then appears to him that everything Japanese is delicate, exquisite, admirable--even a pair of common wooden chopsticks in a paper bag with a little drawing upon it; even a package of toothpicks of cherry-wood, bound with a paper wrapper wonderfully lettered in three different colours; even the little sky-blue towel, with designs of flying sparrows upon it, which the jinricksha man uses to wipe his face. The bank bills, the commonest copper coins, are things of beauty. Even the piece of plaited coloured string used by the shopkeeper in tying up your last purchase is a pretty curiosity. Curiosities and dainty objects bewilder you by their very multitude: on either side of you, wherever you turn your eyes, are countless wonderful things as yet incomprehensible. But it is perilous to look at them. Every time you dare to look, something obliges you to buy it--unless, as may often happen, the smiling vendor invites your inspection of so many varieties of one article, each specially and all unspeakably desirable, that you flee away out of mere terror at your own impulses. The shopkeeper never asks you to buy; but his wares are enchanted, and if you once begin buying you are lost. Cheapness means only a temptation to commit bankruptcy; for the resources of irresistible artistic cheapness are inexhaustible. The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact to yourself, what you really want to buy is not the contents of a shop; you want the shop and the shopkeeper, and streets of shops with their draperies and their inhabitants, the whole city and the bay and the mountains begirdling it, and Fujiyama's white witchery overhanging it in the speckless sky, all Japan, in very truth, with its magical trees and luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe. Now there comes to my mind something I once heard said by a practical American on hearing of a great fire in Japan: 'Oh! those people can afford fires; their houses are so cheaply built.' It is true that the frail wooden houses of the common people can be cheaply and quickly replaced; but that which was within them to make them beautiful cannot--and every fire is an art tragedy. For this is the land of infinite hand-made variety; machinery has not yet been able to introduce sameness and utilitarian ugliness in cheap production (except in response to foreign demand for bad taste to suit vulgar markets), and each object made by the artist or artisan differs still from all others, even of his own making. And each time something beautiful perishes by fire, it is a something representing an individual idea. Happily the art impulse itself, in this country of conflagrations, has a vitality which survives each generation of artists, and defies the flame that changes their labour to ashes or melts it to shapelessness. The idea whose symbol has perished will reappear again in other creations--perhaps after the passing of a century--modified, indeed, yet recognisably of kin to the thought of the past. And every artist is a ghostly worker. Not by years of groping and sacrifice does he find his highest expression; the sacrificial past is within him; his art is an inheritance; his fingers are guided by the dead in the delineation of a flying bird, of the vapours of mountains, of the colours of the morning and the evening, of the shape of branches and the spring burst of flowers: generations of skilled workmen have given him their cunning, and revive in the wonder of his drawing. What was conscious effort in the beginning became unconscious in later centuries--becomes almost automatic in the living man,--becomes the art instinctive. Wherefore, one coloured print by a Hokusai or Hiroshige, originally sold for less than a cent, may have more real art in it than many a Western painting valued at more than the worth of a whole Japanese street. Sec. 5 Here are Hokusai's own figures walking about in straw raincoats, and immense mushroom-shaped hats of straw, and straw sandals--bare-limbed peasants, deeply tanned by wind and sun; and patient-faced mothers with smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their geta (high, noisy, wooden clogs), and robed merchants squatting and smoking their little brass pipes among the countless riddles of their shops. Then I notice how small and shapely the feet of the people are--whether bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny, tiny geta, or feet of young girls in snowy tabi. The tabi, the white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect--the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness. Clad or bare, the Japanese foot has the antique symmetry: it has not yet been distorted by the infamous foot-gear which has deformed the feet of Occidentals. Of every pair of Japanese wooden clogs, one makes in walking a slightly different sound from the other, as kring to krang; so that the echo of the walker's steps has an alternate rhythm of tones. On a pavement, such as that of a railway station, the sound obtains immense sonority; and a crowd will sometimes intentionally fall into step, with the drollest conceivable result of drawling wooden noise. Sec. 6 'Tera e yuke!' I have been obliged to return to the European hotel--not because of the noon-meal, as I really begrudge myself the time necessary to eat it, but because I cannot make Cha understand that I want to visit a Buddhist temple. Now Cha understands; my landlord has uttered the mystical words: 'Tera e yuke!' A few minutes of running along broad thoroughfares lined with gardens and costly ugly European buildings; then passing the bridge of a canal stocked with unpainted sharp-prowed craft of extraordinary construction, we again plunge into narrow, low, bright pretty streets--into another part of the Japanese city. And Cha runs at the top of his speed between more rows of little ark-shaped houses, narrower above than below; between other unfamiliar lines of little open shops. And always over the shops little strips of blue-tiled roof slope back to the paper-screened chamber of upper floors; and from all the facades hang draperies dark blue, or white, or crimson--foot-breadths of texture covered with beautiful Japanese lettering, white on blue, red on black, black on white. But all this flies by swiftly as a dream. Once more we cross a canal; we rush up a narrow street rising to meet a hill; and Cha, halting suddenly before an immense flight of broad stone steps, sets the shafts of his vehicle on the ground that I may dismount, and, pointing to the steps, exclaims: 'Tera!' I dismount, and ascend them, and, reaching a broad terrace, find myself face to face with a wonderful gate, topped by a tilted, peaked, many-cornered Chinese roof. It is all strangely carven, this gate. Dragons are inter-twined in a frieze above its open doors; and the panels of the doors themselves are similarly sculptured; and there are gargoyles--grotesque lion heads--protruding from the eaves. And the whole is grey, stone-coloured; to me, nevertheless, the carvings do not seem to have the fixity of sculpture; all the snakeries and dragonries appear to undulate with a swarming motion, elusively, in eddyings as of water. I turn a moment to look back through the glorious light. Sea and sky mingle in the same beautiful pale clear blue. Below me the billowing of bluish roofs reaches to the verge of the unruffled bay on the right, and to the feet of the green wooded hills flanking the city on two sides. Beyond that semicircle of green hills rises a lofty range of serrated mountains, indigo silhouettes. And enormously high above the line of them towers an apparition indescribably lovely--one solitary snowy cone, so filmily exquisite, so spiritually white, that but for its immemorially familiar outline, one would surely deem it a shape of cloud. Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous heaven--the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama. And suddenly, a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before this weirdly sculptured portal--a sensation of dream and doubt. It seems to me that the steps, and the dragon-swarming gate, and the blue sky arching over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and the shadow of myself there stretching upon the grey masonry, must all vanish presently. Why such a feeling? Doubtless because the forms before me--the curved roofs, the coiling dragons, the Chinese grotesqueries of carving--do not really appear to me as things new, but as things dreamed: the sight of them must have stirred to life forgotten memories of picture-books. A moment, and the delusion vanishes; the romance of reality returns, with freshened consciousness of all that which is truly and deliciously new; the magical transparencies of distance, the wondrous delicacy of the tones of the living picture, the enormous height of the summer blue, and the white soft witchery of the Japanese sun. Sec. 7 I pass on and climb more steps to a second gate with similar gargoyles and swarming of dragons, and enter a court where graceful votive lanterns of stone stand like monuments. On my right and left two great grotesque stone lions are sitting--the lions of Buddha, male and female. Beyond is a long low light building, with curved and gabled roof of blue tiles, and three wooden steps before its entrance. Its sides are simple wooden screens covered with thin white paper. This is the temple. On the steps I take off my shoes; a young man slides aside the screens closing the entrance, and bows me a gracious welcome. And I go in, feeling under my feet a softness of matting thick as bedding. An immense square apartment is before me, full of an unfamiliar sweet smell--the scent of Japanese incense; but after the full blaze of the sun, the paper-filtered light here is dim as moonshine; for a minute or two I can see nothing but gleams of gilding in a soft gloom. Then, my eyes becoming accustomed to the obscurity, I perceive against the paper-paned screens surrounding the sanctuary on three sides shapes of enormous flowers cutting like silhouettes against the vague white light. I approach and find them to be paper flowers--symbolic lotus-blossoms beautifully coloured, with curling leaves gilded on the upper surface and bright green beneath, At the dark end of the apartment, facing the entrance, is the altar of Buddha, a rich and lofty altar, covered with bronzes and gilded utensils clustered to right and left of a shrine like a tiny gold temple. But I see no statue; only a mystery of unfamiliar shapes of burnished metal, relieved against darkness, a darkness behind the shrine and altar--whether recess or inner sanctuary I cannot distinguish. The young attendant who ushered me into the temple now approaches, and, to my great surprise, exclaims in excellent English, pointing to a richly decorated gilded object between groups of candelabra on the altar: 'That is the shrine of Buddha.' 'And I would like to make an offering to Buddha,' I respond. 'It is not necessary,' he says, with a polite smile. But I insist; and he places the little offering for me upon the altar. Then he invites me to his own room, in a wing of the building--a large luminous room, without furniture, beautifully matted. And we sit down upon the floor and chat. He tells me he is a student in the temple. He learned English in Tokyo and speaks it with a curious accent, but with fine choice of words. Finally he asks me: 'Are you a Christian?' And I answer truthfully: 'No.' 'Are you a Buddhist?' 'Not exactly.' 'Why do you make offerings if you do not believe in Buddha?' 'I revere the beauty of his teaching, and the faith of those who follow it.' 'Are there Buddhists in England and America?' 'There are, at least, a great many interested in Buddhist philosophy.' And he takes from an alcove a little book, and gives it to me to examine. It is an English copy of Olcott's Buddhist Catechism. 'Why is there no image of Buddha in your temple?' I ask. 'There is a small one in the shrine upon the altar,' the student answers; 'but the shrine is closed. And we have several large ones. But the image of Buddha is not exposed here every day--only upon festal days. And some images are exposed only once or twice a year. From my place, I can see, between the open paper screens, men and women ascending the steps, to kneel and pray before the entrance of the temple. They kneel with such naive reverence, so gracefully and so naturally, that the kneeling of our Occidental devotees seems a clumsy stumbling by comparison. Some only join their hands; others clap them three times loudly and slowly; then they bow their heads, pray silently for a moment, and rise and depart. The shortness of the prayers impresses me as something novel and interesting. From time to time I hear the clink and rattle of brazen coin cast into the great wooden money-box at the entrance. I turn to the young student, and ask him: 'Why do they clap their hands three times before they pray?' He answers: 'Three times for the Sansai, the Three Powers: Heaven, Earth, Man.' 'But do they clap their hands to call the Gods, as Japanese clap their hands to summon their attendants?' 'Oh, no!' he replied. 'The clapping of hands represents only the awakening from the Dream of the Long Night.' [1] 'What night? what dream?' He hesitates some moments before making answer: 'The Buddha said: All beings are only dreaming in this fleeting world of unhappiness.' 'Then the clapping of hands signifies that in prayer the soul awakens from such dreaming?' 'Yes.' 'You understand what I mean by the word "soul"?' 'Oh, yes! Buddhists believe the soul always was--always will be.' 'Even in Nirvana?' 'Yes.' While we are thus chatting the Chief Priest of the temple enters--a very aged man-accompanied by two young priests, and I am presented to them; and the three bow very low, showing me the glossy crowns of their smoothly-shaven heads, before seating themselves in the fashion of gods upon the floor. I observe they do not smile; these are the first Japanese I have seen who do not smile: their faces are impassive as the faces of images. But their long eyes observe me very closely, while the student interprets their questions, and while I attempt to tell them something about the translations of the Sutras in our Sacred Books of the East, and about the labours of Beal and Burnouf and Feer and Davids and Kern, and others. They listen without change of countenance, and utter no word in response to the young student's translation of my remarks. Tea, however, is brought in and set before me in a tiny cup, placed in a little brazen saucer, shaped like a lotus-leaf; and I am invited to partake of some little sugar-cakes (kwashi), stamped with a figure which I recognise as the Swastika, the ancient Indian symbol of the Wheel of the Law. As I rise to go, all rise with me; and at the steps the student asks for my name and address. 'For,' he adds, 'you will not see me here again, as I am going to leave the temple. But I will visit you.' 'And your name?' I ask. 'Call me Akira,' he answers. At the threshold I bow my good-bye; and they all bow very, very low, one blue-black head, three glossy heads like balls of ivory. And as I go, only Akira smiles. Sec. 8 'Tera?' queries Cha, with his immense white hat in his hand, as I resume my seat in the jinricksha at the foot of the steps. Which no doubt means, do I want to see any more temples? Most certainly I do: I have not yet seen Buddha. 'Yes, tera, Cha.' And again begins the long panorama of mysterious shops and tilted eaves, and fantastic riddles written over everything. I have no idea in what direction Cha is running. I only know that the streets seem to become always narrower as we go, and that some of the houses look like great wickerwork pigeon-cages only, and that we pass over several bridges before we halt again at the foot of another hill. There is a lofty flight of steps here also, and before them a structure which I know is both a gate and a symbol, imposing, yet in no manner resembling the great Buddhist gateway seen before. Astonishingly simple all the lines of it are: it has no carving, no colouring, no lettering upon it; yet it has a weird solemnity, an enigmatic beauty. It is a torii. 'Miya,' observes Cha. Not a tera this time, but a shrine of the gods of the more ancient faith of the land--a miya. I am standing before a Shinto symbol; I see for the first time, out of a picture at least, a torii. How describe a torii to those who have never looked at one even in a photograph or engraving? Two lofty columns, like gate-pillars, supporting horizontally two cross-beams, the lower and lighter beam having its ends fitted into the columns a little distance below their summits; the uppermost and larger beam supported upon the tops of the columns, and projecting well beyond them to right and left. That is a torii: the construction varying little in design, whether made of stone, wood, or metal. But this description can give no correct idea of the appearance of a torii, of its majestic aspect, of its mystical suggestiveness as a gateway. The first time you see a noble one, you will imagine, perhaps, that you see the colossal model of some beautiful Chinese letter towering against the sky; for all the lines of the thing have the grace of an animated ideograph,--have the bold angles and curves of characters made with four sweeps of a master-brush. [2] Passing the torii I ascend a flight of perhaps one hundred stone steps, and find at their summit a second torii, from whose lower cross-beam hangs festooned the mystic shimenawa. It is in this case a hempen rope of perhaps two inches in diameter through its greater length, but tapering off at either end like a snake. Sometimes the shimenawa is made of bronze, when the torii itself is of bronze; but according to tradition it should be made of straw, and most commonly is. For it represents the straw rope which the deity Futo-tama-no-mikoto stretched behind the Sun-goddess, Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami, after Ame-no-ta-jikara-wo-no-Kami, the Heavenly-hand-strength-god, had pulled her out, as is told in that ancient myth of Shinto which Professor Chamberlain has translated. [3] And the shimenawa, in its commoner and simpler form, has pendent tufts of straw along its entire length, at regular intervals, because originally made, tradition declares, of grass pulled up by the roots which protruded from the twist of it. Advancing beyond this torii, I find myself in a sort of park or pleasure-ground on the summit of the hill. There is a small temple on the right; it is all closed up; and I have read so much about the disappointing vacuity of Shinto temples that I do not regret the absence of its guardian. And I see before me what is infinitely more interesting,--a grove of cherry-trees covered with something unutterably beautiful,--a dazzling mist of snowy blossoms clinging like summer cloud-fleece about every branch and twig; and the ground beneath them, and the path before me, is white with the soft, thick, odorous snow of fallen petals. Beyond this loveliness are flower-plots surrounding tiny shrines; and marvellous grotto-work, full of monsters--dragons and mythologic beings chiselled in the rock; and miniature landscape work with tiny groves of dwarf trees, and Lilliputian lakes, and microscopic brooks and bridges and cascades. Here, also, are swings for children. And here are belvederes, perched on the verge of the hill, wherefrom the whole fair city, and the whole smooth bay speckled with fishing-sails no bigger than pin-heads, and the far, faint, high promontories reaching into the sea, are all visible in one delicious view--blue-pencilled in a beauty of ghostly haze indescribable. Why should the trees be so lovely in Japan? With us, a plum or cherry tree in flower is not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that, however much you may have previously read about it, the real spectacle strikes you dumb. You see no leaves--only one great filmy mist of petals. Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the Gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake? Assuredly they have mastered men's hearts by their loveliness, like beautiful slaves. That is to say, Japanese hearts. Apparently there have been some foreign tourists of the brutal class in this place, since it has been deemed necessary to set up inscriptions in English announcing that 'IT IS FORBIDDEN TO INJURE THE TREES.' Sec. 9 'Tera?' 'Yes, Cha, tera.' But only for a brief while do I traverse Japanese streets. The houses separate, become scattered along the feet of the hills: the city thins away through little valleys, and vanishes at last behind. And we follow a curving road overlooking the sea. Green hills slope steeply down to the edge of the way on the right; on the left, far below, spreads a vast stretch of dun sand and salty pools to a line of surf so distant that it is discernible only as a moving white thread. The tide is out; and thousands of cockle-gatherers are scattered over the sands, at such distances that their stooping figures, dotting the glimmering sea-bed, appear no larger than gnats. And some are coming along the road before us, returning from their search with well-filled baskets--girls with faces almost as rosy as the faces of English girls. As the jinricksha rattles on, the hills dominating the road grow higher. All at once Cha halts again before the steepest and loftiest flight of temple steps I have yet seen. I climb and climb and climb, halting perforce betimes, to ease the violent aching of my quadriceps muscles; reach the top completely out of breath; and find myself between two lions of stone; one showing his fangs, the other with jaws closed. Before me stands the temple, at the farther end of a small bare plateau surrounded on three sides by low cliffs,-a small temple, looking very old and grey. From a rocky height to the left of the building, a little cataract rumbles down into a pool, ringed in by a palisade. The voice of the water drowns all other sounds. A sharp wind is blowing from the ocean: the place is chill even in the sun, and bleak, and desolate, as if no prayer had been uttered in it for a hundred years. Cha taps and calls, while I take off my shoes upon the worn wooden steps of the temple; and after a minute of waiting, we hear a muffled step approaching and a hollow cough behind the paper screens. They slide open; and an old white-robed priest appears, and motions me, with a low bow, to enter. He has a kindly face; and his smile of welcome seems to me one of the most exquisite I have ever been greeted with. Then he coughs again, so badly that I think if I ever come here another time, I shall ask for him in vain. I go in, feeling that soft, spotless, cushioned matting beneath my feet with which the floors of all Japanese buildings are covered. I pass the indispensable bell and lacquered reading-desk; and before me I see other screens only, stretching from floor to ceiling. The old man, still coughing, slides back one of these upon the right, and waves me into the dimness of an inner sanctuary, haunted by faint odours of incense. A colossal bronze lamp, with snarling gilded dragons coiled about its columnar stem, is the first object I discern; and, in passing it, my shoulder sets ringing a festoon of little bells suspended from the lotus-shaped summit of it. Then I reach the altar, gropingly, unable yet to distinguish forms clearly. But the priest, sliding back screen after screen, pours in light upon the gilded brasses and the inscriptions; and I look for the image of the Deity or presiding Spirit between the altar-groups of convoluted candelabra. And I see--only a mirror, a round, pale disk of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this mockery of me a phantom of the far sea. Only a mirror! Symbolising what? Illusion? or that the Universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our own hearts? Perhaps some day I shall be able to find out all these things. As I sit on the temple steps, putting on my shoes preparatory to going, the kind old priest approaches me again, and, bowing, presents a bowl. I hastily drop some coins in it, imagining it to be a Buddhist alms-bowl, before discovering it to be full of hot water. But the old man's beautiful courtesy saves me from feeling all the grossness of my mistake. Without a word, and still preserving his kindly smile, he takes the bowl away, and, returning presently with another bowl, empty, fills it with hot water from a little kettle, and makes a sign to me to drink. Tea is most usually offered to visitors at temples; but this little shrine is very, very poor; and I have a suspicion that the old priest suffers betimes for want of what no fellow-creature should be permitted to need. As I descend the windy steps to the roadway I see him still looking after me, and I hear once more his hollow cough. Then the mockery of the mirror recurs to me. I am beginning to wonder whether I shall ever be able to discover that which I seek--outside of myself! That is, outside of my own imagination. Sec. 10 'Tera?' once more queries Cha. 'Tera, no--it is getting late. Hotel, Cha.' But Cha, turning the corner of a narrow street, on our homeward route, halts the jinricksha before a shrine or tiny temple scarcely larger than the smallest of Japanese shops, yet more of a surprise to me than any of the larger sacred edifices already visited. For, on either side of the entrance, stand two monster-figures, nude, blood-red, demoniac, fearfully muscled, with feet like lions, and hands brandishing gilded thunderbolts, and eyes of delirious fury; the guardians of holy things, the Ni-O, or "Two Kings." [4] And right between these crimson monsters a young girl stands looking at us; her slight figure, in robe of silver grey and girdle of iris-violet, relieved deliciously against the twilight darkness of the interior. Her face, impassive and curiously delicate, would charm wherever seen; but here, by strange contrast with the frightful grotesqueries on either side of her, it produces an effect unimaginable. Then I find myself wondering whether my feeling of repulsion toward those twin monstrosities be altogether lust, seeing that so charming a maiden deems them worthy of veneration. And they even cease to seem ugly as I watch her standing there between them, dainty and slender as some splendid moth, and always naively gazing at the foreigner, utterly unconscious that they might have seemed to him both unholy and uncomely. What are they? Artistically they are Buddhist transformations of Brahma and of Indra. Enveloped by the absorbing, all-transforming magical atmosphere of Buddhism, Indra can now wield his thunderbolts only in defence of the faith which has dethroned him: he has become a keeper of the temple gates; nay, has even become a servant of Bosatsu (Bodhisattvas), for this is only a shrine of Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy, not yet a Buddha. 'Hotel, Cha, hotel!' I cry out again, for the way is long, and the sun sinking,--sinking in the softest imaginable glow of topazine light. I have not seen Shaka (so the Japanese have transformed the name Sakya-Muni); I have not looked upon the face of the Buddha. Perhaps I may be able to find his image to-morrow, somewhere in this wilderness of wooden streets, or upon the summit of some yet unvisited hill. The sun is gone; the topaz-light is gone; and Cha stops to light his lantern of paper; and we hurry on again, between two long lines of painted paper lanterns suspended before the shops: so closely set, so level those lines are, that they seem two interminable strings of pearls of fire. And suddenly a sound--solemn, profound, mighty--peals to my ears over the roofs of the town, the voice of the tsurigane, the great temple-bell of Nogiyama. All too short the day seemed. Yet my eyes have been so long dazzled by the great white light, and so confused by the sorcery of that interminable maze of mysterious signs which made each street vista seem a glimpse into some enormous grimoire, that they are now weary even of the soft glowing of all these paper lanterns, likewise covered with characters that look like texts from a Book of Magic. And I feel at last the coming of that drowsiness which always follows enchantment. Sec. 11 'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!' A woman's voice ringing through the night, chanting in a tone of singular sweetness words of which each syllable comes through my open window like a wavelet of flute-sound. My Japanese servant, who speaks a little English, has told me what they mean, those words: 'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!' And always between these long, sweet calls I hear a plaintive whistle, one long note first, then two short ones in another key. It is the whistle of the amma, the poor blind woman who earns her living by shampooing the sick or the weary, and whose whistle warns pedestrians and drivers of vehicles to take heed for her sake, as she cannot see. And she sings also that the weary and the sick may call her in. 'Amma-kamishimo-go-hyakmon!' The saddest melody, but the sweetest voice. Her cry signifies that for the sum of 'five hundred mon' she will come and rub your weary body 'above and below,' and make the weariness or the pain go away. Five hundred mon are the equivalent of five sen (Japanese cents); there are ten rin to a sen, and ten mon to one rin. The strange sweetness of the voice is haunting,--makes me even wish to have some pains, that I might pay five hundred mon to have them driven away. I lie down to sleep, and I dream. I see Chinese texts--multitudinous, weird, mysterious--fleeing by me, all in one direction; ideographs white and dark, upon signboards, upon paper screens, upon backs of sandalled men. They seem to live, these ideographs, with conscious life; they are moving their parts, moving with a movement as of insects, monstrously, like phasmidae. I am rolling always through low, narrow, luminous streets in a phantom jinricksha, whose wheels make no sound. And always, always, I see the huge white mushroom-shaped hat of Cha dancing up and down before me as he runs. Chapter Two The Writing of Kobodaishi Sec. 1 KOBODAISHI, most holy of Buddhist priests, and founder of the Shingon-sho--which is the sect of Akira--first taught the men of Japan to write the writing called Hiragana and the syllabary I-ro-ha; and Kobodaishi was himself the most wonderful of all writers, and the most skilful wizard among scribes. And in the book, Kobodaishi-ichi-dai-ki, it is related that when he was in China, the name of a certain room in the palace of the Emperor having become effaced by time, the Emperor sent for him and bade him write the name anew. Thereupon Kobodaishi took a brush in his right hand, and a brush in his left, and one brush between the toes of his left foot, and another between the toes of his right, and one in his mouth also; and with those five brushes, so holding them, he limned the characters upon the wall. And the characters were beautiful beyond any that had ever been seen in China--smooth-flowing as the ripples in the current of a river. And Kobodaishi then took a brush, and with it from a distance spattered drops of ink upon the wall; and the drops as they fell became transformed and turned into beautiful characters. And the Emperor gave to Kobodaishi the name Gohitsu Osho, signifying The Priest who writes with Five Brushes. At another time, while the saint was dwelling in Takawasan, near to Kyoto, the Emperor, being desirous that Kobodaishi should write the tablet for the great temple called Kongo-jo-ji, gave the tablet to a messenger and bade him carry it to Kobodaishi, that Kobodaishi might letter it. But when the Emperor's messenger, bearing the tablet, came near to the place where Kobodaishi dwelt, he found a river before him so much swollen by rain that no man might cross it. In a little while, however, Kobodaishi appeared upon the farther bank, and, hearing from the messenger what the Emperor desired, called to him to hold up the tablet. And the messenger did so; and Kobodaishi, from his place upon the farther bank, made the movements of the letters with his brush; and as fast as he made them they appeared upon the tablet which the messenger was holding up. Sec. 2 Now in that time Kobodaishi was wont to meditate alone by the river-side; and one day, while so meditating, he was aware of a boy standing before him, gazing at him curiously. The garments of the boy were as the garments worn by the needy; but his face was beautiful. And while Kobodaishi wondered, the boy asked him: 'Are you Kobodaishi, whom men call "Gohitsu-Osho"--the priest who writes with five brushes at once?' And Kobodaishi answered: 'I am he.' Then said the boy: 'If you be he, write, I pray you, upon the sky.' And Kobodaishi, rising, took his brush, and made with it movements toward the sky as if writing; and presently upon the face of the sky the letters appeared, most beautifully wrought. Then the boy said: 'Now I shall try;' and he wrote also upon the sky as Kobodaishi had done. And he said again to Kobodaishi: 'I pray you, write for me--write upon the surface of the river.' Then Kobodaishi wrote upon the water a poem in praise of the water; and for a moment the characters remained, all beautiful, upon the face of the stream, as if they had fallen upon it like leaves; but presently they moved with the current and floated away. 'Now I will try,' said the boy; and he wrote upon the water the Dragon-character--the character Ryu in the writing which is called Sosho, the 'Grass-character;' and the character remained upon the flowing surface and moved not. But Kobodaishi saw that the boy had not placed the ten, the little dot belonging to the character, beside it. And he asked the boy: 'Why did you not put the ten?' 'Oh, I forgot!' answered the boy; 'please put it there for me,' and Kobodaishi then made the dot. And lo! the Dragon-character became a Dragon; and the Dragon moved terribly in the waters; and the sky darkened with thunder-clouds, and blazed with lightnings; and the Dragon ascended in a whirl of tempest to heaven. Then Kobodaishi asked the boy: 'Who are you?' And the boy made answer: 'I am he whom men worship on the mountain Gotai; I am the Lord of Wisdom,--Monju Bosatsu!' And even as he spoke the boy became changed; and his beauty became luminous like the beauty of gods; and his limbs became radiant, shedding soft light about. And, smiling, he rose to heaven and vanished beyond the clouds. Sec. 3 But Kobodaishi himself once forgot to put the ten beside the character O on the tablet which he painted with the name of the Gate O-Te-mon of the Emperor's palace. And the Emperor at Kyoto having asked him why he had not put the ten beside the character, Kobodaishi answered: 'I forgot; but I will put it on now.' Then the Emperor bade ladders be brought; for the tablet was already in place, high above the gate. But Kobodaishi, standing on the pavement before the gate, simply threw his brush at the tablet; and the brush, so thrown, made the ten there most admirably, and fell back into his hand. Kobodaishi also painted the tablet of the gate called Ko-kamon of the Emperor's palace at Kyoto. Now there was a man, dwelling near that gate, whose name was Kino Momoye; and he ridiculed the characters which Kobodaishi had made, and pointed to one of them, saying: 'Why, it looks like a swaggering wrestler!' But the same night Momoye dreamed that a wrestler had come to his bedside and leaped upon him, and was beating him with his fists. And, crying out with the pain of the blows, he awoke, and saw the wrestler rise in air, and change into the written character he had laughed at, and go back to the tablet over the gate. And there was another writer, famed greatly for his skill, named Onomo Toku, who laughed at some characters on the tablet of the Gate Shukaku-mon, written by Kobodaishi; and he said, pointing to the character Shu: 'Verily shu looks like the character "rice".' And that night he dreamed that the character he had mocked at became a man; and that the man fell upon him and beat him, and jumped up and down upon his face many times--even as a kometsuki, a rice-cleaner, leaps up and down to move the hammers that beat the rice--saying the while: 'Lo! I am the messenger of Kobodaishi!' And, waking, he found himself bruised and bleeding as one that had been grievously trampled. And long after Kobodaishi's death it was found that the names written by him on the two gates of the Emperor's palace Bi-fuku-mon, the Gate of Beautiful Fortune; and Ko-ka-mon, the Gate of Excellent Greatness--were well-nigh effaced by time. And the Emperor ordered a Dainagon [1], whose name was Yukinari, to restore the tablets. But Yukinari was afraid to perform the command of the Emperor, by reason of what had befallen other men; and, fearing the divine anger of Kobodaishi, he made offerings, and prayed for some token of permission. And the same night, in a dream, Kobodaishi appeared to him, smiling gently, and said: 'Do the work even as the Emperor desires, and have no fear.' So he restored the tablets in the first month of the fourth year of Kwanko, as is recorded in the book, Hon-cho-bun-sui. And all these things have been related to me by my friend Akira. Chapter Three Jizo Sec. 1 I HAVE passed another day in wandering among the temples, both Shinto and Buddhist. I have seen many curious things; but I have not yet seen the face of the Buddha. Repeatedly, after long wearisome climbing of stone steps, and passing under gates full of gargoyles--heads of elephants and heads of lions--and entering shoeless into scented twilight, into enchanted gardens of golden lotus-flowers of paper, and there waiting for my eyes to become habituated to the dimness, I have looked in vain for images. Only an opulent glimmering confusion of things half-seen--vague altar-splendours created by gilded bronzes twisted into riddles, by vessels of indescribable shape, by enigmatic texts of gold, by mysterious glittering pendent things--all framing in only a shrine with doors fast closed. What has most impressed me is the seeming joyousness of popular faith. I have seen nothing grim, austere, or self-repressive. I have not even noted anything approaching the solemn. The bright temple courts and even the temple steps are thronged with laughing children, playing curious games; and mothers, entering the sanctuary to pray, suffer their little ones to creep about the matting and crow. The people take their religion lightly and cheerfully: they drop their cash in the great alms-box, clap their hands, murmur a very brief prayer, then turn to laugh and talk and smoke their little pipes before the temple entrance. Into some shrines, I have noticed the worshippers do not enter at all; they merely stand before the doors and pray for a few seconds, and make their small offerings. Blessed are they who do not too much fear the gods which they have made! Sec. 2 Akira is bowing and smiling at the door. He slips off his sandals, enters in his white digitated stockings, and, with another smile and bow, sinks gently into the proffered chair. Akira is an interesting boy. With his smooth beardless face and clear bronze skin and blue-black hair trimmed into a shock that shadows his forehead to the eyes, he has almost the appearance, in his long wide-sleeved robe and snowy stockings, of a young Japanese girl. I clap my hands for tea, hotel tea, which he calls 'Chinese tea.' I offer him a cigar, which he declines; but with my permission, he will smoke his pipe. Thereupon he draws from his girdle a Japanese pipe-case and tobacco-pouch combined; pulls out of the pipe-case a little brass pipe with a bowl scarcely large enough to hold a pea; pulls out of the pouch some tobacco so finely cut that it looks like hair, stuffs a tiny pellet of this preparation in the pipe, and begins to smoke. He draws the smoke into his lungs, and blows it out again through his nostrils. Three little whiffs, at intervals of about half a minute, and the pipe, emptied, is replaced in its case. Meanwhile I have related to Akira the story of my disappointments. 'Oh, you can see him to-day,' responds Akira, 'if you will take a walk with me to the Temple of Zotokuin. For this is the Busshoe, the festival of the Birthday of Buddha. But he is very small, only a few inches high. If you want to see a great Buddha, you must go to Kamakura. There is a Buddha in that place, sitting upon a lotus; and he is fifty feet high.' So I go forth under the guidance of Akira. He says he may be able to show me 'some curious things.' Sec. 3 There is a sound of happy voices from the temple, and the steps are crowded with smiling mothers and laughing children. Entering, I find women and babies pressing about a lacquered table in front of the doorway. Upon it is a little tub-shaped vessel of sweet tea--amacha; and standing in the tea is a tiny figure of Buddha, one hand pointing upward and one downward. The women, having made the customary offering, take up some of the tea with a wooden ladle of curious shape, and pour it over the statue, and then, filling the ladle a second time, drink a little, and give a sip to their babies. This is the ceremony of washing the statue of Buddha. Near the lacquered stand on which the vessel of sweet tea rests is another and lower stand supporting a temple bell shaped like a great bowl. A priest approaches with a padded mallet in his hand and strikes the bell. But the bell does not sound properly: he starts, looks into it, and stoops to lift out of it a smiling Japanese baby. The mother, laughing, runs to relieve him of his burden; and priest, mother, and baby all look at us with a frankness of mirth in which we join. Akira leaves me a moment to speak with one of the temple attendants, and presently returns with a curious lacquered box, about a foot in length, and four inches wide on each of its four sides. There is only a small hole in one end of it; no appearance of a lid of any sort. 'Now,' says Akira, 'if you wish to pay two sen, we shall learn our future lot according to the will of the gods.' I pay the two sen, and Akira shakes the box. Out comes a narrow slip of bamboo, with Chinese characters written thereon. 'Kitsu!' cries Akira. 'Good-fortune. The number is fifty-and-one.' Again he shakes the box; a second bamboo slip issues from the slit. 'Dai kitsu! great good-fortune. The number is ninety-and-nine. Once more the box is shaken; once more the oracular bamboo protrudes. 'Kyo!' laughs Akira. 'Evil will befall us. The number is sixty-and-four.' He returns the box to a priest, and receives three mysterious papers, numbered with numbers corresponding to the numbers of the bamboo slips. These little bamboo slips, or divining-sticks, are called mikuji. This, as translated by Akira, is the substance of the text of the paper numbered fifty-and-one: 'He who draweth forth this mikuji, let him live according to the heavenly law and worship Kwannon. If his trouble be a sickness, it shall pass from him. If he have lost aught, it shall be found. If he have a suit at law, he shall gain. If he love a woman, he shall surely win her, though he should have to wait. And many happinesses will come to him.' The dai-kitsu paper reads almost similarly, with the sole differences that, instead of Kwannon, the deities of wealth and prosperity--Daikoku, Bishamon, and Benten--are to be worshipped, and that the fortunate man will not have to wait at all for the woman loved. But the kyo paper reads thus: 'He who draweth forth this mikuji, it will be well for him to obey the heavenly law and to worship Kwannon the Merciful. If he have any sickness, even much more sick he shall become. If he have lost aught, it shall never be found. If he have a suit at law, he shall never gain it. If he love a woman, let him have no more expectation of winning her. Only by the most diligent piety can he hope to escape the most frightful calamities. And there shall be no felicity in his portion.' 'All the same, we are fortunate,' declares Akira. 'Twice out of three times we have found luck. Now we will go to see another statue of Buddha.' And he guides me, through many curious streets, to the southern verge of the city. Sec. 4 Before us rises a hill, with a broad flight of stone steps sloping to its summit, between foliage of cedars and maples. We climb; and I see above me the Lions of Buddha waiting--the male yawning menace, the female with mouth closed. Passing between them, we enter a large temple court, at whose farther end rises another wooded eminence. And here is the temple, with roof of blue-painted copper tiles, and tilted eaves and gargoyles and dragons, all weather-stained to one neutral tone. The paper screens are open, but a melancholy rhythmic chant from within tells us that the noonday service is being held: the priests are chanting the syllables of Sanscrit texts transliterated into Chinese--intoning the Sutra called the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law. One of those who chant keeps time by tapping with a mallet, cotton-wrapped, some grotesque object shaped like a dolphin's head, all lacquered in scarlet and gold, which gives forth a dull, booming tone--a mokugyo. To the right of the temple is a little shrine, filling the air with fragrance of incense-burning. I peer in through the blue smoke that curls up from half a dozen tiny rods planted in a small brazier full of ashes; and far back in the shadow I see a swarthy Buddha, tiara-coiffed, with head bowed and hands joined, just as I see the Japanese praying, erect in the sun, before the thresholds of temples. The figure is of wood, rudely wrought and rudely coloured: still the placid face has beauty of suggestion. Crossing the court to the left of the building, I find another flight of steps before me, leading up a slope to something mysterious still higher, among enormous trees. I ascend these steps also, reach the top, guarded by two small symbolic lions, and suddenly find myself in cool shadow, and startled by a spectacle totally unfamiliar. Dark--almost black--soil and the shadowing of trees immemorially old, through whose vaulted foliage the sunlight leaks thinly down in rare flecks; a crepuscular light, tender and solemn, revealing the weirdest host of unfamiliar shapes--a vast congregation of grey, columnar, mossy things, stony, monumental, sculptured with Chinese ideographs. And about them, behind them, rising high above them, thickly set as rushes in a marsh-verge, tall slender wooden tablets, like laths, covered with similar fantastic lettering, pierce the green gloom by thousands, by tens of thousands. And before I can note other details, I know that I am in a hakaba, a cemetery--a very ancient Buddhist cemetery. These laths are called in the Japanese tongue sotoba. [1] All have notches cut upon their edges on both sides near the top-five notches; and all are painted with Chinese characters on both faces. One inscription is always the phrase 'To promote Buddhahood,' painted immediately below the dead man's name; the inscription upon the other surface is always a sentence in Sanscrit whose meaning has been forgotten even by those priests who perform the funeral rites. One such lath is planted behind the tomb as soon as the monument (haka) is set up; then another every seven days for forty-nine days, then one after the lapse of a hundred days; then one at the end of a year; then one after the passing of three years; and at successively longer periods others are erected during one hundred years. And in almost every group I notice some quite new, or freshly planed unpainted white wood, standing beside others grey or even black with age; and there are many, still older from whose surface all the characters have disappeared. Others are lying on the sombre clay. Hundreds stand so loose in the soil that the least breeze jostles and clatters them together. Not less unfamiliar in their forms, but far more interesting, are the monuments of stone. One shape I know represents five of the Buddhist elements: a cube supporting a sphere which upholds a pyramid on which rests a shallow square cup with four crescent edges and tilted corners, and in the cup a pyriform body poised with the point upwards. These successively typify Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Ether, the five substances wherefrom the body is shapen, and into which it is resolved by death; the absence of any emblem for the Sixth element, Knowledge, touches more than any imagery conceivable could do. And nevertheless, in the purpose of the symbolism, this omission was never planned with the same idea that it suggests to the Occidental mind. Very numerous also among the monuments are low, square, flat-topped shafts, with a Japanese inscription in black or gold, or merely cut into the stone itself. Then there are upright slabs of various shapes and heights, mostly rounded at the top, usually bearing sculptures in relief. Finally, there are many curiously angled stones, or natural rocks, dressed on one side only, with designs etched upon the smoothed surface. There would appear to be some meaning even in the irregularity of the shape of these slabs; the rock always seems to have been broken out of its bed at five angles, and the manner in which it remains balanced perpendicularly upon its pedestal is a secret that the first hasty examination fails to reveal. The pedestals themselves vary in construction; most have three orifices in the projecting surface in front of the monument supported by them, usually one large oval cavity, with two small round holes flanking it. These smaller holes serve for the burning of incense-rods; the larger cavity is filled with water. I do not know exactly why. Only my Japanese companion tells me 'it is an ancient custom in Japan thus to pour out water for the dead.' There are also bamboo cups on either side of the monument in which to place flowers. Many of the sculptures represent Buddha in meditation, or in the attitude of exhorting; a few represent him asleep, with the placid, dreaming face of a child, a Japanese child; this means Nirvana. A common design upon many tombs also seems to be two lotus-blossoms with stalks intertwined. In one place I see a stone with an English name upon it, and above that name a rudely chiselled cross. Verily the priests of Buddha have blessed tolerance; for this is a Christian tomb! And all is chipped and mouldered and mossed; and the grey stones stand closely in hosts of ranks, only one or two inches apart, ranks of thousands upon thousands, always in the shadow of the great trees. Overhead innumerable birds sweeten the air with their trilling; and far below, down the steps behind us, I still hear the melancholy chant of the priests, faintly, like a humming of bees. Akira leads the way in silence to where other steps descend into a darker and older part of the cemetery; and at the head of the steps, to the right, I see a group of colossal monuments, very tall, massive, mossed by time, with characters cut more than two inches deep into the grey rock of them. And behind them, in lieu of laths, are planted large sotoba, twelve to fourteen feet high, and thick as the beams of a temple roof. These are graves of priests. Sec. 5 Descending the shadowed steps, I find myself face to face with six little statues about three feet high, standing in a row upon one long pedestal. The first holds a Buddhist incense-box; the second, a lotus; the third, a pilgrim's staff (tsue); the fourth is telling the beads of a Buddhist rosary; the fifth stands in the attitude of prayer, with hands joined; the sixth bears in one hand the shakujo or mendicant priest's staff, having six rings attached to the top of it and in the other hand the mystic jewel, Nio-i ho-jiu, by virtue whereof all desires may be accomplished. But the faces of the Six are the same: each figure differs from the other by the attitude only and emblematic attribute; and all are smiling the like faint smile. About the neck of each figure a white cotton bag is suspended; and all the bags are filled with pebbles; and pebbles have been piled high also about the feet of the statues, and upon their knees, and upon their shoulders; and even upon their aureoles of stone, little pebbles are balanced. Archaic, mysterious, but inexplicably touching, all these soft childish faces are. Roku Jizo--'The Six Jizo'--these images are called in the speech of the people; and such groups may be seen in many a Japanese cemetery. They are representations of the most beautiful and tender figure in Japanese popular faith, that charming divinity who cares for the souls of little children, and consoles them in the place of unrest, and saves them from the demons. 'But why are those little stones piled about the statues?' I ask. Well, it is because some say the child-ghosts must build little towers of stones for penance in the Sai-no-Kawara, which is the place to which all children after death must go. And the Oni, who are demons, come to throw down the little stone-piles as fast as the children build; and these demons frighten the children, and torment them. But the little souls run to Jizo, who hides them in his great sleeves, and comforts them, and makes the demons go away. And every stone one lays upon the knees or at the feet of Jizo, with a prayer from the heart, helps some child-soul in the Sai-no-Kawara to perform its long penance. [2] 'All little children,' says the young Buddhist student who tells all this, with a smile as gentle as Jizo's own, 'must go to the Sai-no-Kawara when they die. And there they play with Jizo. The Sai-no-Kawara is beneath us, below the ground. [3] 'And Jizo has long sleeves to his robe; and they pull him by the sleeves in their play; and they pile up little stones before him to amuse themselves. And those stones you see heaped about the statues are put there by people for the sake of the little ones, most often by mothers of dead children who pray to Jizo. But grown people do not go to the Sai-no-Kawara when they die.' [4] And the young student, leaving the Roku-Jizo, leads the way to other strange surprises, guiding me among the tombs, showing me the sculptured divinities. Some of them are quaintly touching; all are interesting; a few are positively beautiful. The greater number have nimbi. Many are represented kneeling, with hands joined exactly like the figures of saints in old Christian art. Others, holding lotus-flowers, appear to dream the dreams that are meditations. One figure reposes on the coils of a great serpent. Another, coiffed with something resembling a tiara, has six hands, one pair joined in prayer, the rest, extended, holding out various objects; and this figure stands upon a prostrate demon, crouching face downwards. Yet another image, cut in low relief, has arms innumerable. The first pair of hands are joined, with the palms together; while from behind the line of the shoulders, as if shadowily emanating therefrom, multitudinous arms reach out in all directions, vapoury, spiritual, holding forth all kinds of objects as in answer to supplication, and symbolising, perhaps, the omnipotence of love. This is but one of the many forms of Kwannon, the goddess of mercy, the gentle divinity who refused the rest of Nirvana to save the souls of men, and who is most frequently pictured as a beautiful Japanese girl. But here she appears as Senjiu-Kwannon (Kwannon-of-the-Thousand-Hands). Close by stands a great slab bearing upon the upper portion of its chiselled surface an image in relief of Buddha, meditating upon a lotus; and below are carven three weird little figures, one with hands upon its eyes, one with hands upon its ears, one with hands upon its mouth; these are Apes. 'What do they signify?' I inquire. My friend answers vaguely, mimicking each gesture of the three sculptured shapes: 'I see no bad thing; I hear no bad thing; I speak no bad thing.' Gradually, by dint of reiterated explanations, I myself learn to recognise some of the gods at sight. The figure seated upon a lotus, holding a sword in its hand, and surrounded by bickering fire, is Fudo-Sama--Buddha as the Unmoved, the Immutable: the Sword signifies Intellect; the Fire, Power. Here is a meditating divinity, holding in one hand a coil of ropes: the divinity is Buddha; those are the ropes which bind the passions and desires. Here also is Buddha slumbering, with the gentlest, softest Japanese face--a child face--and eyes closed, and hand pillowing the cheek, in Nirvana. Here is a beautiful virgin-figure, standing upon a lily: Kwannon-Sama, the Japanese Madonna. Here is a solemn seated figure, holding in one hand a vase, and lifting the other with the gesture of a teacher: Yakushi-Sama, Buddha the All-Healer, Physician of Souls. Also, I see figures of animals. The Deer of Buddhist birth-stories stands, all grace, in snowy stone, upon the summit of toro, or votive lamps. On one tomb I see, superbly chiselled, the image of a fish, or rather the Idea of a fish, made beautifully grotesque for sculptural purposes, like the dolphin of Greek art. It crowns the top of a memorial column; the broad open jaws, showing serrated teeth, rest on the summit of the block bearing the dead man's name; the dorsal fin and elevated tail are elaborated into decorative impossibilities. 'Mokugyo,' says Akira. It is the same Buddhist emblem as that hollow wooden object, lacquered scarlet-and-gold, on which the priests beat with a padded mallet while chanting the Sutra. And, finally, in one place I perceive a pair of sitting animals, of some mythological species, supple of figure as greyhounds. 'Kitsune,' says Akira--'foxes.' So they are, now that I look upon them with knowledge of their purpose; idealised foxes, foxes spiritualised, impossibly graceful foxes. They are chiselled in some grey stone. They have long, narrow, sinister, glittering eyes; they seem to snarl; they are weird, very weird creatures, the servants of the Rice-God, retainers of Inari-Sama, and properly belong, not to Buddhist iconography, but the imagery of Shinto. No inscriptions upon these tombs corresponding to our epitaphs. Only family names--the names of the dead and their relatives and a sculptured crest, usually a flower. On the sotoba, only Sanscrit words. Farther on, I find other figures of Jizo, single reliefs, sculptured upon tombs. But one of these is a work of art so charming that I feel a pain at being obliged to pass it by. More sweet, assuredly, than any imaged Christ, this dream in white stone of the playfellow of dead children, like a beautiful young boy, with gracious eyelids half closed, and face made heavenly by such a smile as only Buddhist art could have imagined, the smile of infinite lovingness and supremest gentleness. Indeed, so charming the ideal of Jizo is that in the speech of the people a beautiful face is always likened to his--'Jizo-kao,' as the face of Jizo. Sec. 6 And we come to the end of the cemetery, to the verge of the great grove. Beyond the trees, what caressing sun, what spiritual loveliness in the tender day! A tropic sky always seemed to me to hang so low that one could almost bathe one's fingers in its lukewarm liquid blue by reaching upward from any dwelling-roof. But this sky, softer, fainter, arches so vastly as to suggest the heaven of a larger planet. And the very clouds are not clouds, but only dreams of clouds, so filmy they are; ghosts of clouds, diaphanous spectres, illusions! All at once I become aware of a child standing before me, a very young girl who looks up wonderingly at my face; so light her approach that the joy of the birds and whispering of the leaves quite drowned the soft sound of her feet. Her ragged garb is Japanese; but her gaze, her loose fair hair, are not of Nippon only; the ghost of another race--perhaps my own--watches me through her flower-blue eyes. A strange playground surely is this for thee, my child; I wonder if all these shapes about thee do not seem very weird, very strange, to that little soul of thine. But no; 'tis only I who seem strange to thee; thou hast forgotten the Other Birth, and thy father's world. Half-caste and poor and pretty, in this foreign port! Better thou wert with the dead about thee, child! better than the splendour of this soft blue light the unknown darkness for thee. There the gentle Jizo would care for thee, and hide thee in his great sleeves, and keep all evil from thee, and play shadowy play with thee; and this thy forsaken mother, who now comes to ask an alms for thy sake, dumbly pointing to thy strange beauty with her patient Japanese smile, would put little stones upon the knees of the dear god that thou mightest find rest. Sec. 7 'Oh, Akira! you must tell me something more about Jizo, and the ghosts of the children in the Sai-no-Kawara.' 'I cannot tell you much more,' answers Akira, smiling at my interest in this charming divinity; 'but if you will come with me now to Kuboyama, I will show you, in one of the temples there, pictures of the Sai-no-Kawara and of Jizo, and the Judgment of Souls.' So we take our way in two jinricksha to the Temple Rinko-ji, on Kuboyama. We roll swiftly through a mile of many-coloured narrow Japanese streets; then through a half-mile of pretty suburban ways, lined with gardens, behind whose clipped hedges are homes light and dainty as cages of wicker-work; and then, leaving our vehicles, we ascend green hills on foot by winding paths, and traverse a region of fields and farms. After a long walk in the hot sun we reach a village almost wholly composed of shrines and temples. The outlying sacred place--three buildings in one enclosure of bamboo fences--belongs to the Shingon sect. A small open shrine, to the left of the entrance, first attracts us. It is a dead-house: a Japanese bier is there. But almost opposite the doorway is an altar covered with startling images. What immediately rivets the attention is a terrible figure, all vermilion red, towering above many smaller images--a goblin shape with immense cavernous eyes. His mouth is widely opened as if speaking in wrath, and his brows frown terribly. A long red beard descends upon his red breast. And on his head is a strangely shaped crown, a crown of black and gold, having three singular lobes: the left lobe bearing an image of the moon; the right, an image of the sun; the central lobe is all black. But below it, upon the deep gold-rimmed black band, flames the mystic character signifying KING. Also, from the same crown-band protrude at descending angles, to left and right, two gilded sceptre-shaped objects. In one hand the King holds an object similar of form, but larger, his shaku or regal wand. And Akira explains. This is Emma-O, Lord of Shadows, Judge of Souls, King of the Dead. [5] Of any man having a terrible countenance the Japanese are wont to say, 'His face is the face of Emma.' At his right hand white Jizo-Sama stands upon a many-petalled rosy lotus. At his left is the image of an aged woman--weird Sodzu-Baba, she who takes the garments of the dead away by the banks of the River of the Three Roads, which flows through the phantom-world. Pale blue her robe is; her hair and skin are white; her face is strangely wrinkled; her small, keen eyes are hard. The statue is very old, and the paint is scaling from it in places, so as to lend it a ghastly leprous aspect. There are also images of the Sea-goddess Benten and of Kwannon-Sama, seated on summits of mountains forming the upper part of miniature landscapes made of some unfamiliar composition, and beautifully coloured; the whole being protected from careless fingering by strong wire nettings stretched across the front of the little shrines containing the panorama. Benten has eight arms: two of her hands are joined in prayer; the others, extended above her, hold different objects a sword, a wheel, a bow, an arrow, a key, and a magical gem. Below her, standing on the slopes of her mountain throne, are her ten robed attendants, all in the attitude of prayer; still farther down appears the body of a great white serpent, with its tail hanging from one orifice in the rocks, and its head emerging from another. At the very bottom of the hill lies a patient cow. Kwannon appears as Senjiu-Kwannon, offering gifts to men with all the multitude of her arms of mercy. But this is not what we came to see. The pictures of heaven and hell await us in the Zen-Shu temple close by, whither we turn our steps. On the way my guide tells me this: 'When one dies the body is washed and shaven, and attired in white, in the garments of a pilgrim. And a wallet (sanyabukkero), like the wallet of a Buddhist pilgrim, is hung about the neck of the dead; and in this wallet are placed three rin. [6] And these coin are buried with the dead. 'For all who die must, except children, pay three rin at the Sanzu-no-Kawa, "The River of the Three Roads." When souls have reached that river, they find there the Old Woman of the Three Roads, Sodzu-Baba, waiting for them: she lives on the banks of that river, with her husband, Ten Datsu-Ba. And if the Old Woman is not paid the sum of three rin, she takes away the clothes of the dead, and hangs them upon the trees.' Sec. 8 The temple is small, neat, luminous with the sun pouring into its widely opened shoji; and Akira must know the priests well, so affable their greeting is. I make a little offering, and Akira explains the purpose of our visit. Thereupon we are invited into a large bright apartment in a wing of the building, overlooking a lovely garden. Little cushions are placed on the floor for us to sit upon; and a smoking-box is brought in, and a tiny lacquered table about eight inches high. And while one of the priests opens a cupboard, or alcove with doors, to find the kakemono, another brings us tea, and a plate of curious confectionery consisting of various pretty objects made of a paste of sugar and rice flour. One is a perfect model of a chrysanthemum blossom; another is a lotus; others are simply large, thin, crimson lozenges bearing admirable designs--flying birds, wading storks, fish, even miniature landscapes. Akira picks out the chrysanthemum, and insists that I shall eat it; and I begin to demolish the sugary blossom, petal by petal, feeling all the while an acute remorse for spoiling so beautiful a thing. Meanwhile four kakemono have been brought forth, unrolled, and suspended from pegs upon the wall; and we rise to examine them. They are very, very beautiful kakemono, miracles of drawing and of colour-subdued colour, the colour of the best period of Japanese art; and they are very large, fully five feet long and more than three broad, mounted upon silk. And these are the legends of them: First kakemono: In the upper part of the painting is a scene from the Shaba, the world of men which we are wont to call the Real--a cemetery with trees in blossom, and mourners kneeling before tombs. All under the soft blue light of Japanese day. Underneath is the world of ghosts. Down through the earth-crust souls are descending. Here they are flitting all white through inky darknesses; here farther on, through weird twilight, they are wading the flood of the phantom River of the Three Roads, Sanzu-no-Kawa. And here on the right is waiting for them Sodzu-Baba, the Old Woman of the Three Roads, ghastly and grey, and tall as a nightmare. From some she is taking their garments;--the trees about her are heavily hung with the garments of others gone before. Farther down I see fleeing souls overtaken by demons--hideous blood-red demons, with feet like lions, with faces half human, half bovine, the physiognomy of minotaurs in fury. One is rending a soul asunder. Another demon is forcing souls to reincarnate themselves in bodies of horses, of dogs, of swine. And as they are thus reincarnated they flee away into shadow. Second kakemono: Such a gloom as the diver sees in deep-sea water, a lurid twilight. In the midst a throne, ebon-coloured, and upon it an awful figure seated--Emma Dai-O, Lord of Death and Judge of Souls, unpitying, tremendous. Frightful guardian spirits hover about him--armed goblins. On the left, in the foreground below the throne, stands the wondrous Mirror, Tabarino-Kagami, reflecting the state of souls and all the happenings of the world. A landscape now shadows its surface,--a landscape of cliffs and sand and sea, with ships in the offing. Upon the sand a dead man is lying, slain by a sword slash; the murderer is running away. Before this mirror a terrified soul stands, in the grasp of a demon, who compels him to look, and to recognise in the murderer's features his own face. To the right of the throne, upon a tall-stemmed flat stand, such as offerings to the gods are placed upon in the temples, a monstrous shape appears, like a double-faced head freshly cut off, and set upright upon the stump of the neck. The two faces are the Witnesses: the face of the Woman (Mirume) sees all that goes on in the Shaba; the other face is the face of a bearded man, the face of Kaguhana, who smells all odours, and by them is aware of all that human beings do. Close to them, upon a reading-stand, a great book is open, the record-book of deeds. And between the Mirror and the Witnesses white shuddering souls await judgment. Farther down I see the sufferings of souls already sentenced. One, in lifetime a liar, is having his tongue torn out by a demon armed with heated pincers. Other souls, flung by scores into fiery carts, are being dragged away to torment. The carts are of iron, but resemble in form certain hand-wagons which one sees every day being pulled and pushed through the streets by bare-limbed Japanese labourers, chanting always the same melancholy alternating chorus, Haidak! hei! haidak hei! But these demon-wagoners--naked, blood-coloured, having the feet of lions and the heads of bulls--move with their flaming wagons at a run, like jinricksha-men. All the souls so far represented are souls of adults. Third kakemono: A furnace, with souls for fuel, blazing up into darkness. Demons stir the fire with poles of iron. Down through the upper blackness other souls are falling head downward into the flames. Below this scene opens a shadowy landscape--a faint-blue and faint-grey world of hills and vales, through which a river serpentines--the Sai-no-Kawara. Thronging the banks of the pale river are ghosts of little children, trying to pile up stones. They are very, very pretty, the child-souls, pretty as real Japanese children are (it is astonishing how well is child-beauty felt and expressed by the artists of Japan). Each child has one little short white dress. In the foreground a horrible devil with an iron club has just dashed down and scattered a pile of stones built by one of the children. The little ghost, seated by the ruin of its work, is crying, with both pretty hands to its eyes. The devil appears to sneer. Other children also are weeping near by. But, lo! Jizo comes, all light and sweetness, with a glory moving behind him like a great full moon; and he holds out his shakujo, his strong and holy staff, and the little ghosts catch it and cling to it, and are drawn into the circle of his protection. And other infants have caught his great sleeves, and one has been lifted to the bosom of the god. Below this Sai-no-Kawara scene appears yet another shadow-world, a wilderness of bamboos! Only white-robed shapes of women appear in it. They are weeping; the fingers of all are bleeding. With finger-nails plucked out must they continue through centuries to pick the sharp-edged bamboo-grass. Fourth kakemono: Floating in glory, Dai-Nichi-Nyorai, Kwannon-Sama, Amida Buddha. Far below them as hell from heaven surges a lake of blood, in which souls float. The shores of this lake are precipices studded with sword-blades thickly set as teeth in the jaws of a shark; and demons are driving naked ghosts up the frightful slopes. But out of the crimson lake something crystalline rises, like a beautiful, clear water-spout; the stem of a flower,--a miraculous lotus, bearing up a soul to the feet of a priest standing above the verge of the abyss. By virtue of his prayer was shaped the lotus which thus lifted up and saved a sufferer. Alas! there are no other kakemonos. There were several others: they have been lost! No: I am happily mistaken; the priest has found, in some mysterious recess, one more kakemono, a very large one, which he unrolls and suspends beside the others. A vision of beauty, indeed! but what has this to do with faith or ghosts? In the foreground a garden by the waters of the sea, of some vast blue lake,--a garden like that at Kanagawa, full of exquisite miniature landscape-work: cascades, grottoes, lily-ponds, carved bridges, and trees snowy with blossom, and dainty pavilions out-jutting over the placid azure water. Long, bright, soft bands of clouds swim athwart the background. Beyond and above them rises a fairy magnificence of palatial structures, roof above roof, through an aureate haze like summer vapour: creations aerial, blue, light as dreams. And there are guests in these gardens, lovely beings, Japanese maidens. But they wear aureoles, star-shining: they are spirits! For this is Paradise, the Gokuraku; and all those divine shapes are Bosatsu. And now, looking closer, I perceive beautiful weird things which at first escaped my notice. They are gardening, these charming beings!--they are caressing the lotus-buds, sprinkling their petals with something celestial, helping them to blossom. And what lotus-buds with colours not of this world. Some have burst open; and in their luminous hearts, in a radiance like that of dawn, tiny naked infants are seated, each with a tiny halo. These are Souls, new Buddhas, hotoke born into bliss. Some are very, very small; others larger; all seem to be growing visibly, for their lovely nurses are feeding them with something ambrosial. I see one which has left its lotus-cradle, being conducted by a celestial Jizo toward the higher splendours far away. Above, in the loftiest blue, are floating tennin, angels of the Buddhist heaven, maidens with phoenix wings. One is playing with an ivory plectrum upon some stringed instrument, just as a dancing-girl plays her samisen; and others are sounding those curious Chinese flutes, composed of seventeen tubes, which are used still in sacred concerts at the great temples. Akira says this heaven is too much like earth. The gardens, he declares, are like the gardens of temples, in spite of the celestial lotus-flowers; and in the blue roofs of the celestial mansions he discovers memories of the tea-houses of the city of Saikyo. [7] Well, what after all is the heaven of any faith but ideal reiteration and prolongation of happy experiences remembered--the dream of dead days resurrected for us, and made eternal? And if you think this Japanese ideal too simple, too naive, if you say there are experiences of the material life more worthy of portrayal in a picture of heaven than any memory of days passed in Japanese gardens and temples and tea-houses, it is perhaps because you do not know Japan, the soft, sweet blue of its sky, the tender colour of its waters, the gentle splendour of its sunny days, the exquisite charm of its interiors, where the least object appeals to one's sense of beauty with the air of something not made, but caressed, into existence. Sec. 9 'Now there is a wasan of Jizo,' says Akira, taking from a shelf in the temple alcove some much-worn, blue-covered Japanese book. 'A wasan is what you would call a hymn or psalm. This book is two hundred years old: it is called Saino-Kawara-kuchi-zu-sami-no-den, which is, literally, "The Legend of the Humming of the Sai-no-Kawara." And this is the wasan'; and he reads me the hymn of Jizo--the legend of the murmur of the little ghosts, the legend of the humming of the Sai-no-Kawara-rhythmically, like a song: [8] 'Not of this world is the story of sorrow. The story of the Sai-no-Kawara, At the roots of the Mountain of Shide; Not of this world is the tale; yet 'tis most pitiful to hear. For together in the Sai-no-Kawara are assembled Children of tender age in multitude, Infants but two or three years old, Infants of four or five, infants of less than ten: In the Sai-no-Kawara are they gathered together. And the voice of their longing for their parents, The voice of their crying for their mothers and their fathers--"Chichi koishi! haha koishi!"--Is never as the voice of the crying of children in this world, But a crying so pitiful to hear That the sound of it would pierce through flesh and bone. And sorrowful indeed the task which they perform--Gathering the stones of the bed of the river, Therewith to heap the tower of prayers. Saying prayers for the happiness of father, they heap the first tower; Saying prayers for the happiness of mother, they heap the second tower; Saying prayers for their brothers, their sisters, and all whom they loved at home, they heap the third tower. Such, by day, are their pitiful diversions. But ever as the sun begins to sink below the horizon, Then do the Oni, the demons of the hells, appear, And say to them--"What is this that you do here?" Lo! your parents still living in the Shaba-world "Take no thought of pious offering or holy work "They do nought but mourn for you from the morning unto the evening. "Oh, how pitiful! alas! how unmerciful! "Verily the cause of the pains that you suffer "Is only the mourning, the lamentation of your parents." And saying also, "Blame never us!" The demons cast down the heaped-up towers, They dash the stones down with their clubs of iron. But lo! the teacher Jizo appears. All gently he comes, and says to the weeping infants:-- "Be not afraid, dears! be never fearful! "Poor little souls, your lives were brief indeed! "Too soon you were forced to make the weary journey to the Meido, "The long journey to the region of the dead! "Trust to me! I am your father and mother in the Meido, "Father of all children in the region of the dead." And he folds the skirt of his shining robe about them; So graciously takes he pity on the infants. To those who cannot walk he stretches forth his strong shakujo; And he pets the little ones, caresses them, takes them to his loving bosom So graciously he takes pity on the infants. Namu Amida Butsu! Chapter Four A Pilgrimage to Enoshima Sec. 1 KAMAKURA. A long, straggling country village, between low wooded hills, with a canal passing through it. Old Japanese cottages, dingy, neutral-tinted, with roofs of thatch, very steeply sloping, above their wooden walls and paper shoji. Green patches on all the roof-slopes, some sort of grass; and on the very summits, on the ridges, luxurious growths of yaneshobu, [1] the roof-plant, bearing pretty purple flowers. In the lukewarm air a mingling of Japanese odours, smells of sake, smells of seaweed soup, smells of daikon, the strong native radish; and dominating all, a sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense,--incense from the shrines of gods. Akira has hired two jinricksha for our pilgrimage; a speckless azure sky arches the world; and the land lies glorified in a joy of sunshine. And yet a sense of melancholy, of desolation unspeakable, weighs upon me as we roll along the bank of the tiny stream, between the mouldering lines of wretched little homes with grass growing on their roofs. For this mouldering hamlet represents all that remains of the million-peopled streets of Yoritomo's capital, the mighty city of the Shogunate, the ancient seat of feudal power, whither came the envoys of Kublai Khan demanding tribute, to lose their heads for their temerity. And only some of the unnumbered temples of the once magnificent city now remain, saved from the conflagrations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, doubtless because built in high places, or because isolated from the maze of burning streets by vast courts and groves. Here still dwell the ancient gods in the great silence of their decaying temples, without worshippers, without revenues, surrounded by desolations of rice-fields, where the chanting of frogs replaces the sea-like murmur of the city that was and is not. Sec. 2 The first great temple--En-gaku-ji--invites us to cross the canal by a little bridge facing its outward gate--a roofed gate with fine Chinese lines, but without carving. Passing it, we ascend a long, imposing succession of broad steps, leading up through a magnificent grove to a terrace, where we reach the second gate. This gate is a surprise; a stupendous structure of two stories--with huge sweeping curves of roof and enormous gables--antique, Chinese, magnificent. It is more than four hundred years old, but seems scarcely affected by the wearing of the centuries. The whole of the ponderous and complicated upper structure is sustained upon an open-work of round, plain pillars and cross-beams; the vast eaves are full of bird-nests; and the storm of twittering from the roofs is like a rushing of water. Immense the work is, and imposing in its aspect of settled power; but, in its way, it has great severity: there are no carvings, no gargoyles, no dragons; and yet the maze of projecting timbers below the eaves will both excite and delude expectation, so strangely does it suggest the grotesqueries and fantasticalities of another art. You look everywhere for the heads of lions, elephants, dragons, and see only the four-angled ends of beams, and feel rather astonished than disappointed. The majesty of the edifice could not have been strengthened by any such carving. After the gate another long series of wide steps, and more trees, millennial, thick-shadowing, and then the terrace of the temple itself, with two beautiful stone lanterns (toro) at its entrance. The architecture of the temple resembles that of the gate, although on a lesser scale. Over the doors is a tablet with Chinese characters, signifying, 'Great, Pure, Clear, Shining Treasure.' But a heavy framework of wooden bars closes the sanctuary, and there is no one to let us in. Peering between the bars I see, in a sort of twilight, first a pavement of squares of marble, then an aisle of massive wooden pillars upholding the dim lofty roof, and at the farther end, between the pillars, Shaka, colossal, black-visaged, gold-robed, enthroned upon a giant lotus fully forty feet in circumference. At his right hand some white mysterious figure stands, holding an incense-box; at his left, another white figure is praying with clasped hands. Both are of superhuman stature. But it is too dark within the edifice to discern who they may be--whether disciples of the Buddha, or divinities, or figures of saints. Beyond this temple extends an immense grove of trees--ancient cedars and pines--with splendid bamboos thickly planted between them, rising perpendicularly as masts to mix their plumes with the foliage of the giants: the effect is tropical, magnificent. Through this shadowing, a flight of broad stone steps slant up gently to some yet older shrine. And ascending them we reach another portal, smaller than the imposing Chinese structure through which we already passed, but wonderful, weird, full of dragons, dragons of a form which sculptors no longer carve, which they have even forgotten how to make, winged dragons rising from a storm-whirl of waters or thereinto descending. The dragon upon the panel of the left gate has her mouth closed; the jaws of the dragon on the panel of the right gate are open and menacing. Female and male they are, like the lions of Buddha. And the whirls of the eddying water, and the crests of the billowing, stand out from the panel in astonishing boldness of relief, in loops and curlings of grey wood time-seasoned to the hardness of stone. The little temple beyond contains no celebrated image, but a shari only, or relic of Buddha, brought from India. And I cannot see it, having no time to wait until the absent keeper of the shari can be found. Sec. 3 'Now we shall go to look at the big bell,' says Akira. We turn to the left as we descend along a path cut between hills faced for the height of seven or eight feet with protection-walls made green by moss; and reach a flight of extraordinarily dilapidated steps, with grass springing between their every joint and break--steps so worn down and displaced by countless feet that they have become ruins, painful and even dangerous to mount. We reach the summit, however, without mishap, and find ourselves before a little temple, on the steps of which an old priest awaits us, with smiling bow of welcome. We return his salutation; but ere entering the temple turn to look at the tsurigane on the right--the famous bell. Under a lofty open shed, with a tilted Chinese roof, the great bell is hung. I should judge it to be fully nine feet high, and about five feet in diameter, with lips about eight inches thick. The shape of it is not like that of our bells, which broaden toward the lips; this has the same diameter through all its height, and it is covered with Buddhist texts cut into the smooth metal of it. It is rung by means of a heavy swinging beam, suspended from the roof by chains, and moved like a battering-ram. There are loops of palm-fibre rope attached to this beam to pull it by; and when you pull hard enough, so as to give it a good swing, it strikes a moulding like a lotus-flower on the side of the bell. This it must have done many hundred times; for the square, flat end of it, though showing the grain of a very dense wood, has been battered into a convex disk with ragged protruding edges, like the surface of a long-used printer's mallet. A priest makes a sign to me to ring the bell. I first touch the great lips with my hand very lightly; and a musical murmur comes from them. Then I set the beam swinging strongly; and a sound deep as thunder, rich as the bass of a mighty organ--a sound enormous, extraordinary, yet beautiful--rolls over the hills and away. Then swiftly follows another and lesser and sweeter billowing of tone; then another; then an eddying of waves of echoes. Only once was it struck, the astounding bell; yet it continues to sob and moan for at least ten minutes! And the age of this bell is six hundred and fifty years. [2] In the little temple near by, the priest shows us a series of curious paintings, representing the six hundredth anniversary of the casting of the bell. (For this is a sacred bell, and the spirit of a god is believed to dwell within it.) Otherwise the temple has little of interest. There are some kakemono representing Iyeyasu and his retainers; and on either side of the door, separating the inner from the outward sanctuary, there are life-size images of Japanese warriors in antique costume. On the altars of the inner shrine are small images, grouped upon a miniature landscape-work of painted wood--the Jiugo-Doji, or Fifteen Youths--the Sons of the Goddess Benten. There are gohei before the shrine, and a mirror upon it; emblems of Shinto. The sanctuary has changed hands in the great transfer of Buddhist temples to the State religion. In nearly every celebrated temple little Japanese prints are sold, containing the history of the shrine, and its miraculous legends. I find several such things on sale at the door of the temple, and in one of them, ornamented with a curious engraving of the bell, I discover, with Akira's aid, the following traditions: Sec. 4 In the twelfth year of Bummei, this bell rang itself. And one who laughed on being told of the miracle, met with misfortune; and another, who believed, thereafter prospered, and obtained all his desires. Now, in that time there died in the village of Tamanawa a sick man whose name was Ono-no-Kimi; and Ono-no-Kimi descended to the region of the dead, and went before the Judgment-Seat of Emma-O. And Emma, Judge of Souls, said to him, 'You come too soon! The measure of life allotted you in the Shaba-world has not yet been exhausted. Go back at once.' But Ono-no-Kimi pleaded, saying, 'How may I go back, not knowing my way through the darkness?' And Emma answered him, 'You can find your way back by listening to the sound of the bell of En-gaku-ji, which is heard in the Nan-en-budi world, going south.' And Ono-no-Kimi went south, and heard the bell, and found his way through the darknesses, and revived in the Shaba-world. Also in those days there appeared in many provinces a Buddhist priest of giant stature, whom none remembered to have seen before, and whose name no man knew, travelling through the land, and everywhere exhorting the people to pray before the bell of En-gaku-ji. And it was at last discovered that the giant pilgrim was the holy bell itself, transformed by supernatural power into the form of a priest. And after these things had happened, many prayed before the bell, and obtained their wishes. Sec. 5 'Oh! there is something still to see,' my guide exclaims as we reach the great Chinese gate again; and he leads the way across the grounds by another path to a little hill, previously hidden from view by trees. The face of the hill, a mass of soft stone perhaps one hundred feet high, is hollowed out into chambers, full of images. These look like burial-caves; and the images seem funereal monuments. There are two stories of chambers--three above, two below; and the former are connected with the latter by a narrow interior stairway cut through the living rock. And all around the dripping walls of these chambers on pedestals are grey slabs, shaped exactly like the haka in Buddhist cemeteries, and chiselled with figures of divinities in high relief. All have glory-disks: some are naive and sincere like the work of our own mediaeval image-makers. Several are not unfamiliar. I have seen before, in the cemetery of Kuboyama, this kneeling woman with countless shadowy hands; and this figure tiara-coiffed, slumbering with one knee raised, and cheek pillowed upon the left hand--the placid and pathetic symbol of the perpetual rest. Others, like Madonnas, hold lotus-flowers, and their feet rest upon the coils of a serpent. I cannot see them all, for the rock roof of one chamber has fallen in; and a sunbeam entering the ruin reveals a host of inaccessible sculptures half buried in rubbish. But no!--this grotto-work is not for the dead; and these are not haka, as I imagined, but only images of the Goddess of Mercy. These chambers are chapels; and these sculptures are the En-gaku-ji-no-hyaku-Kwannon, 'the Hundred Kwannons of En-gaku-ji.' And I see in the upper chamber above the stairs a granite tablet in a rock-niche, chiselled with an inscription in Sanscrit transliterated into Chinese characters, 'Adoration to the great merciful Kwan-ze-on, who looketh down above the sound of prayer.' [3] Sec. 6 Entering the grounds of the next temple, the Temple of Ken-cho-ji, through the 'Gate of the Forest of Contemplative Words,' and the 'Gate of the Great Mountain of Wealth,' one might almost fancy one's self reentering, by some queer mistake, the grounds of En-gaku-ji. For the third gate before us, and the imposing temple beyond it, constructed upon the same models as those of the structures previously visited, were also the work of the same architect. Passing this third gate--colossal, severe, superb--we come to a fountain of bronze before the temple doors, an immense and beautiful lotus-leaf of metal, forming a broad shallow basin kept full to the brim by a jet in its midst. This temple also is paved with black and white square slabs, and we can enter it with our shoes. Outside it is plain and solemn as that of En-gaku-ji; but the interior offers a more extraordinary spectacle of faded splendour. In lieu of the black Shaka throned against a background of flamelets, is a colossal Jizo-Sama, with a nimbus of fire--a single gilded circle large as a wagon-wheel, breaking into fire-tongues at three points. He is seated upon an enormous lotus of tarnished gold--over the lofty edge of which the skirt of his robe trails down. Behind him, standing on ascending tiers of golden steps, are glimmering hosts of miniature figures of him, reflections, multiplications of him, ranged there by ranks of hundreds--the Thousand Jizo. From the ceiling above him droop the dingy splendours of a sort of dais-work, a streaming circle of pendants like a fringe, shimmering faintly through the webbed dust of centuries. And the ceiling itself must once have been a marvel; all beamed in caissons, each caisson containing, upon a gold ground, the painted figure of a flying bird. Formerly the eight great pillars supporting the roof were also covered with gilding; but only a few traces of it linger still upon their worm-pierced surfaces, and about the bases of their capitals. And there are wonderful friezes above the doors, from which all colour has long since faded away, marvellous grey old carvings in relief; floating figures of tennin, or heavenly spirits playing upon flutes and biwa. There is a chamber separated by a heavy wooden screen from the aisle on the right; and the priest in charge of the building slides the screen aside, and bids us enter. In this chamber is a drum elevated upon a brazen stand,--the hugest I ever saw, fully eighteen feet in circumference. Beside it hangs a big bell, covered with Buddhist texts. I am sorry to learn that it is prohibited to sound the great drum. There is nothing else to see except some dingy paper lanterns figured with the svastika--the sacred Buddhist symbol called by the Japanese manji. Sec. 7 Akira tells me that in the book called Jizo-kyo-Kosui, this legend is related of the great statue of Jizo in this same ancient temple of Ken-cho-ji. Formerly there lived at Kamakura the wife of a Ronin [4] named Soga Sadayoshi. She lived by feeding silkworms and gathering the silk. She used often to visit the temple of Ken-cho-ji; and one very cold day that she went there, she thought that the image of Jizo looked like one suffering from cold; and she resolved to make a cap to keep the god's head warm--such a cap as the people of the country wear in cold weather. And she went home and made the cap and covered the god's head with it, saying, 'Would I were rich enough to give thee a warm covering for all thine august body; but, alas! I am poor, and even this which I offer thee is unworthy of thy divine acceptance.' Now this woman very suddenly died in the fiftieth year of her age, in the twelfth month of the fifth year of the period called Chisho. But her body remained warm for three days, so that her relatives would not suffer her to be taken to the burning-ground. And on the evening of the third day she came to life again. Then she related that on the day of her death she had gone before the judgment-seat of Emma, king and judge of the dead. And Emma, seeing her, became wroth, and said to her: 'You have been a wicked woman, and have scorned the teaching of the Buddha. All your life you have passed in destroying the lives of silkworms by putting them into heated water. Now you shall go to the Kwakkto-Jigoku, and there burn until your sins shall be expiated.' Forthwith she was seized and dragged by demons to a great pot filled with molten metal, and thrown into the pot, and she cried out horribly. And suddenly Jizo-Sama descended into the molten metal beside her, and the metal became like a flowing of oil and ceased to burn; and Jizo put his arms about her and lifted her out. And he went with her before King Emma, and asked that she should be pardoned for his sake, forasmuch as she had become related to him by one act of goodness. So she found pardon, and returned to the Shaba-world. 'Akira,' I ask, 'it cannot then be lawful, according to Buddhism, for any one to wear silk?' 'Assuredly not,' replies Akira; 'and by the law of Buddha priests are expressly forbidden to wear silk. Nevertheless,' he adds with that quiet smile of his, in which I am beginning to discern suggestions of sarcasm, 'nearly all the priests wear silk.' Sec. 8 Akira also tells me this: It is related in the seventh volume of the book Kamakurashi that there was formerly at Kamakura a temple called Emmei-ji, in which there was enshrined a famous statue of Jizo, called Hadaka-Jizo, or Naked Jizo. The statue was indeed naked, but clothes were put upon it; and it stood upright with its feet upon a chessboard. Now, when pilgrims came to the temple and paid a certain fee, the priest of the temple would remove the clothes of the statue; and then all could see that, though the face was the face of Jizo, the body was the body of a woman. Now this was the origin of the famous image of Hadaka-Jizo standing upon the chessboard. On one occasion the great prince Taira-no-Tokyori was playing chess with his wife in the presence of many guests. And he made her agree, after they had played several games, that whosoever should lose the next game would have to stand naked on the chessboard. And in the next game they played his wife lost. And she prayed to Jizo to save her from the shame of appearing naked. And Jizo came in answer to her prayer and stood upon the chessboard, and disrobed himself, and changed his body suddenly into the body of a woman. Sec. 9 As we travel on, the road curves and narrows between higher elevations, and becomes more sombre. 'Oi! mat!' my Buddhist guide calls softly to the runners; and our two vehicles halt in a band of sunshine, descending, through an opening in the foliage of immense trees, over a flight of ancient mossy steps. 'Here,' says my friend, 'is the temple of the King of Death; it is called Emma-Do; and it is a temple of the Zen sect--Zen-Oji. And it is more than seven hundred years old, and there is a famous statue in it.' We ascend to a small, narrow court in which the edifice stands. At the head of the steps, to the right, is a stone tablet, very old, with characters cut at least an inch deep into the granite of it, Chinese characters signifying, 'This is the Temple of Emma, King.' The temple resembles outwardly and inwardly the others we have visited, and, like those of Shaka and of the colossal Jizo of Kamakura, has a paved floor, so that we are not obliged to remove our shoes on entering. Everything is worn, dim, vaguely grey; there is a pungent scent of mouldiness; the paint has long ago peeled away from the naked wood of the pillars. Throned to right and left against the high walls tower nine grim figures--five on one side, four on the other--wearing strange crowns with trumpet-shapen ornaments; figures hoary with centuries, and so like to the icon of Emma, which I saw at Kuboyama, that I ask, 'Are all these Emma?' 'Oh, no!' my guide answers; 'these are his attendants only--the Jiu-O, the Ten Kings.' 'But there are only nine?' I query. 'Nine, and Emma completes the number. You have not yet seen Emma.' Where is he? I see at the farther end of the chamber an altar elevated upon a platform approached by wooden steps; but there is no image, only the usual altar furniture of gilded bronze and lacquer-ware. Behind the altar I see only a curtain about six feet square--a curtain once dark red, now almost without any definite hue--probably veiling some alcove. A temple guardian approaches, and invites us to ascend the platform. I remove my shoes before mounting upon the matted surface, and follow the guardian behind the altar, in front of the curtain. He makes me a sign to look, and lifts the veil with a long rod. And suddenly, out of the blackness of some mysterious profundity masked by that sombre curtain, there glowers upon me an apparition at the sight of which I involuntarily start back--a monstrosity exceeding all anticipation--a Face. [5] A Face tremendous, menacing, frightful, dull red, as with the redness of heated iron cooling into grey. The first shock of the vision is no doubt partly due to the somewhat theatrical manner in which the work is suddenly revealed out of darkness by the lifting of the curtain. But as the surprise passes I begin to recognise the immense energy of the conception--to look for the secret of the grim artist. The wonder of the creation is not in the tiger frown, nor in the violence of the terrific mouth, nor in the fury and ghastly colour of the head as a whole: it is in the eyes--eyes of nightmare. Sec. 10 Now this weird old temple has its legend. Seven hundred years ago, 'tis said, there died the great image-maker, the great busshi; Unke-Sosei. And Unke-Sosei signifies 'Unke who returned from the dead.' For when he came before Emma, the Judge of Souls, Emma said to him: 'Living, thou madest no image of me. Go back unto earth and make one, now that thou hast looked upon me.' And Unke found himself suddenly restored to the world of men; and they that had known him before, astonished to see him alive again, called him Unke-Sosei. And Unke-Sosei, bearing with him always the memory of the countenance of Emma, wrought this image of him, which still inspires fear in all who behold it; and he made also the images of the grim Jiu-O, the Ten Kings obeying Emma, which sit throned about the temple. I want to buy a picture of Emma, and make my wish known to the temple guardian. Oh, yes, I may buy a picture of Emma, but I must first see the Oni. I follow the guardian out of the temple, down the mossy steps, and across the village highway into a little Japanese cottage, where I take my seat upon the floor. The guardian disappears behind a screen, and presently returns dragging with him the Oni--the image of a demon, naked, blood-red, indescribably ugly. The Oni is about three feet high. He stands in an attitude of menace, brandishing a club. He has a head shaped something like the head of a bulldog, with brazen eyes; and his feet are like the feet of a lion. Very gravely the guardian turns the grotesquery round and round, that I may admire its every aspect; while a naive crowd collects before the open door to look at the stranger and the demon. Then the guardian finds me a rude woodcut of Emma, with a sacred inscription printed upon it; and as soon as I have paid for it, he proceeds to stamp the paper, with the seal of the temple. The seal he keeps in a wonderful lacquered box, covered with many wrappings of soft leather. These having been removed, I inspect the seal--an oblong, vermilion-red polished stone, with the design cut in intaglio upon it. He moistens the surface with red ink, presses it upon the corner of the paper bearing the grim picture, and the authenticity of my strange purchase is established for ever. Sec. 11 You do not see the Dai-Butsu as you enter the grounds of his long-vanished temple, and proceed along a paved path across stretches of lawn; great trees hide him. But very suddenly, at a turn, he comes into full view and you start! No matter how many photographs of the colossus you may have already seen, this first vision of the reality is an astonishment. Then you imagine that you are already too near, though the image is at least a hundred yards away. As for me, I retire at once thirty or forty yards back, to get a better view. And the jinricksha man runs after me, laughing and gesticulating, thinking that I imagine the image alive and am afraid of it. But, even were that shape alive, none could be afraid of it. The gentleness, the dreamy passionlessness of those features,--the immense repose of the whole figure--are full of beauty and charm. And, contrary to all expectation, the nearer you approach the giant Buddha, the greater this charm becomes. You look up into the solemnly beautiful face--into the half-closed eyes that seem to watch you through their eyelids of bronze as gently as those of a child; and you feel that the image typifies all that is tender and calm in the Soul of the East. Yet you feel also that only Japanese thought could have created it. Its beauty, its dignity, its perfect repose, reflect the higher life of the race that imagined it; and, though doubtless inspired by some Indian model, as the treatment of the hair and various symbolic marks reveal, the art is Japanese. So mighty and beautiful the work is, that you will not for some time notice the magnificent lotus-plants of bronze, fully fifteen feet high, planted before the figure, on either side of the great tripod in which incense-rods are burning. Through an orifice in the right side of the enormous lotus-blossom on which the Buddha is seated, you can enter into the statue. The interior contains a little shrine of Kwannon, and a statue of the priest Yuten, and a stone tablet bearing in Chinese characters the sacred formula, Namu Amida Butsu. A ladder enables the pilgrim to ascend into the interior of the colossus as high as the shoulders, in which are two little windows commanding a wide prospect of the grounds; while a priest, who acts as guide, states the age of the statue to be six hundred and thirty years, and asks for some small contribution to aid in the erection of a new temple to shelter it from the weather. For this Buddha once had a temple. A tidal wave following an earthquake swept walls and roof away, but left the mighty Amida unmoved, still meditating upon his lotus. Sec. 12 And we arrive before the far-famed Kamakura temple of Kwannon--Kwannon, who yielded up her right to the Eternal Peace that she might save the souls of men, and renounced Nirvana to suffer with humanity for other myriad million ages--Kwannon, the Goddess of Pity and of Mercy. I climb three flights of steps leading to the temple, and a young girl, seated at the threshold, rises to greet us. Then she disappears within the temple to summon the guardian priest, a venerable man, white-robed, who makes me a sign to enter. The temple is large as any that I have yet seen, and, like the others, grey with the wearing of six hundred years. From the roof there hang down votive offerings, inscriptions, and lanterns in multitude, painted with various pleasing colours. Almost opposite to the entrance is a singular statue, a seated figure, of human dimensions and most human aspect, looking upon us with small weird eyes set in a wondrously wrinkled face. This face was originally painted flesh-tint, and the robes of the image pale blue; but now the whole is uniformly grey with age and dust, and its colourlessness harmonises so well with the senility of the figure that one is almost ready to believe one's self gazing at a living mendicant pilgrim. It is Benzuru, the same personage whose famous image at Asakusa has been made featureless by the wearing touch of countless pilgrim-fingers. To left and right of the entrance are the Ni-O, enormously muscled, furious of aspect; their crimson bodies are speckled with a white scum of paper pellets spat at them by worshippers. Above the altar is a small but very pleasing image of Kwannon, with her entire figure relieved against an oblong halo of gold, imitating the flickering of flame. But this is not the image for which the temple is famed; there is another to be seen upon certain conditions. The old priest presents me with a petition, written in excellent and eloquent English, praying visitors to contribute something to the maintenance of the temple and its pontiff, and appealing to those of another faith to remember that 'any belief which can make men kindly and good is worthy of respect.' I contribute my mite, and I ask to see the great Kwannon. Then the old priest lights a lantern, and leads the way, through a low doorway on the left of the altar, into the interior of the temple, into some very lofty darkness. I follow him cautiously awhile, discerning nothing whatever but the flicker of the lantern; then we halt before something which gleams. A moment, and my eyes, becoming more accustomed to the darkness, begin to distinguish outlines; the gleaming object defines itself gradually as a Foot, an immense golden Foot, and I perceive the hem of a golden robe undulating over the instep. Now the other foot appears; the figure is certainly standing. I can perceive that we are in a narrow but also very lofty chamber, and that out of some mysterious blackness overhead ropes are dangling down into the circle of lantern-light illuminating the golden feet. The priest lights two more lanterns, and suspends them upon hooks attached to a pair of pendent ropes about a yard apart; then he pulls up both together slowly. More of the golden robe is revealed as the lanterns ascend, swinging on their way; then the outlines of two mighty knees; then the curving of columnar thighs under chiselled drapery, and, as with the still waving ascent of the lanterns the golden Vision towers ever higher through the gloom, expectation intensifies. There is no sound but the sound of the invisible pulleys overhead, which squeak like bats. Now above the golden girdle, the suggestion of a bosom. Then the glowing of a golden hand uplifted in benediction. Then another golden hand holding a lotus. And at last a Face, golden, smiling with eternal youth and infinite tenderness, the face of Kwannon. So revealed out of the consecrated darkness, this ideal of divine feminity--creation of a forgotten art and time--is more than impressive. I can scarcely call the emotion which it produces admiration; it is rather reverence. But the lanterns, which paused awhile at the level of the beautiful face, now ascend still higher, with a fresh squeaking of pulleys. And lo! the tiara of the divinity appears with strangest symbolism. It is a pyramid of heads, of faces-charming faces of maidens, miniature faces of Kwannon herself. For this is the Kwannon of the Eleven Faces--Jiu-ichimen-Kwannon. Sec. 13 Most sacred this statue is held; and this is its legend. In the reign of Emperor Gensei, there lived in the province of Yamato a Buddhist priest, Tokudo Shonin, who had been in a previous birth Hold Bosatsu, but had been reborn among common men to save their souls. Now at that time, in a valley in Yamato, Tokudo Shonin, walking by night, saw a wonderful radiance; and going toward it found that it came from the trunk of a great fallen tree, a kusunoki, or camphor-tree. A delicious perfume came from the tree, and the shining of it was like the shining of the moon. And by these signs Tokudo Shonin knew that the wood was holy; and he bethought him that he should have the statue of Kwannon carved from it. And he recited a sutra, and repeated the Nenbutsu, praying for inspiration; and even while he prayed there came and stood before him an aged man and an aged woman; and these said to him, 'We know that your desire is to have the image of Kwannon-Sama carved from this tree with the help of Heaven; continue therefore, to pray, and we shall carve the statue.' And Tokudo Shonin did as they bade him; and he saw them easily split the vast trunk into two equal parts, and begin to carve each of the parts into an image. And he saw them so labour for three days; and on the third day the work was done--and he saw the two marvellous statues of Kwannon made perfect before him. And he said to the strangers: 'Tell me, I pray you, by what names you are known.' Then the old man answered: 'I am Kasuga Myojin.' And the woman answered: 'I am called Ten-sho-ko-dai-jin; I am the Goddess of the Sun.' And as they spoke both became transfigured and ascended to heaven and vanished from the sight of Tokudo Shonin. [6] And the Emperor, hearing of these happenings, sent his representative to Yamato to make offerings, and to have a temple built. Also the great priest, Gyogi-Bosatsu, came and consecrated the images, and dedicated the temple which by order of the Emperor was built. And one of the statues he placed in the temple, enshrining it, and commanding it: 'Stay thou here always to save all living creatures!' But the other statue he cast into the sea, saying to it: 'Go thou whithersoever it is best, to save all the living.' Now the statue floated to Kamakura. And there arriving by night it shed a great radiance all about it as if there were sunshine upon the sea; and the fishermen of Kamakura were awakened by the great light; and they went out in boats, and found the statue floating and brought it to shore. And the Emperor ordered that a temple should be built for it, the temple called Shin-haseidera, on the mountain called Kaiko-San, at Kamakura. Sec. 14 As we leave the temple of Kwannon behind us, there are no more dwellings visible along the road; the green slopes to left and right become steeper, and the shadows of the great trees deepen over us. But still, at intervals, some flight of venerable mossy steps, a carven Buddhist gateway, or a lofty torii, signals the presence of sanctuaries we have no time to visit: countless crumbling shrines are all around us, dumb witnesses to the antique splendour and vastness of the dead capital; and everywhere, mingled with perfume of blossoms, hovers the sweet, resinous smell of Japanese incense. Be-times we pass a scattered multitude of sculptured stones, like segments of four-sided pillars--old haka, the forgotten tombs of a long-abandoned cemetery; or the solitary image of some Buddhist deity--a dreaming Amida or faintly smiling Kwannon. All are ancient, time-discoloured, mutilated; a few have been weather-worn into unrecognisability. I halt a moment to contemplate something pathetic, a group of six images of the charming divinity who cares for the ghosts of little children--the Roku-Jizo. Oh, how chipped and scurfed and mossed they are! Five stand buried almost up to their shoulders in a heaping of little stones, testifying to the prayers of generations; and votive yodarekake, infant bibs of divers colours, have been put about the necks of these for the love of children lost. But one of the gentle god's images lies shattered and overthrown in its own scattered pebble-pile-broken perhaps by some passing wagon. Sec. 15 The road slopes before us as we go, sinks down between cliffs steep as the walls of a canyon, and curves. Suddenly we emerge from the cliffs, and reach the sea. It is blue like the unclouded sky--a soft dreamy blue. And our path turns sharply to the right, and winds along cliff-summits overlooking a broad beach of dun-coloured sand; and the sea wind blows deliciously with a sweet saline scent, urging the lungs to fill themselves to the very utmost; and far away before me, I perceive a beautiful high green mass, an island foliage-covered, rising out of the water about a quarter of a mile from the mainland--Enoshima, the holy island, sacred to the goddess of the sea, the goddess of beauty. I can already distinguish a tiny town, grey-sprinkling its steep slope. Evidently it can be reached to-day on foot, for the tide is out, and has left bare a long broad reach of sand, extending to it, from the opposite village which we are approaching, like a causeway. At Katase, the little settlement facing the island, we must leave our jinricksha and walk; the dunes between the village and the beach are too deep to pull the vehicle over. Scores of other jinricksha are waiting here in the little narrow street for pilgrims who have preceded me. But to-day, I am told, I am the only European who visits the shrine of Benten. Our two men lead the way over the dunes, and we soon descend upon damp firm sand. As we near the island the architectural details of the little town define delightfully through the faint sea-haze--curved bluish sweeps of fantastic roofs, angles of airy balconies, high-peaked curious gables, all above a fluttering of queerly shaped banners covered with mysterious lettering. We pass the sand-flats; and the ever-open Portal of the Sea-city, the City of the Dragon-goddess, is before us, a beautiful torii. All of bronze it is, with shimenawa of bronze above it, and a brazen tablet inscribed with characters declaring: 'This is the Palace of the Goddess of Enoshima.' About the bases of the ponderous pillars are strange designs in relievo, eddyings of waves with tortoises struggling in the flow. This is really the gate of the city, facing the shrine of Benten by the land approach; but it is only the third torii of the imposing series through Katase: we did not see the others, having come by way of the coast. And lo! we are in Enoshima. High before us slopes the single street, a street of broad steps, a street shadowy, full of multi-coloured flags and dank blue drapery dashed with white fantasticalities, which are words, fluttered by the sea wind. It is lined with taverns and miniature shops. At every one I must pause to look; and to dare to look at anything in Japan is to want to buy it. So I buy, and buy, and buy! For verily 'tis the City of Mother-of-Pearl, this Enoshima. In every shop, behind the lettered draperies there are miracles of shell-work for sale at absurdly small prices. The glazed cases laid flat upon the matted platforms, the shelved cabinets set against the walls, are all opalescent with nacreous things--extraordinary surprises, incredible ingenuities; strings of mother-of-pearl fish, strings of mother-of-pearl birds, all shimmering with rainbow colours. There are little kittens of mother-of-pearl, and little foxes of mother-of-pearl, and little puppies of mother-of-pearl, and girls' hair-combs, and cigarette-holders, and pipes too beautiful to use. There are little tortoises, not larger than a shilling, made of shells, that, when you touch them, however lightly, begin to move head, legs, and tail, all at the same time, alternately withdrawing or protruding their limbs so much like real tortoises as to give one a shock of surprise. There are storks and birds, and beetles and butterflies, and crabs and lobsters, made so cunningly of shells, that only touch convinces you they are not alive. There are bees of shell, poised on flowers of the same material--poised on wire in such a way that they seem to buzz if moved only with the tip of a feather. There is shell-work jewellery indescribable, things that Japanese girls love, enchantments in mother-of-pearl, hair-pins carven in a hundred forms, brooches, necklaces. And there are photographs of Enoshima. Sec. 16 This curious street ends at another torii, a wooden torii, with a steeper flight of stone steps ascending to it. At the foot of the steps are votive stone lamps and a little well, and a stone tank at which all pilgrims wash their hands and rinse their mouths before approaching the temples of the gods. And hanging beside the tank are bright blue towels, with large white Chinese characters upon them. I ask Akira what these characters signify: 'Ho-Keng is the sound of the characters in the Chinese; but in Japanese the same characters are pronounced Kenjitatetmatsuru, and signify that those towels are mostly humbly offered to Benten. They are what you call votive offerings. And there are many kinds of votive offerings made to famous shrines. Some people give towels, some give pictures, some give vases; some offer lanterns of paper, or bronze, or stone. It is common to promise such offerings when making petitions to the gods; and it is usual to promise a torii. The torii may be small or great according to the wealth of him who gives it; the very rich pilgrim may offer to the gods a torii of metal, such as that below, which is the Gate of Enoshima.' 'Akira, do the Japanese always keep their vows to the gods?' Akira smiles a sweet smile, and answers: 'There was a man who promised to build a torii of good metal if his prayers were granted. And he obtained all that he desired. And then he built a torii with three exceedingly small needles.' Sec. 17 Ascending the steps, we reach a terrace, overlooking all the city roofs. There are Buddhist lions of stone and stone lanterns, mossed and chipped, on either side the torii; and the background of the terrace is the sacred hill, covered with foliage. To the left is a balustrade of stone, old and green, surrounding a shallow pool covered with scum of water-weed. And on the farther bank above it, out of the bushes, protrudes a strangely shaped stone slab, poised on edge, and covered with Chinese characters. It is a sacred stone, and is believed to have the form of a great frog, gama; wherefore it is called Gama-ishi, the Frog-stone. Here and there along the edge of the terrace are other graven monuments, one of which is the offering of certain pilgrims who visited the shrine of the sea-goddess one hundred times. On the right other flights of steps lead to loftier terraces; and an old man, who sits at the foot of them, making bird-cages of bamboo, offers himself as guide. We follow him to the next terrace, where there is a school for the children of Enoshima, and another sacred stone, huge and shapeless: Fuku-ishi, the Stone of Good Fortune. In old times pilgrims who rubbed their hands upon it believed they would thereby gain riches; and the stone is polished and worn by the touch of innumerable palms. More steps and more green-mossed lions and lanterns, and another terrace with a little temple in its midst, the first shrine of Benten. Before it a few stunted palm-trees are growing. There is nothing in the shrine of interest, only Shinto emblems. But there is another well beside it with other votive towels, and there is another mysterious monument, a stone shrine brought from China six hundred years ago. Perhaps it contained some far-famed statue before this place of pilgrimage was given over to the priests of Shinto. There is nothing in it now; the monolith slab forming the back of it has been fractured by the falling of rocks from the cliff above; and the inscription cut therein has been almost effaced by some kind of scum. Akira reads 'Dai-Nippongoku-Enoshima-no-reiseki-ken . . .'; the rest is undecipherable. He says there is a statue in the neighbouring temple, but it is exhibited only once a year, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. Leaving the court by a rising path to the left, we proceed along the verge of a cliff overlooking the sea. Perched upon this verge are pretty tea-houses, all widely open to the sea wind, so that, looking through them, over their matted floors and lacquered balconies one sees the ocean as in a picture-frame, and the pale clear horizon specked with snowy sails, and a faint blue-peaked shape also, like a phantom island, the far vapoury silhouette of Oshima. Then we find another torii, and other steps leading to a terrace almost black with shade of enormous evergreen trees, and surrounded on the sea side by another stone balustrade, velveted with moss. On the right more steps, another torii, another terrace; and more mossed green lions and stone lamps; and a monument inscribed with the record of the change whereby Enoshima passed away from Buddhism to become Shino. Beyond, in the centre of another plateau, the second shrine of Benten. But there is no Benten! Benten has been hidden away by Shinto hands. The second shrine is void as the first. Nevertheless, in a building to the left of the temple, strange relics are exhibited. Feudal armour; suits of plate and chain-mail; helmets with visors which are demoniac masks of iron; helmets crested with dragons of gold; two-handed swords worthy of giants; and enormous arrows, more than five feet long, with shafts nearly an inch in diameter. One has a crescent head about nine inches from horn to horn, the interior edge of the crescent being sharp as a knife. Such a missile would take off a man's head; and I can scarcely believe Akira's assurance that such ponderous arrows were shot from a bow by hand only. There is a specimen of the writing of Nichiren, the great Buddhist priest--gold characters on a blue ground; and there is, in a lacquered shrine, a gilded dragon said to have been made by that still greater priest and writer and master-wizard, Kobodaishi. A path shaded by overarching trees leads from this plateau to the third shrine. We pass a torii and beyond it come to a stone monument covered with figures of monkeys chiselled in relief. What the signification of this monument is, even our guide cannot explain. Then another torii. It is of wood; but I am told it replaces one of metal, stolen in the night by thieves. Wonderful thieves! that torii must have weighed at least a ton! More stone lanterns; then an immense count, on the very summit of the mountain, and there, in its midst, the third and chief temple of Benten. And before the temple is a large vacant space surrounded by a fence in such manner as to render the shrine totally inaccessible. Vanity and vexation of spirit! There is, however, a little haiden, or place of prayer, with nothing in it but a money-box and a bell, before the fence, and facing the temple steps. Here the pilgrims make their offerings and pray. Only a small raised platform covered with a Chinese roof supported upon four plain posts, the back of the structure being closed by a lattice about breast high. From this praying-station we can look into the temple of Benten, and see that Benten is not there. But I perceive that the ceiling is arranged in caissons; and in a central caisson I discover a very curious painting--a foreshortened Tortoise, gazing down at me. And while I am looking at it I hear Akira and the guide laughing; and the latter exclaims, 'Benten-Sama!' A beautiful little damask snake is undulating up the lattice-work, poking its head through betimes to look at us. It does not seem in the least afraid, nor has it much reason to be, seeing that its kind are deemed the servants and confidants of Benten. Sometimes the great goddess herself assumes the serpent form; perhaps she has come to see us. Near by is a singular stone, set on a pedestal in the court. It has the form of the body of a tortoise, and markings like those of the creature's shell; and it is held a sacred thing, and is called the Tortoise-stone. But I fear exceedingly that in all this place we shall find nothing save stones and serpents! Sec. 18 Now we are going to visit the Dragon cavern, not so called, Akira says, because the Dragon of Benten ever dwelt therein, but because the shape of the cavern is the shape of a dragon. The path descends toward the opposite side of the island, and suddenly breaks into a flight of steps cut out of the pale hard rock--exceedingly steep, and worn, and slippery, and perilous--overlooking the sea. A vision of low pale rocks, and surf bursting among them, and a toro or votive stone lamp in the centre of them--all seen as in a bird's-eye view, over the verge of an awful precipice. I see also deep, round holes in one of the rocks. There used to be a tea-house below; and the wooden pillars supporting it were fitted into those holes. I descend with caution; the Japanese seldom slip in their straw sandals, but I can only proceed with the aid of the guide. At almost every step I slip. Surely these steps could never have been thus worn away by the straw sandals of pilgrims who came to see only stones and serpents! At last we reach a plank gallery carried along the face of the cliff above the rocks and pools, and following it round a projection of the cliff enter the sacred cave. The light dims as we advance; and the sea-waves, running after us into the gloom, make a stupefying roar, multiplied by the extraordinary echo. Looking back, I see the mouth of the cavern like a prodigious sharply angled rent in blackness, showing a fragment of azure sky. We reach a shrine with no deity in it, pay a fee; and lamps being lighted and given to each of us, we proceed to explore a series of underground passages. So black they are that even with the light of three lamps, I can at first see nothing. In a while, however, I can distinguish stone figures in relief--chiselled on slabs like those I saw in the Buddhist graveyard. These are placed at regular intervals along the rock walls. The guide approaches his light to the face of each one, and utters a name, 'Daikoku-Sama,' 'Fudo-Sama,' 'Kwannon-Sama.' Sometimes in lieu of a statue there is an empty shrine only, with a money-box before it; and these void shrines have names of Shinto gods, 'Daijingu,' 'Hachiman,' 'Inari-Sama.' All the statues are black, or seem black in the yellow lamplight, and sparkle as if frosted. I feel as if I were in some mortuary pit, some subterranean burial-place of dead gods. Interminable the corridor appears; yet there is at last an end--an end with a shrine in it--where the rocky ceiling descends so low that to reach the shrine one must go down on hands and knees. And there is nothing in the shrine. This is the Tail of the Dragon. We do not return to the light at once, but enter into other lateral black corridors--the Wings of the Dragon. More sable effigies of dispossessed gods; more empty shrines; more stone faces covered with saltpetre; and more money-boxes, possible only to reach by stooping, where more offerings should be made. And there is no Benten, either of wood or stone. I am glad to return to the light. Here our guide strips naked, and suddenly leaps head foremost into a black deep swirling current between rocks. Five minutes later he reappears, and clambering out lays at my feet a living, squirming sea-snail and an enormous shrimp. Then he resumes his robe, and we re-ascend the mountain. Sec. 19 'And this,' the reader may say,--'this is all that you went forth to see: a torii, some shells, a small damask snake, some stones?' It is true. And nevertheless I know that I am bewitched. There is a charm indefinable about the place--that sort of charm which comes with a little ghostly thrill never to be forgotten. Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of numberless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and inter-blended: the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening, vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished generations. And other memories ineffaceable: the first sight of the sea-girt City of Pearl through a fairy veil of haze; the windy approach to the lovely island over the velvety soundless brown stretch of sand; the weird majesty of the giant gate of bronze; the queer, high-sloping, fantastic, quaintly gabled street, flinging down sharp shadows of aerial balconies; the flutter of coloured draperies in the sea wind, and of flags with their riddles of lettering; the pearly glimmering of the astonishing shops. And impressions of the enormous day--the day of the Land of the Gods--a loftier day than ever our summers know; and the glory of the view from those green sacred silent heights between sea and sun; and the remembrance of the sky, a sky spiritual as holiness, a sky with clouds ghost-pure and white as the light itself--seeming, indeed, not clouds but dreams, or souls of Bodhisattvas about to melt for ever into some blue Nirvana. And the romance of Benten, too,--the Deity of Beauty, the Divinity of Love, the Goddess of Eloquence. Rightly is she likewise named Goddess of the Sea. For is not the Sea most ancient and most excellent of Speakers--the eternal Poet, chanter of that mystic hymn whose rhythm shakes the world, whose mighty syllables no man may learn? Sec. 20 We return by another route. For a while the way winds through a long narrow winding valley between wooded hills: the whole extent of bottom-land is occupied by rice-farms; the air has a humid coolness, and one hears only the chanting of frogs, like a clattering of countless castanets, as the jinricksha jolts over the rugged elevated paths separating the flooded rice-fields. As we skirt the foot of a wooded hill upon the right, my Japanese comrade signals to our runners to halt, and himself dismounting, points to the blue peaked roof of a little temple high-perched on the green slope. 'Is it really worth while to climb up there in the sun?' I ask. 'Oh, yes!' he answers: 'it is the temple of Kishibojin--Kishibojin, the Mother of Demons!' We ascend a flight of broad stone steps, meet the Buddhist guardian lions at the summit, and enter the little court in which the temple stands. An elderly woman, with a child clinging to her robe, comes from the adjoining building to open the screens for us; and taking off our footgear we enter the temple. Without, the edifice looked old and dingy; but within all is neat and pretty. The June sun, pouring through the open shoji, illuminates an artistic confusion of brasses gracefully shaped and multi-coloured things--images, lanterns, paintings, gilded inscriptions, pendent scrolls. There are three altars. Above the central altar Amida Buddha sits enthroned on his mystic golden lotus in the attitude of the Teacher. On the altar to the right gleams a shrine of five miniature golden steps, where little images stand in rows, tier above tier, some seated, some erect, male and female, attired like goddesses or like daimyo: the Sanjiubanjin, or Thirty Guardians. Below, on the façade of the altar, is the figure of a hero slaying a monster. On the altar to the left is the shrine of the Mother-of-Demons. Her story is a legend of horror. For some sin committed in a previous birth, she was born a demon, devouring her own children. But being saved by the teaching of Buddha, she became a divine being, especially loving and protecting infants; and Japanese mothers pray to her for their little ones, and wives pray to her for beautiful boys. The face of Kishibojin [7] is the face of a comely woman. But her eyes are weird. In her right hand she bears a lotus-blossom; with her left she supports in a fold of her robe, against her half-veiled breast, a naked baby. At the foot of her shrine stands Jizo-Sama, leaning upon his shakujo. But the altar and its images do not form the startling feature of the temple-interior. What impresses the visitor in a totally novel way are the votive offerings. High before the shrine, suspended from strings stretched taut between tall poles of bamboo, are scores, no, hundreds, of pretty, tiny dresses--Japanese baby-dresses of many colours. Most are made of poor material, for these are the thank-offerings of very poor simple women, poor country mothers, whose prayers to Kishibojin for the blessing of children have been heard. And the sight of all those little dresses, each telling so naively its story of joy and pain--those tiny kimono shaped and sewn by docile patient fingers of humble mothers--touches irresistibly, like some unexpected revelation of the universal mother-love. And the tenderness of all the simple hearts that have testified thus to faith and thankfulness seems to thrill all about me softly, like a caress of summer wind. Outside the world appears to have suddenly grown beautiful; the light is sweeter; it seems to me there is a new charm even in the azure of the eternal day. Sec. 21 Then, having traversed the valley, we reach a main road so level and so magnificently shaded by huge old trees that I could believe myself in an English lane--a lane in Kent or Surrey, perhaps--but for some exotic detail breaking the illusion at intervals; a torii, towering before temple-steps descending to the highway, or a signboard lettered with Chinese characters, or the wayside shrine of some unknown god. All at once I observe by the roadside some unfamiliar sculptures in relief--a row of chiselled slabs protected by a little bamboo shed; and I dismount to look at them, supposing them to be funereal monuments. They are so old that the lines of their sculpturing are half obliterated; their feet are covered with moss, and their visages are half effaced. But I can discern that these are not haka, but six images of one divinity; and my guide knows him--Koshin, the God of Roads. So chipped and covered with scurf he is, that the upper portion of his form has become indefinably vague; his attributes have been worn away. But below his feet, on several slabs, chiselled cunningly, I can still distinguish the figures of the Three Apes, his messengers. And some pious soul has left before one image a humble votive offering--the picture of a black cock and a white hen, painted upon a wooden shingle. It must have been left here very long ago; the wood has become almost black, and the painting has been damaged by weather and by the droppings of birds. There are no stones piled at the feet of these images, as before the images of Jizo; they seem like things forgotten, crusted over by the neglect of generations--archaic gods who have lost their worshippers. But my guide tells me, 'The Temple of Koshin is near, in the village of Fujisawa.' Assuredly I must visit it. Sec. 22 The temple of Koshin is situated in the middle of the village, in a court opening upon the main street. A very old wooden temple it is, unpainted, dilapidated, grey with the greyness of all forgotten and weather-beaten things. It is some time before the guardian of the temple can be found, to open the doors. For this temple has doors in lieu of shoji--old doors that moan sleepily at being turned upon their hinges. And it is not necessary to remove one's shoes; the floor is matless, covered with dust, and squeaks under the unaccustomed weight of entering feet. All within is crumbling, mouldering, worn; the shrine has no image, only Shinto emblems, some poor paper lanterns whose once bright colours have vanished under a coating of dust, some vague inscriptions. I see the circular frame of a metal mirror; but the mirror itself is gone. Whither? The guardian says: 'No priest lives now in this temple; and thieves might come in the night to steal the mirror; so we have hidden it away.' I ask about the image of Koshin. He answers it is exposed but once in every sixty-one years: so I cannot see it; but there are other statues of the god in the temple court. I go to look at them: a row of images, much like those upon the public highway, but better preserved. One figure of Koshin, however, is different from the others I have seen--apparently made after some Hindoo model, judging by the Indian coiffure, mitre-shaped and lofty. The god has three eyes; one in the centre of his forehead, opening perpendicularly instead of horizontally. He has six arms. With one hand he supports a monkey; with another he grasps a serpent; and the other hands hold out symbolic things--a wheel, a sword, a rosary, a sceptre. And serpents are coiled about his wrists and about his ankles; and under his feet is a monstrous head, the head of a demon, Amanjako, sometimes called Utatesa ('Sadness'). Upon the pedestal below the Three Apes are carven; and the face of an ape appears also upon the front of the god's tiara. I see also tablets of stone, graven only with the god's name,--votive offerings. And near by, in a tiny wooden shrine, is the figure of the Earth-god, Ken-ro-ji-jin, grey, primeval, vaguely wrought, holding in one hand a spear, in the other a vessel containing something indistinguishable. Sec. 23 Perhaps to uninitiated eyes these many-headed, many-handed gods at first may seem--as they seem always in the sight of Christian bigotry--only monstrous. But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its thought. To me the image of Kwannon of the Thousand Hands is not less admirable than any other representation of human loveliness idealised bearing her name--the Peerless, the Majestic, the Peace-Giving, or even White Sui-Getsu, who sails the moonlit waters in her rosy boat made of a single lotus-petal; and in the triple-headed Shaka I discern and revere the mighty power of that Truth, whereby, as by a conjunction of suns, the Three Worlds have been illuminated. But vain to seek to memorise the names and attributes of all the gods; they seem, self-multiplying, to mock the seeker; Kwannon the Merciful is revealed as the Hundred Kwannon; the Six Jizo become the Thousand. And as they multiply before research, they vary and change: less multiform, less complex, less elusive the moving of waters than the visions of this Oriental faith. Into it, as into a fathomless sea, mythology after mythology from India and China and the farther East has sunk and been absorbed; and the stranger, peering into its deeps, finds himself, as in the tale of Undine, contemplating a flood in whose every surge rises and vanishes a Face--weird or beautiful or terrible--a most ancient shoreless sea of forms incomprehensibly interchanging and intermingling, but symbolising the protean magic of that infinite Unknown that shapes and re-shapes for ever all cosmic being. Sec. 24 I wonder if I can buy a picture of Koshin. In most Japanese temples little pictures of the tutelar deity are sold to pilgrims, cheap prints on thin paper. But the temple guardian here tells me, with a gesture of despair, that there are no pictures of Koshin for sale; there is only an old kakemono on which the god is represented. If I would like to see it he will go home and get it for me. I beg him to do me the favour; and he hurries into the street. While awaiting his return, I continue to examine the queer old statues, with a feeling of mingled melancholy and pleasure. To have studied and loved an ancient faith only through the labours of palaeographers and archaeologists, and as a something astronomically remote from one's own existence, and then suddenly in after years to find the same faith a part of one's human environment,--to feel that its mythology, though senescent, is alive all around you--is almost to realise the dream of the Romantics, to have the sensation of returning through twenty centuries into the life of a happier world. For these quaint Gods of Roads and Gods of Earth are really living still, though so worn and mossed and feebly worshipped. In this brief moment, at least, I am really in the Elder World--perhaps just at that epoch of it when the primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned, crumbling slowly before the corrosive influence of a new philosophy; and I know myself a pagan still, loving these simple old gods, these gods of a people's childhood. And they need some human love, these naive, innocent, ugly gods. The beautiful divinities will live for ever by that sweetness of womanhood idealised in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and Benten; they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great temples shall all have become voiceless and priestless as this shrine of Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers--how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the so-called 'laws of progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of evolution! The guardian returns, bringing with him a kakemono, very small, very dusty, and so yellow-stained by time that it might be a thousand years old. But I am disappointed as I unroll it; there is only a very common print of the god within--all outline. And while I am looking at it, I become for the first time conscious that a crowd has gathered about me,--tanned kindly-faced labourers from the fields, and mothers with their babies on their backs, and school children, and jinricksha men--all wondering that a stranger should be thus interested in their gods. And although the pressure about me is very, very gentle, like a pressure of tepid water for gentleness, I feel a little embarrassed. I give back the old kakemono to the guardian, make my offering to the god, and take my leave of Koshin and his good servant. All the kind oblique eyes follow me as I go. And something like a feeling of remorse seizes me at thus abruptly abandoning the void, dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its kindly guardian whom I see still watching my retreating steps, with the yellow kakemono in his hand. The whistle of a locomotive warns me that I shall just have time to catch the train. For Western civilisation has invaded all this primitive peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways of iron. This is not of thy roads, O Koshin!--the old gods are dying along its ash-strewn verge! Chapter Five At the Market of the Dead Sec. 1 IT is just past five o'clock in the afternoon. Through the open door of my little study the rising breeze of evening is beginning to disturb the papers on my desk, and the white fire of the Japanese sun is taking that pale amber tone which tells that the heat of the day is over. There is not a cloud in the blue--not even one of those beautiful white filamentary things, like ghosts of silken floss, which usually swim in this most ethereal of earthly skies even in the driest weather. A sudden shadow at the door. Akira, the young Buddhist student, stands at the threshold slipping his white feet out of his sandal-thongs preparatory to entering, and smiling like the god Jizo. 'Ah! komban, Akira.' 'To-night,' says Akira, seating himself upon the floor in the posture of Buddha upon the Lotus, 'the Bon-ichi will be held. Perhaps you would like to see it?' 'Oh, Akira, all things in this country I should like to see. But tell me, I pray you; unto what may the Bon-ichi be likened?' 'The Bon-ichi,' answers Akira, 'is a market at which will be sold all things required for the Festival of the Dead; and the Festival of the Dead will begin to-morrow, when all the altars of the temples and all the shrines in the homes of good Buddhists will be made beautiful.' 'Then I want to see the Bon-ichi, Akira, and I should also like to see a Buddhist shrine--a household shrine.' 'Yes, will you come to my room?' asks Akira. 'It is not far--in the Street of the Aged Men, beyond the Street of the Stony River, and near to the Street Everlasting. There is a butsuma there--a household shrine--and on the way I will tell you about the Bonku.' So, for the first time, I learn those things--which I am now about to write. Sec. 2 From the 13th to the 15th day of July is held the Festival of the Dead--the Bommatsuri or Bonku--by some Europeans called the Feast of Lanterns. But in many places there are two such festivals annually; for those who still follow the ancient reckoning of time by moons hold that the Bommatsuri should fall on the 13th, 14th, and 15th days of the seventh month of the antique calendar, which corresponds to a later period of the year. Early on the morning of the 13th, new mats of purest rice straw, woven expressly for the festival, are spread upon all Buddhist altars and within each butsuma or butsudan--the little shrine before which the morning and evening prayers are offered up in every believing home. Shrines and altars are likewise decorated with beautiful embellishments of coloured paper, and with flowers and sprigs of certain hallowed plants--always real lotus-flowers when obtainable, otherwise lotus-flowers of paper, and fresh branches of shikimi (anise) and of misohagi (lespedeza). Then a tiny lacquered table--a zen-such as Japanese meals are usually served upon, is placed upon the altar, and the food offerings are laid on it. But in the smaller shrines of Japanese homes the offerings are more often simply laid upon the rice matting, wrapped in fresh lotus-leaves. These offerings consist of the foods called somen, resembling our vermicelli, gozen, which is boiled rice, dango, a sort of tiny dumpling, eggplant, and fruits according to season--frequently uri and saikwa, slices of melon and watermelon, and plums and peaches. Often sweet cakes and dainties are added. Sometimes the offering is only O-sho-jin-gu (honourable uncooked food); more usually it is O-rio-gu (honourable boiled food); but it never includes, of course, fish, meats, or wine. Clear water is given to the shadowy guest, and is sprinkled from time to time upon the altar or within the shrine with a branch of misohagi; tea is poured out every hour for the viewless visitors, and everything is daintily served up in little plates and cups and bowls, as for living guests, with hashi (chopsticks) laid beside the offering. So for three days the dead are feasted. At sunset, pine torches, fixed in the ground before each home, are kindled to guide the spirit-visitors. Sometimes, also, on the first evening of the Bommatsuri, welcome-fires (mukaebi) are lighted along the shore of the sea or lake or river by which the village or city is situated--neither more nor less than one hundred and eight fires; this number having some mystic signification in the philosophy of Buddhism. And charming lanterns are suspended each night at the entrances of homes--the Lanterns of the Festival of the Dead--lanterns of special forms and colours, beautifully painted with suggestions of landscape and shapes of flowers, and always decorated with a peculiar fringe of paper streamers. Also, on the same night, those who have dead friends go to the cemeteries and make offerings there, and pray, and burn incense, and pour out water for the ghosts. Flowers are placed there in the bamboo vases set beside each haka, and lanterns are lighted and hung up before the tombs, but these lanterns have no designs upon them. At sunset on the evening of the 15th only the offerings called Segaki are made in the temples. Then are fed the ghosts of the Circle of Penance, called Gakido, the place of hungry spirits; and then also are fed by the priests those ghosts having no other friends among the living to care for them. Very, very small these offerings are--like the offerings to the gods. Sec. 3 Now this, Akira tells me, is the origin of the Segaki, as the same is related in the holy book Busetsuuran-bongyo: Dai-Mokenren, the great disciple of Buddha, obtained by merit the Six Supernatural Powers. And by virtue of them it was given him to see the soul of his mother in the Gakido--the world of spirits doomed to suffer hunger in expiation of faults committed in a previous life. Mokenren saw that his mother suffered much; he grieved exceedingly because of her pain, and he filled a bowl with choicest food and sent it to her. He saw her try to eat; but each time that she tried to lift the food to her lips it would change into fire and burning embers, so that she could not eat. Then Mokenren asked the Teacher what he could do to relieve his mother from pain. And the Teacher made answer: 'On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, feed the ghosts of the great priests of all countries.' And Mokenren, having done so, saw that his mother was freed from the state of gaki, and that she was dancing for joy. [1] This is the origin also of the dances called Bono-dori, which are danced on the third night of the Festival of the Dead throughout Japan. Upon the third and last night there is a weirdly beautiful ceremony, more touching than that of the Segaki, stranger than the Bon-odori--the ceremony of farewell. All that the living may do to please the dead has been done; the time allotted by the powers of the unseen worlds unto the ghostly visitants is well nigh past, and their friends must send them all back again. Everything has been prepared for them. In each home small boats made of barley straw closely woven have been freighted with supplies of choice food, with tiny lanterns, and written messages of faith and love. Seldom more than two feet in length are these boats; but the dead require little room. And the frail craft are launched on canal, lake, sea, or river--each with a miniature lantern glowing at the prow, and incense burning at the stern. And if the night be fair, they voyage long. Down all the creeks and rivers and canals the phantom fleets go glimmering to the sea; and all the sea sparkles to the horizon with the lights of the dead, and the sea wind is fragrant with incense. But alas! it is now forbidden in the great seaports to launch the shoryobune, 'the boats of the blessed ghosts.' Sec. 4 It is so narrow, the Street of the Aged Men, that by stretching out one's arms one can touch the figured sign-draperies before its tiny shops on both sides at once. And these little ark-shaped houses really seem toy-houses; that in which Akira lives is even smaller than the rest, having no shop in it, and no miniature second story. It is all closed up. Akira slides back the wooden amado which forms the door, and then the paper-paned screens behind it; and the tiny structure, thus opened, with its light unpainted woodwork and painted paper partitions, looks something like a great bird-cage. But the rush matting of the elevated floor is fresh, sweet-smelling, spotless; and as we take off our footgear to mount upon it I see that all within is neat, curious, and pretty. 'The woman has gone out,' says Akira, setting the smoking-box (hibachi) in the middle of the floor, and spreading beside it a little mat for me to squat upon. 'But what is this, Akira?' I ask, pointing to a thin board suspended by a ribbon on the wall--a board so cut from the middle of a branch as to leave the bark along its edges. There are two columns of mysterious signs exquisitely painted upon it. 'Oh, that is a calendar,' answers Akira. 'On the right side are the names of the months having thirty-one days; on the left, the names of those having less. Now here is a household shrine.' Occupying the alcove, which is an indispensable part of the structure of Japanese guest-rooms, is a native cabinet painted with figures of flying birds; and on this cabinet stands the butsuma. It is a small lacquered and gilded shrine, with little doors modelled after those of a temple gate--a shrine very quaint, very much dilapidated (one door has lost its hinges), but still a dainty thing despite its crackled lacquer and faded gilding. Akira opens it with a sort of compassionate smile; and I look inside for the image. There is none; only a wooden tablet with a band of white paper attached to it, bearing Japanese characters--the name of a dead baby girl--and a vase of expiring flowers, a tiny print of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and a cup filled with ashes of incense. 'Tomorrow,' Akira says, 'she will decorate this, and make the offerings of food to the little one.' Hanging from the ceiling, on the opposite side of the room, and in front of the shrine, is a wonderful, charming, funny, white-and-rosy mask--the face of a laughing, chubby girl with two mysterious spots upon her forehead, the face of Otafuku. [2] It twirls round and round in the soft air-current coming through the open shoji; and every time those funny black eyes, half shut with laughter, look at me, I cannot help smiling. And hanging still higher, I see little Shinto emblems of paper (gohei), a miniature mitre-shaped cap in likeness of those worn in the sacred dances, a pasteboard emblem of the magic gem (Nio-i hojiu) which the gods bear in their hands, a small Japanese doll, and a little wind-wheel which will spin around with the least puff of air, and other indescribable toys, mostly symbolic, such as are sold on festal days in the courts of the temples--the playthings of the dead child. 'Komban!' exclaims a very gentle voice behind us. The mother is standing there, smiling as if pleased at the stranger's interest in her butsuma--a middle-aged woman of the poorest class, not comely, but with a most kindly face. We return her evening greeting; and while I sit down upon the little mat laid before the hibachi, Akira whispers something to her, with the result that a small kettle is at once set to boil over a very small charcoal furnace. We are probably going to have some tea. As Akira takes his seat before me, on the other side of the hibachi, I ask him: 'What was the name I saw on the tablet?' 'The name which you saw,' he answers, 'was not the real name. The real name is written upon the other side. After death another name is given by the priest. A dead boy is called Ryochi Doji; a dead girl, Mioyo Donyo.' While we are speaking, the woman approaches the little shrine, opens it, arranges the objects in it, lights the tiny lamp, and with joined hands and bowed head begins to pray. Totally unembarrassed by our presence and our chatter she seems, as one accustomed to do what is right and beautiful heedless of human opinion; praying with that brave, true frankness which belongs to the poor only of this world--those simple souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips, which among this kind people is a token of humblest desire to please. As I watch the tender little rite, I become aware of something dimly astir in the mystery of my own life--vaguely, indefinably familiar, like a memory ancestral, like the revival of a sensation forgotten two thousand years. Blended in some strange way it seems to be with my faint knowledge of an elder world, whose household gods were also the beloved dead; and there is a weird sweetness in this place, like a shadowing of Lares. Then, her brief prayer over, she turns to her miniature furnace again. She talks and laughs with Akira; she prepares the tea, pours it out in tiny cups and serves it to us, kneeling in that graceful attitude--picturesque, traditional--which for six hundred years has been the attitude of the Japanese woman serving tea. Verily, no small part of the life of the woman of Japan is spent thus in serving little cups of tea. Even as a ghost, she appears in popular prints offering to somebody spectral tea-cups of spectral tea. Of all Japanese ghost-pictures, I know of none more pathetic than that in which the phantom of a woman kneeling humbly offers to her haunted and remorseful murderer a little cup of tea! 'Now let us go to the Bon-ichi,' says Akira, rising; 'she must go there herself soon, and it is already getting dark. Sayonara!' It is indeed almost dark as we leave the little house: stars are pointing in the strip of sky above the street; but it is a beautiful night for a walk, with a tepid breeze blowing at intervals, and sending long flutterings through the miles of shop draperies. The market is in the narrow street at the verge of the city, just below the hill where the great Buddhist temple of Zoto-Kuin stands--in the Motomachi, only ten squares away. Sec. 5 The curious narrow street is one long blaze of lights--lights of lantern signs, lights of torches and lamps illuminating unfamiliar rows of little stands and booths set out in the thoroughfare before all the shop-fronts on each side; making two far-converging lines of multi-coloured fire. Between these moves a dense throng, filling the night with a clatter of geta that drowns even the tide-like murmuring of voices and the cries of the merchant. But how gentle the movement!-- there is no jostling, no rudeness; everybody, even the weakest and smallest, has a chance to see everything; and there are many things to see. 'Hasu-no-hana!--hasu-no-hana!' Here are the venders of lotus-flowers for the tombs and the altars, of lotus leaves in which to wrap the food of the beloved ghosts. The leaves, folded into bundles, are heaped upon tiny tables; the lotus-flowers, buds and blossoms intermingled, are fixed upright in immense bunches, supported by light frames of bamboo. 'Ogara!--ogara-ya! White sheaves of long peeled rods. These are hemp-sticks. The thinner ends can be broken up into hashi for the use of the ghosts; the rest must be consumed in the mukaebi. Rightly all these sticks should be made of pine; but pine is too scarce and dear for the poor folk of this district, so the ogara are substituted. 'Kawarake!--kawarake-ya!' The dishes of the ghosts: small red shallow platters of unglazed earthenware; primeval pottery suku-makemasu!' Eh! what is all this? A little booth shaped like a sentry-box, all made of laths, covered with a red-and-white chess pattern of paper; and out of this frail structure issues a shrilling keen as the sound of leaking steam. 'Oh, that is only insects,' says Akira, laughing; 'nothing to do with the Bonku.' Insects, yes!--in cages! The shrilling is made by scores of huge green crickets, each prisoned in a tiny bamboo cage by itself. 'They are fed with eggplant and melon rind,' continues Akira, 'and sold to children to play with.' And there are also beautiful little cages full of fireflies--cages covered with brown mosquito-netting, upon each of which some simple but very pretty design in bright colours has been dashed by a Japanese brush. One cricket and cage, two cents. Fifteen fireflies and cage, five cents. Here on a street corner squats a blue-robed boy behind a low wooden table, selling wooden boxes about as big as match-boxes, with red paper hinges. Beside the piles of these little boxes on the table are shallow dishes filled with clear water, in which extraordinary thin flat shapes are floating--shapes of flowers, trees, birds, boats, men, and women. Open a box; it costs only two cents. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, are bundles of little pale sticks, like round match-sticks, with pink ends. Drop one into the water, it instantly unrolls and expands into the likeness of a lotus-flower. Another transforms itself into a fish. A third becomes a boat. A fourth changes to an owl. A fifth becomes a tea-plant, covered with leaves and blossoms. . . . So delicate are these things that, once immersed, you cannot handle them without breaking them. They are made of seaweed. 'Tsukuri hana!--tsukuri-hana-wa-irimasenka?' The sellers of artificial flowers, marvellous chrysanthemums and lotus-plants of paper, imitations of bud and leaf and flower so cunningly wrought that the eye alone cannot detect the beautiful trickery. It is only right that these should cost much more than their living counterparts. Sec. 6 High above the thronging and the clamour and the myriad fires of the merchants, the great Shingon temple at the end of the radiant street towers upon its hill against the starry night, weirdly, like a dream--strangely illuminated by rows of paper lanterns hung all along its curving eaves; and the flowing of the crowd bears me thither. Out of the broad entrance, over a dark gliding mass which I know to be heads and shoulders of crowding worshippers, beams a broad band of yellow light; and before reaching the lion-guarded steps I hear the continuous clanging of the temple gong, each clang the signal of an offering and a prayer. Doubtless a cataract of cash is pouring into the great alms-chest; for to-night is the Festival of Yakushi-Nyorai, the Physician of Souls. Borne to the steps at last, I find myself able to halt a moment, despite the pressure of the throng, before the stand of a lantern-seller selling the most beautiful lanterns that I have ever seen. Each is a gigantic lotus-flower of paper, so perfectly made in every detail as to seem a great living blossom freshly plucked; the petals are crimson at their bases, paling to white at their tips; the calyx is a faultless mimicry of nature, and beneath it hangs a beautiful fringe of paper cuttings, coloured with the colours of the flower, green below the calyx, white in the middle, crimson at the ends. In the heart of the blossom is set a microscopic oil-lamp of baked clay; and this being lighted, all the flower becomes luminous, diaphanous--a lotus of white and crimson fire. There is a slender gilded wooden hoop by which to hang it up, and the price is four cents! How can people afford to make such things for four cents, even in this country of astounding cheapness? Akira is trying to tell me something about the hyaku-hachino-mukaebi, the Hundred and Eight Fires, to be lighted to-morrow evening, which bear some figurative relation unto the Hundred and Eight Foolish Desires; but I cannot hear him for the clatter of the geta and the komageta, the wooden clogs and wooden sandals of the worshippers ascending to the shrine of Yakushi-Nyorai. The light straw sandals of the poorer men, the zori and the waraji, are silent; the great clatter is really made by the delicate feet of women and girls, balancing themselves carefully upon their noisy geta. And most of these little feet are clad with spotless tabi, white as a white lotus. White feet of little blue-robed mothers they mostly are--mothers climbing patiently and smilingly, with pretty placid babies at their backs, up the hill to Buddha. And while through the tinted lantern light I wander on with the gentle noisy people, up the great steps of stone, between other displays of lotus-blossoms, between other high hedgerows of paper flowers, my thought suddenly goes back to the little broken shrine in the poor woman's room, with the humble playthings hanging before it, and the laughing, twirling mask of Otafuku. I see the happy, funny little eyes, oblique and silky-shadowed like Otafuku's own, which used to look at those toys,--toys in which the fresh child-senses found a charm that I can but faintly divine, a delight hereditary, ancestral. I see the tender little creature being borne, as it was doubtless borne many times, through just such a peaceful throng as this, in just such a lukewarm, luminous night, peeping over the mother's shoulder, softly clinging at her neck with tiny hands. Somewhere among this multitude she is--the mother. She will feel again to-night the faint touch of little hands, yet will not turn her head to look and laugh, as in other days. Chapter Six Bon-odori Sec. 1 Over the mountains to Izumo, the land of the Kamiyo, [1] the land of the Ancient Gods. A journey of four days by kuruma, with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan; for we have taken the longest and least frequented route. Through valleys most of this long route lies, valleys always open to higher valleys, while the road ascends, valleys between mountains with rice-fields ascending their slopes by successions of diked terraces which look like enormous green flights of steps. Above them are shadowing sombre forests of cedar and pine; and above these wooded summits loom indigo shapes of farther hills overtopped by peaked silhouettes of vapoury grey. The air is lukewarm and windless; and distances are gauzed by delicate mists; and in this tenderest of blue skies, this Japanese sky which always seems to me loftier than any other sky which I ever saw, there are only, day after day, some few filmy, spectral, diaphanous white wandering things: like ghosts of clouds, riding on the wind. But sometimes, as the road ascends, the rice-fields disappear a while: fields of barley and of indigo, and of rye and of cotton, fringe the route for a little space; and then it plunges into forest shadows. Above all else, the forests of cedar sometimes bordering the way are astonishments; never outside of the tropics did I see any growths comparable for density and perpendicularity with these. Every trunk is straight and bare as a pillar: the whole front presents the spectacle of an immeasurable massing of pallid columns towering up into a cloud of sombre foliage so dense that one can distinguish nothing overhead but branchings lost in shadow. And the profundities beyond the rare gaps in the palisade of blanched trunks are night-black, as in Dore's pictures of fir woods. No more great towns; only thatched villages nestling in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above the congregation of thatched homesteads, and its miya, or Shinto shrine, with a torii before it like a great ideograph shaped in stone or wood. But Buddhism still dominates; every hilltop has its tera; and the statues of Buddhas or of Bodhisattvas appear by the roadside, as we travel on, with the regularity of milestones. Often a village tera is so large that the cottages of the rustic folk about it seem like little out-houses; and the traveller wonders how so costly an edifice of prayer can be supported by a community so humble. And everywhere the signs of the gentle faith appear: its ideographs and symbols are chiselled upon the faces of the rocks; its icons smile upon you from every shadowy recess by the way; even the very landscape betimes would seem to have been moulded by the soul of it, where hills rise softly as a prayer. And the summits of some are domed like the head of Shaka, and the dark bossy frondage that clothes them might seem the clustering of his curls. But gradually, with the passing of the days, as we journey into the loftier west, I see fewer and fewer tera. Such Buddhist temples as we pass appear small and poor; and the wayside images become rarer and rarer. But the symbols of Shinto are more numerous, and the structure of its miya larger and loftier. And the torii are visible everywhere, and tower higher, before the approaches to villages, before the entrances of courts guarded by strangely grotesque lions and foxes of stone, and before stairways of old mossed rock, upsloping, between dense growths of ancient cedar and pine, to shrines that moulder in the twilight of holy groves. At one little village I see, just beyond, the torii leading to a great Shinto temple, a particularly odd small shrine, and feel impelled by curiosity to examine it. Leaning against its closed doors are many short gnarled sticks in a row, miniature clubs. Irreverently removing these, and opening the little doors, Akira bids me look within. I see only a mask--the mask of a goblin, a Tengu, grotesque beyond description, with an enormous nose--so grotesque that I feel remorse for having looked at it. The sticks are votive offerings. By dedicating one to the shrine, it is believed that the Tengu may be induced to drive one's enemies away. Goblin-shaped though they appear in all Japanese paintings and carvings of them, the Tengu-Sama are divinities, lesser divinities, lords of the art of fencing and the use of all weapons. And other changes gradually become manifest. Akira complains that he can no longer understand the language of the people. We are traversing regions of dialects. The houses are also architecturally different from those of the country-folk of the north-east; their high thatched roofs are curiously decorated with bundles of straw fastened to a pole of bamboo parallel with the roof-ridge, and elevated about a foot above it. The complexion of the peasantry is darker than in the north-east; and I see no more of those charming rosy faces one observes among the women of the Tokyo districts. And the peasants wear different hats, hats pointed like the straw roofs of those little wayside temples curiously enough called an (which means a straw hat). The weather is more than warm, rendering clothing oppressive; and as we pass through the little villages along the road, I see much healthy cleanly nudity: pretty naked children; brown men and boys with only a soft narrow white cloth about their loins, asleep on the matted floors, all the paper screens of the houses having been removed to admit the breeze. The men seem to be lightly and supply built; but I see no saliency of muscles; the lines of the figure are always smooth. Before almost every dwelling, indigo, spread out upon little mats of rice straw, may be seen drying in the sun. The country-folk gaze wonderingly at the foreigner. At various places where we halt, old men approach to touch my clothes, apologising with humble bows and winning smiles for their very natural curiosity, and asking my interpreter all sorts of odd questions. Gentler and kindlier faces I never beheld; and they reflect the souls behind them; never yet have I heard a voice raised in anger, nor observed an unkindly act. And each day, as we travel, the country becomes more beautiful--beautiful with that fantasticality of landscape only to be found in volcanic lands. But for the dark forests of cedar and pine, and this far faint dreamy sky, and the soft whiteness of the light, there are moments of our journey when I could fancy myself again in the West Indies, ascending some winding way over the mornes of Dominica or of Martinique. And, indeed, I find myself sometimes looking against the horizon glow for shapes of palms and ceibas. But the brighter green of the valleys and of the mountain-slopes beneath the woods is not the green of young cane, but of rice-fields--thousands upon thousands of tiny rice-fields no larger than cottage gardens, separated from each other by narrow serpentine dikes. Sec. 2 In the very heart of a mountain range, while rolling along the verge of a precipice above rice-fields, I catch sight of a little shrine in a cavity of the cliff overhanging the way, and halt to examine it. The sides and sloping roof of the shrine are formed by slabs of unhewn rock. Within smiles a rudely chiselled image of Bato-Kwannon--Kwannon-with-the-Horse's-Head--and before it bunches of wild flowers have been placed, and an earthen incense-cup, and scattered offerings of dry rice. Contrary to the idea suggested by the strange name, this form of Kwannon is not horse-headed; but the head of a horse is sculptured upon the tiara worn by the divinity. And the symbolism is fully explained by a large wooden sotoba planted beside the shrine, and bearing, among other inscriptions, the words, 'Bato Kwan-ze-on Bosatsu, giu ba bodai han ye.' For Bato-Kwannon protects the horses and the cattle of the peasant; and he prays her not only that his dumb servants may be preserved from sickness, but also that their spirits may enter after death, into a happier state of existence. Near the sotoba there has been erected a wooden framework about four feet square, filled with little tablets of pine set edge to edge so as to form one smooth surface; and on these are written, in rows of hundreds, the names of all who subscribed for the statue and its shrine. The number announced is ten thousand. But the whole cost could not have exceeded ten Japanese dollars (yen); wherefore I surmise that each subscriber gave not more than one rin--one tenth of one sen, or cent. For the hyakusho are unspeakably poor. [2] In the midst of these mountain solitudes, the discovery of that little shrine creates a delightful sense of security. Surely nothing save goodness can be expected from a people gentle-hearted enough to pray for the souls of their horses and cows. [3] As we proceed rapidly down a slope, my kurumaya swerves to one side with a suddenness that gives me a violent start, for the road overlooks a sheer depth of several hundred feet. It is merely to avoid hurting a harmless snake making its way across the path. The snake is so little afraid that on reaching the edge of the road it turns its head to look after us. Sec. 3 And now strange signs begin to appear in all these rice-fields: I see everywhere, sticking up above the ripening grain, objects like white-feathered arrows. Arrows of prayer! I take one up to examine it. The shaft is a thin bamboo, split down for about one-third of its length; into the slit a strip of strong white paper with ideographs upon it--an ofuda, a Shinto charm--is inserted; and the separated ends of the cane are then rejoined and tied together just above it. The whole, at a little distance, has exactly the appearance of a long, light, well-feathered arrow. That which I first examine bears the words, 'Yu-Asaki-jinja-kozen-son-chu-an-zen' (From the God whose shrine is before the Village of Peace). Another reads, 'Mihojinja-sho-gwan-jo-ju-go-kito-shugo,' signifying that the Deity of the temple Miho-jinja granteth fully every supplication made unto him. Everywhere, as we proceed, I see the white arrows of prayer glimmering above the green level of the grain; and always they become more numerous. Far as the eye can reach the fields are sprinkled with them, so that they make upon the verdant surface a white speckling as of flowers. Sometimes, also, around a little rice-field, I see a sort of magical fence, formed by little bamboo rods supporting a long cord from which long straws hang down, like a fringe, and paper cuttings, which are symbols (gohei) are suspended at regular intervals. This is the shimenawa, sacred emblem of Shinto. Within the consecrated space inclosed by it no blight may enter--no scorching sun wither the young shoots. And where the white arrows glimmer the locust shall not prevail, nor shall hungry birds do evil. But now I look in vain for the Buddhas. No more great tera, no Shaka, no Amida, no Dai-Nichi-Nyorai; even the Bosatsu have been left behind. Kwannon and her holy kin have disappeared; Koshin, Lord of Roads, is indeed yet with us; but he has changed his name and become a Shinto deity: he is now Saruda-hiko-no-mikoto; and his presence is revealed only by the statues of the Three Mystic Apes which are his servants--Mizaru, who sees no evil, covering his eyes with his hands, Kikazaru, who hears no evil, covering his ears with his hands. Iwazaru, who speaks no evil, covering his mouth with his hands. Yet no! one Bosatsu survives in this atmosphere of magical Shinto: still by the roadside I see at long intervals the image of Jizo-Sama, the charming playfellow of dead children. But Jizo also is a little changed; even in his sextuple representation, [4] the Roku-Jizo, he appears not standing, but seated upon his lotus-flower, and I see no stones piled up before him, as in the eastern provinces. Sec. 4 At last, from the verge of an enormous ridge, the roadway suddenly slopes down into a vista of high peaked roofs of thatch and green-mossed eaves--into a village like a coloured print out of old Hiroshige's picture-books, a village with all its tints and colours precisely like the tints and colours of the landscape in which it lies. This is Kami-Ichi, in the land of Hoki. We halt before a quiet, dingy little inn, whose host, a very aged man, comes forth to salute me; while a silent, gentle crowd of villagers, mostly children and women, gather about the kuruma to see the stranger, to wonder at him, even to touch his clothes with timid smiling curiosity. One glance at the face of the old innkeeper decides me to accept his invitation. I must remain here until to-morrow: my runners are too wearied to go farther to-night. Weather-worn as the little inn seemed without, it is delightful within. Its polished stairway and balconies are speckless, reflecting like mirror-surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms are fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid down. The carven pillars of the alcove (toko) in my chamber, leaves and flowers chiselled in some black rich wood, are wonders; and the kakemono or scroll-picture hanging there is an idyll, Hotei, God of Happiness, drifting in a bark down some shadowy stream into evening mysteries of vapoury purple. Far as this hamlet is from all art-centres, there is no object visible in the house which does not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty in form. The old gold-flowered lacquer-ware, the astonishing box in which sweetmeats (kwashi) are kept, the diaphanous porcelain wine-cups dashed with a single tiny gold figure of a leaping shrimp, the tea-cup holders which are curled lotus-leaves of bronze, even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions, delight the eye and surprise the fancy. Indeed, wherever to-day in Japan one sees something totally uninteresting in porcelain or metal, something commonplace and ugly, one may be almost sure that detestable something has been shaped under foreign influence. But here I am in ancient Japan; probably no European eyes ever looked upon these things before. A window shaped like a heart peeps out upon the garden, a wonderful little garden with a tiny pond and miniature bridges and dwarf trees, like the landscape of a tea-cup; also some shapely stones of course, and some graceful stone-lanterns, or toro, such as are placed in the courts of temples. And beyond these, through the warm dusk, I see lights, coloured lights, the lanterns of the Bonku, suspended before each home to welcome the coming of beloved ghosts; for by the antique calendar, according to which in this antique place the reckoning of time is still made, this is the first night of the Festival of the Dead. As in all the other little country villages where I have been stopping, I find the people here kind to me with a kindness and a courtesy unimaginable, indescribable, unknown in any other country, and even in Japan itself only in the interior. Their simple politeness is not an art; their goodness is absolutely unconscious goodness; both come straight from the heart. And before I have been two hours among these people, their treatment of me, coupled with the sense of my utter inability to repay such kindness, causes a wicked wish to come into my mind. I wish these charming folk would do me some unexpected wrong, something surprisingly evil, something atrociously unkind, so that I should not be obliged to regret them, which I feel sure I must begin to do as soon as I go away. While the aged landlord conducts me to the bath, where he insists upon washing me himself as if I were a child, the wife prepares for us a charming little repast of rice, eggs, vegetables, and sweetmeats. She is painfully in doubt about her ability to please me, even after I have eaten enough for two men, and apologises too much for not being able to offer me more. 'There is no fish,' she says, 'for to-day is the first day of the Bonku, the Festival of the Dead; being the thirteenth day of the month. On the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth of the month nobody may eat fish. But on the morning of the sixteenth day, the fishermen go out to catch fish; and everybody who has both parents living may eat of it. But if one has lost one's father or mother then one must not eat fish, even upon the sixteenth day.' While the good soul is thus explaining I become aware of a strange remote sound from without, a sound I recognise through memory of tropical dances, a measured clapping of hands. But this clapping is very soft and at long intervals. And at still longer intervals there comes to us a heavy muffled booming, the tap of a great drum, a temple drum. 'Oh! we must go to see it,' cries Akira; 'it is the Bon-odori, the Dance of the Festival of the Dead. And you will see the Bon-odori danced here as it is never danced in cities--the Bon-odori of ancient days. For customs have not changed here; but in the cities all is changed.' So I hasten out, wearing only, like the people about me, one of those light wide-sleeved summer robes--yukata--which are furnished to male guests at all Japanese hotels; but the air is so warm that even thus lightly clad, I find myself slightly perspiring. And the night is divine, still, clear, vaster than nights of Europe, with a big white moon flinging down queer shadows of tilted eaves and horned gables and delightful silhouettes of robed Japanese. A little boy, the grandson of our host, leads the way with a crimson paper lantern; and the sonorous echoing of geta, the koro-koro of wooden sandals, fills all the street, for many are going whither we are going, to see the dance. A little while we proceed along the main street; then, traversing a narrow passage between two houses, we find ourselves in a great open space flooded by moonlight. This is the dancing-place; but the dance has ceased for a time. Looking about me, I perceive that we are in the court of an ancient Buddhist temple. The temple building itself remains intact, a low long peaked silhouette against the starlight; but it is void and dark and unhallowed now; it has been turned, they tell me, into a schoolhouse. The priests are gone; the great bell is gone; the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas have vanished, all save one--a broken-handed Jizo of stone, smiling with eyelids closed, under the moon. In the centre of the court is a framework of bamboo supporting a great drum; and about it benches have been arranged, benches from the schoolhouse, on which villagers are resting. There is a hum of voices, voices of people speaking very low, as if expecting something solemn; and cries of children betimes, and soft laughter of girls. And far behind the court, beyond a low hedge of sombre evergreen shrubs, I see soft white lights and a host of tall grey shapes throwing long shadows; and I know that the lights are the white lanterns of the dead (those hung in cemeteries only), and that the grey shapes are shapes of tombs. Suddenly a girl rises from her seat, and taps the huge drum once. It is the signal for the Dance of Souls. Sec. 5 Out of the shadow of the temple a processional line of dancers files into the moonlight and as suddenly halts--all young women or girls, clad in their choicest attire; the tallest leads; her comrades follow in order of stature; little maids of ten or twelve years compose the end of the procession. Figures lightly poised as birds--figures that somehow recall the dreams of shapes circling about certain antique vases; those charming Japanese robes, close-clinging about the knees, might seem, but for the great fantastic drooping sleeves, and the curious broad girdles confining them, designed after the drawing of some Greek or Etruscan artist. And, at another tap of the drum, there begins a performance impossible to picture in words, something unimaginable, phantasmal--a dance, an astonishment. All together glide the right foot forward one pace, without lifting the sandal from the ground, and extend both hands to the right, with a strange floating motion and a smiling, mysterious obeisance. Then the right foot is drawn back, with a repetition of the waving of hands and the mysterious bow. Then all advance the left foot and repeat the previous movements, half-turning to the left. Then all take two gliding paces forward, with a single simultaneous soft clap of the hands, and the first performance is reiterated, alternately to right and left; all the sandalled feet gliding together, all the supple hands waving together, all the pliant bodies bowing and swaying together. And so slowly, weirdly, the processional movement changes into a great round, circling about the moonlit court and around the voiceless crowd of spectators. [5] And always the white hands sinuously wave together, as if weaving spells, alternately without and within the round, now with palms upward, now with palms downward; and all the elfish sleeves hover duskily together, with a shadowing as of wings; and all the feet poise together with such a rhythm of complex motion, that, in watching it, one feels a sensation of hypnotism--as while striving to watch a flowing and shimmering of water. And this soporous allurement is intensified by a dead hush. No one speaks, not even a spectator. And, in the long intervals between the soft clapping of hands, one hears only the shrilling of the crickets in the trees, and the shu-shu of sandals, lightly stirring the dust. Unto what, I ask myself, may this be likened? Unto nothing; yet it suggests some fancy of somnambulism--dreamers, who dream themselves flying, dreaming upon their feet. And there comes to me the thought that I am looking at something immemorially old, something belonging to the unrecorded beginnings of this Oriental life, perhaps to the crepuscular Kamiyo itself, to the magical Age of the Gods; a symbolism of motion whereof the meaning has been forgotten for innumerable years. Yet more and more unreal the spectacle appears, with its silent smilings, with its silent bowings, as if obeisance to watchers invisible; and I find myself wondering whether, were I to utter but a whisper, all would not vanish for ever save the grey mouldering court and the desolate temple, and the broken statue of Jizo, smiling always the same mysterious smile I see upon the faces of the dancers. Under the wheeling moon, in the midst of the round, I feel as one within the circle of a charm. And verily this is enchantment; I am bewitched, bewitched by the ghostly weaving of hands, by the rhythmic gliding of feet, above all by the flitting of the marvellous sleeves--apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitation of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted. But no! these gracious, silent, waving, weaving shapes are not of the Shadowy Folk, for whose coming the white fires were kindled: a strain of song, full of sweet, clear quavering, like the call of a bird, gushes from some girlish mouth, and fifty soft voices join the chant: Sorota soroimashita odorikoga sorota, Soroikite, kita hare yukata. 'Uniform to view [as ears of young rice ripening in the field] all clad alike in summer festal robes, the company of dancers have assembled.' Again only the shrilling of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence, with mesmeric lentor--with a strange grace, which, by its very naivete, seems old as the encircling hills. Those who sleep the sleep of centuries out there, under the grey stones where the white lanterns are, and their fathers, and the fathers of their fathers' fathers, and the unknown generations behind them, buried in cemeteries of which the place has been forgotten for a thousand years, doubtless looked upon a scene like this. Nay! the dust stirred by those young feet was human life, and so smiled and so sang under this self-same moon, 'with woven paces, and with waving hands.' Suddenly a deep male chant breaks the hush. Two giants have joined the round, and now lead it, two superb young mountain peasants nearly nude, towering head and shoulders above the whole of the assembly. Their kimono are rolled about their waistilike girdles, leaving their bronzed limbs and torsos naked to the warm air; they wear nothing else save their immense straw hats, and white tabi, donned expressly for the festival. Never before among these people saw I such men, such thews; but their smiling beardless faces are comely and kindly as those of Japanese boys. They seem brothers, so like in frame, in movement, in the timbre of their voices, as they intone the same song: No demo yama demo ko wa umiokeyo, Sen ryo kura yori ko ga takara. 'Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters nothing: more than a treasure of one thousand ryo, a baby precious is.' And Jizo the lover of children's ghosts, smiles across the silence. Souls close to nature's Soul are these; artless and touching their thought, like the worship of that Kishibojin to whom wives pray. And after the silence, the sweet thin voices of the women answer: Oomu otoko ni sowa sanu oya Wa, Qyade gozaranu ko no kataki. 'The parents who will not allow their girl to be united with her lover; they are not the parents, but the enemies of their child.' And song follows song; and the round ever becomes larger; and the hours pass unfelt, unheard, while the moon wheels slowly down the blue steeps of the night. A deep low boom rolls suddenly across the court, the rich tone of some temple bell telling the twelfth hour. Instantly the witchcraft ends, like the wonder of some dream broken by a sound; the chanting ceases; the round dissolves in an outburst of happy laughter, and chatting, and softly-vowelled callings of flower-names which are names of girls, and farewell cries of 'Sayonara!' as dancers and spectators alike betake themselves homeward, with a great koro-koro of getas. And I, moving with the throng, in the bewildered manner of one suddenly roused from sleep, know myself ungrateful. These silvery-laughing folk who now toddle along beside me upon their noisy little clogs, stepping very fast to get a peep at my foreign face, these but a moment ago were visions of archaic grace, illusions of necromancy, delightful phantoms; and I feel a vague resentment against them for thus materialising into simple country-girls. Sec. 6 Lying down to rest, I ask myself the reason of the singular emotion inspired by that simple peasant-chorus. Utterly impossible to recall the air, with its fantastic intervals and fractional tones--as well attempt to fix in memory the purlings of a bird; but the indefinable charm of it lingers with me still. Melodies of Europe awaken within us feelings we can utter, sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant totally unlike anything in Western melody,--impossible even to write in those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue? And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be something infinitely more old than I--something not of only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes--all trillings of summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land. Chapter Seven The Chief City of the Province of the Gods Sec. 1 THE first of the noises of a Matsue day comes to the sleeper like the throbbing of a slow, enormous pulse exactly under his ear. It is a great, soft, dull buffet of sound--like a heartbeat in its regularity, in its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one's pillow so as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice--a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land. Then the boom of the great bell of Tokoji the Zenshu temple, shakes over the town; then come melancholy echoes of drumming from the tiny little temple of Jizo in the street Zaimokucho, near my house, signalling the Buddhist hour of morning prayer. And finally the cries of the earliest itinerant venders begin--'Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!'--the sellers of daikon and other strange vegetables. 'Moyaya-moya!'--the plaintive call of the women who sell little thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires. Sec. 2 Roused thus by these earliest sounds of the city's wakening life, I slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning over a soft green cloud of spring foliage rising from the river-bounded garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ohashigawa, opening into the grand Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a dim grey frame of peaks. Just opposite to me, across the stream, the blue-pointed Japanese dwellings have their to [1] all closed; they are still shut up like boxes, for it is not yet sunrise, although it is day. But oh, the charm of the vision--those first ghostly love-colours of a morning steeped in mist soft as sleep itself resolved into a visible exhalation! Long reaches of faintly-tinted vapour cloud the far lake verge--long nebulous bands, such as you may have seen in old Japanese picture-books, and must have deemed only artistic whimsicalities unless you had previously looked upon the real phenomena. All the bases of the mountains are veiled by them, and they stretch athwart the loftier peaks at different heights like immeasurable lengths of gauze (this singular appearance the Japanese term 'shelving'), [2] so that the lake appears incomparably larger than it really is, and not an actual lake, but a beautiful spectral sea of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it, while peak-tips rise like islands from the brume, and visionary strips of hill-ranges figure as league-long causeways stretching out of sight--an exquisite chaos, ever-changing aspect as the delicate fogs rise, slowly, very slowly. As the sun's yellow rim comes into sight, fine thin lines of warmer tone--spectral violets and opalines--shoot across the flood, treetops take tender fire, and the unpainted façades of high edifices across the water change their wood-colour to vapoury gold through the delicious haze. Looking sunward, up the long Ohashigawa, beyond the many-pillared wooden bridge, one high-pooped junk, just hoisting sail, seems to me the most fantastically beautiful craft I ever saw--a dream of Orient seas, so idealised by the vapour is it; the ghost of a junk, but a ghost that catches the light as clouds do; a shape of gold mist, seemingly semi-diaphanous, and suspended in pale blue light. Sec. 3 And now from the river-front touching my garden there rises to me a sound of clapping of hand,--one, two, three, four claps,--but the owner of the hands is screened from view by the shrubbery. At the same time, however, I see men and women descending the stone steps of the wharves on the opposite side of the Ohashigawa, all with little blue towels tucked into their girdles. They wash their faces and hands and rinse their mouths--the customary ablution preliminary to Shinto prayer. Then they turn their faces to the sunrise and clap their hands four times and pray. From the long high white bridge come other clappings, like echoes, and others again from far light graceful craft, curved like new moons--extraordinary boats, in which I see bare-limbed fishermen standing with foreheads bowed to the golden East. Now the clappings multiply--multiply at last into an almost continuous volleying of sharp sounds. For all the population are saluting the rising sun, O-Hi-San, the Lady of Fire--Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami, the Lady of the Great Light. [3] 'Konnichi-Sama! Hail this day to thee, divinest Day-Maker! Thanks unutterable unto thee, for this thy sweet light, making beautiful the world!' So, doubt-less, the thought, if not the utterance, of countless hearts. Some turn to the sun only, clapping their hands; yet many turn also to the West, to holy Kitzuki, the immemorial shrine and not a few turn their faces successively to all the points of heaven, murmuring the names of a hundred gods; and others, again, after having saluted the Lady of Fire, look toward high Ichibata, toward the place of the great temple of Yakushi Nyorai, who giveth sight to the blind--not clapping their hands as in Shinto worship, but only rubbing the palms softly together after the Buddhist manner. But all--for in this most antique province of Japan all Buddhists are Shintoists likewise--utter the archaic words of Shinto prayer: 'Harai tamai kiyome tamai to Kami imi tami.' Prayer to the most ancient gods who reigned before the coming of the Buddha, and who still reign here in their own Izumo-land,--in the Land of Reed Plains, in the Place of the Issuing of Clouds; prayer to the deities of primal chaos and primeval sea and of the beginnings of the world--strange gods with long weird names, kindred of U-hiji-ni-no-Kami, the First Mud-Lord, kindred of Su-hiji-ni-no-Kanii, the First Sand-Lady; prayer to those who came after them--the gods of strength and beauty, the world-fashioners, makers of the mountains and the isles, ancestors of those sovereigns whose lineage still is named 'The Sun's Succession'; prayer to the Three Thousand Gods 'residing within the provinces,' and to the Eight Hundred Myriads who dwell in the azure Takamano-hara--in the blue Plain of High Heaven. 'Nippon-koku-chu-yaoyorozu-no-Kami-gami-sama!' Sec. 4 'Ho--ke-kyo!' My uguisu is awake at last, and utters his morning prayer. You do not know what an uguisu is? An uguisu is a holy little bird that professes Buddhism. All uguisu have professed Buddhism from time immemorial; all uguisu preach alike to men the excellence of the divine Sutra. 'Ho--ke-kyo!' In the Japanese tongue, Ho-ke-kyo; in Sanscrit, Saddharma Pundarika: 'The Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law,' the divine book of the Nichiren sect. Very brief, indeed, is my little feathered Buddhist's confession of faith--only the sacred name reiterated over and over again like a litany, with liquid bursts of twittering between. 'Ho--ke-kyo!' Only this one phrase, but how deliciously he utters it! With what slow amorous ecstasy he dwells upon its golden syllables! It hath been written: 'He who shall keep, read, teach, or write this Sutra shall obtain eight hundred good qualities of the Eye. He shall see the whole Triple Universe down to the great hell Aviki, and up to the extremity of existence. He shall obtain twelve hundred good qualities of the Ear. He shall hear all sounds in the Triple Universe,--sounds of gods, goblins, demons, and beings not human.' 'Ho--ke-kyo!' A single word only. But it is also written: 'He who shall joyfully accept but a single word from this Sutra, incalculably greater shall be his merit than the merit of one who should supply all beings in the four hundred thousand Asankhyeyas of worlds with all the necessaries for happiness.' 'Ho--ke-kyo!' Always he makes a reverent little pause after uttering it and before shrilling out his ecstatic warble--his bird-hymn of praise. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds; then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name in a tone as of meditative wonder; then another pause; then another wild, rich, passionate warble. Could you see him, you would marvel how so powerful and penetrating a soprano could ripple from so minute a throat; for he is one of the very tiniest of all feathered singers, yet his chant can be heard far across the broad river, and children going to school pause daily on the bridge, a whole cho away, to listen to his song. And uncomely withal: a neutral-tinted mite, almost lost in his immense box-cage of hinoki wood, darkened with paper screens over its little wire-grated windows, for he loves the gloom. Delicate he is and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at precisely the same hour each day. It demands all possible care and attention merely to keep him alive. He is precious, nevertheless. 'Far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of him,' so rare he is. Indeed, I could not have afforded to buy him. He was sent to me by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, daughter of the governor of Izumo, who, thinking the foreign teacher might feel lonesome during a brief illness, made him the exquisite gift of this dainty creature. Sec. 5 The clapping of hands has ceased; the toil of the day begins; continually louder and louder the pattering of geta over the bridge. It is a sound never to be forgotten, this pattering of geta over the Ohashi--rapid, merry, musical, like the sound of an enormous dance; and a dance it veritably is. The whole population is moving on tiptoe, and the multitudinous twinkling of feet over the verge of the sunlit roadway is an astonishment. All those feet are small, symmetrical--light as the feet of figures painted on Greek vases--and the step is always taken toes first; indeed, with geta it could be taken no other way, for the heel touches neither the geta nor the ground, and the foot is tilted forward by the wedge-shaped wooden sole. Merely to stand upon a pair of geta is difficult for one unaccustomed to their use, yet you see Japanese children running at full speed in geta with soles at least three inches high, held to the foot only by a forestrap fastened between the great toe and the other toes, and they never trip and the geta never falls off. Still more curious is the spectacle of men walking in bokkuri or takageta, a wooden sole with wooden supports at least five inches high fitted underneath it so as to make the whole structure seem the lacquered model of a wooden bench. But the wearers stride as freely as if they had nothing upon their feet. Now children begin to appear, hurrying to school. The undulation of the wide sleeves of their pretty speckled robes, as they run, looks precisely like a fluttering of extraordinary butterflies. The junks spread their great white or yellow wings, and the funnels of the little steamers which have been slumbering all night by the wharves begin to smoke. One of the tiny lake steamers lying at the opposite wharf has just opened its steam-throat to utter the most unimaginable, piercing, desperate, furious howl. When that cry is heard everybody laughs. The other little steamboats utter only plaintive mooings, but unto this particular vessel--newly built and launched by a rival company--there has been given a voice expressive to the most amazing degree of reckless hostility and savage defiance. The good people of Matsue, upon hearing its voice for the first time, gave it forthwith a new and just name--Okami-Maru. 'Maru' signifies a steamship. 'Okami' signifies a wolf. Sec. 6 A very curious little object now comes slowly floating down the river, and I do not think that you could possibly guess what it is. The Hotoke, or Buddhas, and the beneficent Kami are not the only divinities worshipped by the Japanese of the poorer classes. The deities of evil, or at least some of them, are duly propitiated upon certain occasions, and requited by offerings whenever they graciously vouchsafe to inflict a temporary ill instead of an irremediable misfortune. [4] (After all, this is no more irrational than the thanksgiving prayer at the close of the hurricane season in the West Indies, after the destruction by storm of twenty-two thousand lives.) So men sometimes pray to Ekibiogami, the God of Pestilence, and to Kaze-no-Kami, the God of Wind and of Bad Colds, and to Hoso-no-Kami, the God of Smallpox, and to divers evil genii. Now when a person is certainly going to get well of smallpox a feast is given to the Hoso-no-Kami, much as a feast is given to the Fox-God when a possessing fox has promised to allow himself to be cast out. Upon a sando-wara, or small straw mat, such as is used to close the end of a rice-bale, one or more kawarake, or small earthenware vessels, are placed. These are filled with a preparation of rice and red beans, called adzukimeshi, whereof both Inari-Sama and Hoso-no-Kami are supposed to be very fond. Little bamboo wands with gohei (paper cuttings) fastened to them are then planted either in the mat or in the adzukimeshi, and the colour of these gohei must be red. (Be it observed that the gohei of other Kami are always white.) This offering is then either suspended to a tree, or set afloat in some running stream at a considerable distance from the home of the convalescent. This is called 'seeing the God off.' Sec. 7 The long white bridge with its pillars of iron is recognisably modern. It was, in fact, opened to the public only last spring with great ceremony. According to some most ancient custom, when a new bridge has been built the first persons to pass over it must be the happiest of the community. So the authorities of Matsue sought for the happiest folk, and selected two aged men who had both been married for more than half a century, and who had had not less than twelve children, and had never lost any of them. These good patriarchs first crossed the bridge, accompanied by their venerable wives, and followed by their grown-up children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, amidst a great clamour of rejoicing, the showering of fireworks, and the firing of cannon. But the ancient bridge so recently replaced by this structure was much more picturesque, curving across the flood and supported upon multitudinous feet, like a long-legged centipede of the innocuous kind. For three hundred years it had stood over the stream firmly and well, and it had its particular tradition. When Horio Yoshiharu, the great general who became daimyo of Izumo in the Keicho era, first undertook to put a bridge over the mouth of this river, the builders laboured in vain; for there appeared to be no solid bottom for the pillars of the bridge to rest upon. Millions of great stones were cast into the river to no purpose, for the work constructed by day was swept away or swallowed up by night. Nevertheless, at last the bridge was built, but the pillars began to sink soon after it was finished; then a flood carried half of it away and as often as it was repaired so often it was wrecked. Then a human sacrifice was made to appease the vexed spirits of the flood. A man was buried alive in the river-bed below the place of the middle pillar, where the current is most treacherous, and thereafter the bridge remained immovable for three hundred years. This victim was one Gensuke, who had lived in the street Saikamachi; for it had been determined that the first man who should cross the bridge wearing hakama without a machi [5] should be put under the bridge; and Gensuke sought to pass over not having a machi in his hakama, so they sacrificed him Wherefore the midmost pillar of the bridge was for three hundred years called by his name--Gensuke-bashira. It is averred that upon moonless nights a ghostly fire flitted about that pillar--always in the dead watch hour between two and three; and the colour of the light was red, though I am assured that in Japan, as in other lands, the fires of the dead are most often blue. Sec. 8 Now some say that Gensuke was not the name of a man, but the name of an era, corrupted by local dialect into the semblance of a personal appellation. Yet so profoundly is the legend believed, that when the new bridge was being built thousands of country folk were afraid to come to town; for a rumour arose that a new victim was needed, who was to be chosen from among them, and that it had been determined to make the choice from those who still wore their hair in queues after the ancient manner. Wherefore hundreds of aged men cut off their queues. Then another rumour was circulated to the effect that the police had been secretly instructed to seize the one-thousandth person of those who crossed the new bridge the first day, and to treat him after the manner of Gensuke. And at the time of the great festival of the Rice-God, when the city is usually thronged by farmers coming to worship at the many shrines of Inari this year there came but few; and the loss to local commerce was estimated at several thousand yen. The vapours have vanished, sharply revealing a beautiful little islet in the lake, lying scarcely half a mile away--a low, narrow strip of land with a Shinto shrine upon it, shadowed by giant pines; not pines like ours, but huge, gnarled, shaggy, tortuous shapes, vast-reaching like ancient oaks. Through a glass one can easily discern a torii, and before it two symbolic lions of stone (Kara-shishi), one with its head broken off, doubtless by its having been overturned and dashed about by heavy waves during some great storm. This islet is sacred to Benten, the Goddess of Eloquence and Beauty, wherefore it is called Benten-no-shima. But it is more commonly called Yomega-shima, or 'The Island of the Young Wife,' by reason of a legend. It is said that it arose in one night, noiselessly as a dream, bearing up from the depths of the lake the body of a drowned woman who had been very lovely, very pious, and very unhappy. The people, deeming this a sign from heaven, consecrated the islet to Benten, and thereon built a shrine unto her, planted trees about it, set a torii before it, and made a rampart about it with great curiously-shaped stones; and there they buried the drowned woman. Now the sky is blue down to the horizon, the air is a caress of spring. I go forth to wander through the queer old city. Sec. 10 I perceive that upon the sliding doors, or immediately above the principal entrance of nearly every house, are pasted oblong white papers bearing ideographic inscriptions; and overhanging every threshold I see the sacred emblem of Shinto, the little rice-straw rope with its long fringe of pendent stalks. The white papers at once interest me; for they are ofuda, or holy texts and charms, of which I am a devout collector. Nearly all are from temples in Matsue or its vicinity; and the Buddhist ones indicate by the sacred words upon them to what particular shu or sect, the family belong--for nearly every soul in this community professes some form of Buddhism as well as the all-dominant and more ancient faith of Shinto. And even one quite ignorant of Japanese ideographs can nearly always distinguish at a glance the formula of the great Nichiren sect from the peculiar appearance of the column of characters composing it, all bristling with long sharp points and banneret zigzags, like an army; the famous text Namu-myo-ho-ren-gekyo inscribed of old upon the flag of the great captain Kato Kiyomasa, the extirpator of Spanish Christianity, the glorious vir ter execrandus of the Jesuits. Any pilgrim belonging to this sect has the right to call at whatever door bears the above formula and ask for alms or food. But by far the greater number of the ofuda are Shinto. Upon almost every door there is one ofuda especially likely to attract the attention of a stranger, because at the foot of the column of ideographs composing its text there are two small figures of foxes, a black and a white fox, facing each other in a sitting posture, each with a little bunch of rice-straw in its mouth, instead of the more usual emblematic key. These ofuda are from the great Inari temple of Oshiroyama, [6] within the castle grounds, and are charms against fire. They represent, indeed, the only form of assurance against fire yet known in Matsue, so far, at least, as wooden dwellings are concerned. And although a single spark and a high wind are sufficient in combination to obliterate a larger city in one day, great fires are unknown in Matsue, and small ones are of rare occurrence. The charm is peculiar to the city; and of the Inari in question this tradition exists: When Naomasu, the grandson of Iyeyasu, first came to Matsue to rule the province, there entered into his presence a beautiful boy, who said: 'I came hither from the home of your august father in Echizen, to protect you from all harm. But I have no dwelling-place, and am staying therefore at the Buddhist temple of Fu-mon-in. Now if you will make for me a dwelling within the castle grounds, I will protect from fire the buildings there and the houses of the city, and your other residence likewise which is in the capital. For I am Inari Shinyemon.' With these words he vanished from sight. Therefore Naomasu dedicated to him the great temple which still stands in the castle grounds, surrounded by one thousand foxes of stone. Sec. 11 I now turn into a narrow little street, which, although so ancient that its dwarfed two-story houses have the look of things grown up from the ground, is called the Street of the New Timber. New the timber may have been one hundred and fifty years ago; but the tints of the structures would ravish an artist--the sombre ashen tones of the woodwork, the furry browns of old thatch, ribbed and patched and edged with the warm soft green of those velvety herbs and mosses which flourish upon Japanesese roofs. However, the perspective of the street frames in a vision more surprising than any details of its mouldering homes. Between very lofty bamboo poles, higher than any of the dwellings, and planted on both sides of the street in lines, extraordinary black nets are stretched, like prodigious cobwebs against the sky, evoking sudden memories of those monster spiders which figure in Japanese mythology and in the picture-books of the old artists. But these are only fishing-nets of silken thread; and this is the street of the fishermen. I take my way to the great bridge. Sec. 12 A stupendous ghost! Looking eastward from the great bridge over those sharply beautiful mountains, green and blue, which tooth the horizon, I see a glorious spectre towering to the sky. Its base is effaced by far mists: out of the air the thing would seem to have shaped itself--a phantom cone, diaphanously grey below, vaporously white above, with a dream of perpetual snow--the mighty mountain of Daisen. At the first approach of winter it will in one night become all blanched from foot to crest; and then its snowy pyramid so much resembles that Sacred Mountain, often compared by poets to a white inverted fan, half opened, hanging in the sky, that it is called Izumo-Fuji, 'the Fuji of Izumo.' But it is really in Hoki, not in Izumo, though it cannot be seen from any part of Hoki to such advantage as from here. It is the one sublime spectacle of this charming land; but it is visible only when the air is very pure. Many are the marvellous legends related concerning it, and somewhere upon its mysterious summit the Tengu are believed to dwell. Sec. 13 At the farther end of the bridge, close to the wharf where the little steamboats are, is a very small Jizo temple (Jizo-do). Here are kept many bronze drags; and whenever anyone has been drowned and the body not recovered, these are borrowed from the little temple and the river is dragged. If the body be thus found, a new drag must be presented to the temple. From here, half a mile southward to the great Shinto temple of Tenjin, deity of scholarship and calligraphy, broadly stretches Tenjinmachi, the Street of the Rich Merchants, all draped on either side with dark blue hangings, over which undulate with every windy palpitation from the lake white wondrous ideographs, which are names and signs, while down the wide way, in white perspective, diminishes a long line of telegraph poles. Beyond the temple of Tenjin the city is again divided by a river, the Shindotegawa, over which arches the bridge Tenjin-bashi. Again beyond this other large quarters extend to the hills and curve along the lake shore. But in the space between the two rivers is the richest and busiest life of the city, and also the vast and curious quarter of the temples. In this islanded district are likewise the theatres, and the place where wrestling-matches are held, and most of the resorts of pleasure. Parallel with Tenjinmachi runs the great street of the Buddhist temples, or Teramachi, of which the eastern side is one unbroken succession of temples--a solid front of court walls tile-capped, with imposing gateways at regular intervals. Above this long stretch of tile-capped wall rise the beautiful tilted massive lines of grey-blue temple roofs against the sky. Here all the sects dwell side by side in harmony--Nichirenshu, Shingon-shu, Zen-shu, Tendai-shu, even that Shin-shu, unpopular in Izumo because those who follow its teaching strictly must not worship the Kami. Behind each temple court there is a cemetery, or hakaba; and eastward beyond these are other temples, and beyond them yet others--masses of Buddhist architecture mixed with shreds of gardens and miniature homesteads, a huge labyrinth of mouldering courts and fragments of streets. To-day, as usual, I find I can pass a few hours very profitably in visiting the temples; in looking at the ancient images seated within the cups of golden lotus-flowers under their aureoles of gold; in buying curious mamori; in examining the sculptures of the cemeteries, where I can nearly always find some dreaming Kwannon or smiling Jizo well worth the visit. The great courts of Buddhist temples are places of rare interest for one who loves to watch the life of the people; for these have been for unremembered centuries the playing-places of the children. Generations of happy infants have been amused in them. All the nurses, and little girls who carry tiny brothers or sisters upon their backs, go thither every morning that the sun shines; hundreds of children join them; and they play at strange, funny games--'Onigokko,' or the game of Devil, 'Kage-Oni,' which signifies the Shadow and the Demon, and 'Mekusangokko,' which is a sort of 'blindman's buff.' Also, during the long summer evenings, these temples are wrestling-grounds, free to all who love wrestling; and in many of them there is a dohyo-ba, or wrestling-ring. Robust young labourers and sinewy artisans come to these courts to test their strength after the day's tasks are done, and here the fame of more than one now noted wrestler was first made. When a youth has shown himself able to overmatch at wrestling all others in his own district, he is challenged by champions of other districts; and if he can overcome these also, he may hope eventually to become a skilled and popular professional wrestler. It is also in the temple courts that the sacred dances are performed and that public speeches are made. It is in the temple courts, too, that the most curious toys are sold, on the occasion of the great holidays--toys most of which have a religious signification. There are grand old trees, and ponds full of tame fish, which put up their heads to beg for food when your shadow falls upon the water. The holy lotus is cultivated therein. 'Though growing in the foulest slime, the flower remains pure and undefiled. 'And the soul of him who remains ever pure in the midst of temptation is likened unto the lotus. 'Therefore is the lotus carven or painted upon the furniture of temples; therefore also does it appear in all the representations of our Lord Buddha. 'In Paradise the blessed shall sit at ease enthroned upon the cups of golden lotus-flowers.' [7] A bugle-call rings through the quaint street; and round the corner of the last temple come marching a troop of handsome young riflemen, uniformed somewhat like French light infantry, marching by fours so perfectly that all the gaitered legs move as if belonging to a single body, and every sword-bayonet catches the sun at exactly the same angle, as the column wheels into view. These are the students of the Shihan-Gakko, the College of Teachers, performing their daily military exercises. Their professors give them lectures upon the microscopic study of cellular tissues, upon the segregation of developing nerve structure, upon spectrum analysis, upon the evolution of the colour sense, and upon the cultivation of bacteria in glycerine infusions. And they are none the less modest and knightly in manner for all their modern knowledge, nor the less reverentially devoted to their dear old fathers and mothers whose ideas were shaped in the era of feudalism. Sec. 14 Here come a band of pilgrims, with yellow straw overcoats, 'rain-coats' (mino), and enormous yellow straw hats, mushroom-shaped, of which the down-curving rim partly hides the face. All carry staffs, and wear their robes well girded up so as to leave free the lower limbs, which are inclosed in white cotton leggings of a peculiar and indescribable kind. Precisely the same sort of costume was worn by the same class of travellers many centuries ago; and just as you now see them trooping by--whole families wandering together, the pilgrim child clinging to the father's hands--so may you see them pass in quaint procession across the faded pages of Japanese picture-books a hundred years old. At intervals they halt before some shop-front to look at the many curious things which they greatly enjoy seeing, but which they have no money to buy. I myself have become so accustomed to surprises, to interesting or extraordinary sights, that when a day happens to pass during which nothing remarkable has been heard or seen I feel vaguely discontented. But such blank days are rare: they occur in my own case only when the weather is too detestable to permit of going out-of-doors. For with ever so little money one can always obtain the pleasure of looking at curious things. And this has been one of the chief pleasures of the people in Japan for centuries and centuries, for the nation has passed its generations of lives in making or seeking such things. To divert one's self seems, indeed, the main purpose of Japanese existence, beginning with the opening of the baby's wondering eyes. The faces of the people have an indescribable look of patient expectancy--the air of waiting for something interesting to make its appearance. If it fail to appear, they will travel to find it: they are astonishing pedestrians and tireless pilgrims, and I think they make pilgrimages not more for the sake of pleasing the gods than of pleasing themselves by the sight of rare and pretty things. For every temple is a museum, and every hill and valley throughout the land has its temple and its wonders. Even the poorest farmer, one so poor that he cannot afford to eat a grain of his own rice, can afford to make a pilgrimage of a month's duration; and during that season when the growing rice needs least attention hundreds of thousands of the poorest go on pilgrimages. This is possible, because from ancient times it has been the custom for everybody to help pilgrims a little; and they can always find rest and shelter at particular inns (kichinyado) which receive pilgrims only, and where they are charged merely the cost of the wood used to cook their food. But multitudes of the poor undertake pilgrimages requiring much more than a month to perform, such as the pilgrimage to the thirty-three great temples of Kwannon, or that to the eighty-eight temples of Kobodaishi; and these, though years be needed to accomplish them, are as nothing compared to the enormous Sengaji, the pilgrimage to the thousand temples of the Nichiren sect. The time of a generation may pass ere this can be made. One may begin it in early youth, and complete it only when youth is long past. Yet there are several in Matsue, men and women, who have made this tremendous pilgrimage, seeing all Japan, and supporting themselves not merely by begging, but by some kinds of itinerant peddling. The pilgrim who desires to perform this pilgrimage carries on his shoulders a small box, shaped like a Buddhist shrine, in which he keeps his spare clothes and food. He also carries a little brazen gong, which he constantly sounds while passing through a city or village, at the same time chanting the Namu-myo-ho-ren-ge-kyo; and he always bears with him a little blank book, in which the priest of every temple visited stamps the temple seal in red ink. The pilgrimage over, this book with its one thousand seal impressions becomes an heirloom in the family of the pilgrim. Sec. 15 I too must make divers pilgrimages, for all about the city, beyond the waters or beyond the hills, lie holy places immemorially old. Kitzuki, founded by the ancient gods, who 'made stout the pillars upon the nethermost rock bottom, and made high the cross-beams to the Plain of High Heaven'--Kitzuki, the Holy of Holies, whose high-priest claims descent from the Goddess of the Sun; and Ichibata, famed shrine of Yakushi-Nyorai, who giveth sight to the blind--Ichibata-no-Yakushi, whose lofty temple is approached by six hundred and forty steps of stone; and Kiomidzu, shrine of Kwannon of the Eleven Faces, before whose altar the sacred fire has burned without ceasing for a thousand years; and Sada, where the Sacred Snake lies coiled for ever on the sambo of the gods; and Oba, with its temples of Izanami and Izanagi, parents of gods and men, the makers of the world; and Yaegaki, whither lovers go to pray for unions with the beloved; and Kaka, Kaka-ura, Kaka-no-Kukedo San--all these I hope to see. But of all places, Kaka-ura! Assuredly I must go to Kaka. Few pilgrims go thither by sea, and boatmen are forbidden to go there if there be even wind enough 'to move three hairs.' So that whosoever wishes to visit Kaka must either wait for a period of dead calm--very rare upon the coast of the Japanese Sea--or journey thereunto by land; and by land the way is difficult and wearisome. But I must see Kaka. For at Kaka, in a great cavern by the sea, there is a famous Jizo of stone; and each night, it is said, the ghosts of little children climb to the high cavern and pile up before the statue small heaps of pebbles; and every morning, in the soft sand, there may be seen the fresh prints of tiny naked feet, the feet of the infant ghosts. It is also said that in the cavern there is a rock out of which comes a stream of milk, as from a woman's breast; and the white stream flows for ever, and the phantom children drink of it. Pilgrims bring with them gifts of small straw sandals--the zori that children wear--and leave them before the cavern, that the feet of the little ghosts may not be wounded by the sharp rocks. And the pilgrim treads with caution, lest he should overturn any of the many heaps of stones; for if this be done the children cry. Sec. 16 The city proper is as level as a table, but is bounded on two sides by low demilunes of charming hills shadowed with evergreen foliage and crowned with temples or shrines. There are thirty-five thousand souls dwelling in ten thousand houses forming thirty-three principal and many smaller streets; and from each end of almost every street, beyond the hills, the lake, or the eastern rice-fields, a mountain summit is always visible--green, blue, or grey according to distance. One may ride, walk, or go by boat to any quarter of the town; for it is not only divided by two rivers, but is also intersected by numbers of canals crossed by queer little bridges curved like a well-bent bow. Architecturally (despite such constructions in European style as the College of Teachers, the great public school, the Kencho, the new post-office), it is much like other quaint Japanese towns; the structure of its temples, taverns, shops, and private dwellings is the same as in other cities of the western coast. But doubtless owing to the fact that Matsue remained a feudal stronghold until a time within the memory of thousands still living, those feudal distinctions of caste so sharply drawn in ancient times are yet indicated with singular exactness by the varying architecture of different districts. The city can be definitely divided into three architectural quarters: the district of the merchants and shop-keepers, forming the heart of the settlement, where all the houses are two stories high; the district of the temples, including nearly the whole south-eastern part of the town; and the district or districts of the shizoku (formerly called samurai), comprising a vast number of large, roomy, garden-girt, one-story dwellings. From these elegant homes, in feudal days, could be summoned at a moment's notice five thousand 'two-sworded men' with their armed retainers, making a fighting total for the city alone of probably not less than thirteen thousand warriors. More than one-third of all the city buildings were then samurai homes; for Matsue was the military centre of the most ancient province of Japan. At both ends of the town, which curves in a crescent along the lake shore, were the two main settlements of samurai; but just as some of the most important temples are situated outside of the temple district, so were many of the finest homesteads of this knightly caste situated in other quarters. They mustered most thickly, however, about the castle, which stands to-day on the summit of its citadel hill--the Oshiroyama--solid as when first built long centuries ago, a vast and sinister shape, all iron-grey, rising against the sky from a cyclopean foundation of stone. Fantastically grim the thing is, and grotesquely complex in detail; looking somewhat like a huge pagoda, of which the second, third, and fourth stories have been squeezed down and telescoped into one another by their own weight. Crested at its summit, like a feudal helmet, with two colossal fishes of bronze lifting their curved bodies skyward from either angle of the roof, and bristling with horned gables and gargoyled eaves and tilted puzzles of tiled roofing at every story, the creation is a veritable architectural dragon, made up of magnificent monstrosities--a dragon, moreover, full of eyes set at all conceivable angles, above below, and on every side. From under the black scowl of the loftiest eaves, looking east and south, the whole city can be seen at a single glance, as in the vision of a soaring hawk; and from the northern angle the view plunges down three hundred feet to the castle road, where walking figures of men appear no larger than flies. Sec. 17 The grim castle has its legend. It is related that, in accordance with some primitive and barbarous custom, precisely like that of which so terrible a souvenir has been preserved for us in the most pathetic of Servian ballads, 'The Foundation of Skadra,' a maiden of Matsue was interred alive under the walls of the castle at the time of its erection, as a sacrifice to some forgotten gods. Her name has never been recorded; nothing concerning her is remembered except that she was beautiful and very fond of dancing. Now after the castle had been built, it is said that a law had to be passed forbidding that any girl should dance in the streets of Matsue. For whenever any maiden danced the hill Oshiroyama would shudder, and the great castle quiver from basement to summit. Sec. 18 One may still sometimes hear in the streets a very humorous song, which every one in town formerly knew by heart, celebrating the Seven Wonders of Matsue. For Matsue was formerly divided into seven quarters, in each of which some extraordinary object or person was to be seen. It is now divided into five religious districts, each containing a temple of the State religion. People living within those districts are called ujiko, and the temple the ujigami, or dwelling-place of the tutelary god. The ujiko must support the ujigami. (Every village and town has at least one ujigami.) There is probably not one of the multitudinous temples of Matsue which has not some marvellous tradition attached to it; each of the districts has many legends; and I think that each of the thirty-three streets has its own special ghost story. Of these ghost stories I cite two specimens: they are quite representative of one variety of Japanese folk-lore. Near to the Fu-mon-in temple, which is in the north-eastern quarter, there is a bridge called Adzuki-togi-bashi, or The Bridge of the Washing of Peas. For it was said in other years that nightly a phantom woman sat beneath that bridge washing phantom peas. There is an exquisite Japanese iris-flower, of rainbow-violet colour, which flower is named kaki-tsubata; and there is a song about that flower called kaki-tsubata-no-uta. Now this song must never be sung near the Adzuki-togi-bashi, because, for some strange reason which seems to have been forgotten, the ghosts haunting that place become so angry upon hearing it that to sing it there is to expose one's self to the most frightful calamities. There was once a samurai who feared nothing, who one night went to that bridge and loudly sang the song. No ghost appearing, he laughed and went home. At the gate of his house he met a beautiful tall woman whom he had never seen before, and who, bowing, presented him with a lacquered box-fumi-bako--such as women keep their letters in. He bowed to her in his knightly way; but she said, 'I am only the servant--this is my mistress's gift,' and vanished out of his sight. Opening the box, he saw the bleeding head of a young child. Entering his house, he found upon the floor of the guest-room the dead body of his own infant son with the head torn off. Of the cemetery Dai-Oji, which is in the street called Nakabaramachi, this story is told. In Nakabaramachi there is an ameya, or little shop in which midzu-ame is sold--the amber-tinted syrup, made of malt, which is given to children when milk cannot be obtained for them. Every night at a late hour there came to that shop a very pale woman, all in white, to buy one rin [8] worth of midzu-ame. The ame-seller wondered that she was so thin and pale, and often questioned her kindly; but she answered nothing. At last one night he followed her, out of curiosity. She went to the cemetery; and he became afraid and returned. The next night the woman came again, but bought no midzu-ame, and only beckoned to the man to go with her. He followed her, with friends, into the cemetery. She walked to a certain tomb, and there disappeared; and they heard, under the ground, the crying of a child. Opening the tomb, they saw within it the corpse of the woman who nightly visited the ameya, with a living infant, laughing to see the lantern light, and beside the infant a little cup of midzu-ame. For the mother had been prematurely buried; the child was born in the tomb, and the ghost of the mother had thus provided for it--love being stronger than death. Sec. 19 Over the Tenjin-bashi, or Bridge of Tenjin, and through small streets and narrow of densely populated districts, and past many a tenantless and mouldering feudal homestead, I make my way to the extreme south-western end of the city, to watch the sunset from a little sobaya [9] facing the lake. For to see the sun sink from this sobaya is one of the delights of Matsue. There are no such sunsets in Japan as in the tropics: the light is gentle as a light of dreams; there are no furies of colour; there are no chromatic violences in nature in this Orient. All in sea or sky is tint rather than colour, and tint vapour-toned. I think that the exquisite taste of the race in the matter of colours and of tints, as exemplified in the dyes of their wonderful textures, is largely attributable to the sober and delicate beauty of nature's tones in this all-temperate world where nothing is garish. Before me the fair vast lake sleeps, softly luminous, far-ringed with chains of blue volcanic hills shaped like a sierra. On my right, at its eastern end, the most ancient quarter of the city spreads its roofs of blue-grey tile; the houses crowd thickly down to the shore, to dip their wooden feet into the flood. With a glass I can see my own windows and the far-spreading of the roofs beyond, and above all else the green citadel with its grim castle, grotesquely peaked. The sun begins to set, and exquisite astonishments of tinting appear in water and sky. Dead rich purples cloud broadly behind and above the indigo blackness of the serrated hills--mist purples, fading upward smokily into faint vermilions and dim gold, which again melt up through ghostliest greens into the blue. The deeper waters of the lake, far away, take a tender violet indescribable, and the silhouette of the pine-shadowed island seems to float in that sea of soft sweet colour. But the shallower and nearer is cut from the deeper water by the current as sharply as by a line drawn, and all the surface on this side of that line is a shimmering bronze--old rich ruddy gold-bronze. All the fainter colours change every five minutes,--wondrously change and shift like tones and shades of fine shot-silks. Sec. 20 Often in the streets at night, especially on the nights of sacred festivals (matsuri), one's attention will be attracted to some small booth by the spectacle of an admiring and perfectly silent crowd pressing before it. As soon as one can get a chance to look one finds there is nothing to look at but a few vases containing sprays of flowers, or perhaps some light gracious branches freshly cut from a blossoming tree. It is simply a little flower-show, or, more correctly, a free exhibition of master skill in the arrangement of flowers. For the Japanese do not brutally chop off flower-heads to work them up into meaningless masses of colour, as we barbarians do: they love nature too well for that; they know how much the natural charm of the flower depends upon its setting and mounting, its relation to leaf and stem, and they select a single graceful branch or spray just as nature made it. At first you will not, as a Western stranger, comprehend such an exhibition at all: you are yet a savage in such matters compared with the commonest coolies about you. But even while you are still wondering at popular interest in this simple little show, the charm of it will begin to grow upon you, will become a revelation to you; and, despite your Occidental idea of self-superiority, you will feel humbled by the discovery that all flower displays you have ever seen abroad were only monstrosities in comparison with the natural beauty of those few simple sprays. You will also observe how much the white or pale blue screen behind the flowers enhances the effect by lamp or lantern light. For the screen has been arranged with the special purpose of showing the exquisiteness of plant shadows; and the sharp silhouettes of sprays and blossoms cast thereon are beautiful beyond the imagining of any Western decorative artist. Sec. 21 It is still the season of mists in this land whose most ancient name signifies the Place of the Issuing of Clouds. With the passing of twilight a faint ghostly brume rises over lake and landscape, spectrally veiling surfaces, slowly obliterating distances. As I lean over the parapet of the Tenjin-bashi, on my homeward way, to take one last look eastward, I find that the mountains have already been effaced. Before me there is only a shadowy flood far vanishing into vagueness without a horizon--the phantom of a sea. And I become suddenly aware that little white things are fluttering slowly down into it from the fingers of a woman standing upon the bridge beside me, and murmuring something in a low sweet voice. She is praying for her dead child. Each of those little papers she is dropping into the current bears a tiny picture of Jizo and perhaps a little inscription. For when a child dies the mother buys a small woodcut (hanko) of Jizo, and with it prints the image of the divinity upon one hundred little papers. And she sometimes also writes upon the papers words signifying 'For the sake of...'--inscribing never the living, but the kaimyo or soul-name only, which the Buddhist priest has given to the dead, and which is written also upon the little commemorative tablet kept within the Buddhist household shrine, or butsuma. Then, upon a fixed day (most commonly the forty-ninth day after the burial), she goes to some place of running water and drops the little papers therein one by one; repeating, as each slips through her fingers, the holy invocation, 'Namu Jizo, Dai Bosatsu!' Doubtless this pious little woman, praying beside me in the dusk, is very poor. Were she not, she would hire a boat and scatter her tiny papers far away upon the bosom of the lake. (It is now only after dark that this may be done; for the police--I know not why--have been instructed to prevent the pretty rite, just as in the open ports they have been instructed to prohibit the launching of the little straw boats of the dead, the shoryobune.) But why should the papers be cast into running water? A good old Tendai priest tells me that originally the rite was only for the souls of the drowned. But now these gentle hearts believe that all waters flow downward to the Shadow-world and through the Sai-no-Kawara, where Jizo is. Sec. 22 At home again, I slide open once more my little paper window, and look out upon the night. I see the paper lanterns flitting over the bridge, like a long shimmering of fireflies. I see the spectres of a hundred lights trembling upon the black flood. I see the broad shoji of dwellings beyond the river suffused with the soft yellow radiance of invisible lamps; and upon those lighted spaces I can discern slender moving shadows, silhouettes of graceful women. Devoutly do I pray that glass may never become universally adopted in Japan--there would be no more delicious shadows. I listen to the voices of the city awhile. I hear the great bell of Tokoji rolling its soft Buddhist thunder across the dark, and the songs of the night-walkers whose hearts have been made merry with wine, and the long sonorous chanting of the night-peddlers. 'U-mu-don-yai-soba-yai!' It is the seller of hot soba, Japanese buckwheat, making his last round. 'Umai handan, machibito endan, usemono ninso kaso kichikyo no urainai!' The cry of the itinerant fortune-teller. 'Ame-yu!' The musical cry of the seller of midzu-ame, the sweet amber syrup which children love. 'Amail' The shrilling call of the seller of amazake, sweet rice wine. 'Kawachi-no-kuni-hiotan-yama-koi-no-tsuji-ura!' The peddler of love-papers, of divining-papers, pretty tinted things with little shadowy pictures upon them. When held near a fire or a lamp, words written upon them with invisible ink begin to appear. These are always about sweethearts, and sometimes tell one what he does not wish to know. The fortunate ones who read them believe themselves still more fortunate; the unlucky abandon all hope; the jealous become even more jealous than they were before. From all over the city there rises into the night a sound like the bubbling and booming of great frogs in a march--the echoing of the tiny drums of the dancing-girls, of the charming geisha. Like the rolling of a waterfall continually reverberates the multitudinous pattering of geta upon the bridge. A new light rises in the east; the moon is wheeling up from behind the peaks, very large and weird and wan through the white vapours. Again I hear the sounds of the clapping of many hands. For the wayfarers are paying obeisance to O-Tsuki-San: from the long bridge they are saluting the coming of the White Moon-Lady.[10] I sleep, to dream of little children, in some mouldering mossy temple court, playing at the game of Shadows and of Demons. Chapter Eight Kitzuki: The Most Ancient Shrine of Japan SHINKOKU is the sacred name of Japan--Shinkoku, 'The Country of the Gods'; and of all Shinkoku the most holy ground is the land of Izumo. Hither from the blue Plain of High Heaven first came to dwell awhile the Earth-makers, Izanagi and Izanami, the parents of gods and of men; somewhere upon the border of this land was Izanami buried; and out of this land into the black realm of the dead did Izanagi follow after her, and seek in vain to bring her back again. And the tale of his descent into that strange nether world, and of what there befell him, is it not written in the Kojiki? [1] And of all legends primeval concerning the Underworld this story is one of the weirdest--more weird than even the Assyrian legend of the Descent of Ishtar. Even as Izumo is especially the province of the gods, and the place of the childhood of the race by whom Izanagi and Izanami are yet worshiped, so is Kitzuki of Izumo especially the city of the gods, and its immemorial temple the earliest home of the ancient faith, the great religion of Shinto. Now to visit Kitzuki has been my most earnest ambition since I learned the legends of the Kojiki concerning it; and this ambition has been stimulated by the discovery that very few Europeans have visited Kitzuki, and that none have been admitted into the great temple itself. Some, indeed, were not allowed even to approach the temple court. But I trust that I shall be somewhat more fortunate; for I have a letter of introduction from my dear friend Nishida Sentaro, who is also a personal friend of the high pontiff of Kitzuki. I am thus assured that even should I not be permitted to enter the temple--a privilege accorded to but few among the Japanese themselves--I shall at least have the honour of an interview with the Guji, or Spiritual Governor of Kitzuki, Senke Takanori, whose princely family trace back their descent to the Goddess of the Sun. [2] Sec. 1 I leave Matsue for Kitzuki early in the afternoon of a beautiful September day; taking passage upon a tiny steamer in which everything, from engines to awnings, is Lilliputian. In the cabin one must kneel. Under the awnings one cannot possibly stand upright. But the miniature craft is neat and pretty as a toy model, and moves with surprising swiftness and steadiness. A handsome naked boy is busy serving the passengers with cups of tea and with cakes, and setting little charcoal furnaces before those who desire to smoke: for all of which a payment of about three-quarters of a cent is expected. I escape from the awnings to climb upon the cabin roof for a view; and the view is indescribably lovely. Over the lucent level of the lake we are steaming toward a far-away heaping of beautiful shapes, coloured with that strangely delicate blue which tints all distances in the Japanese atmosphere--shapes of peaks and headlands looming up from the lake verge against a porcelain-white horizon. They show no details, whatever. Silhouettes only they are--masses of absolutely pure colour. To left and right, framing in the Shinjiko, are superb green surgings of wooded hills. Great Yakuno-San is the loftiest mountain before us, north-west. South-east, behind us, the city has vanished; but proudly towering beyond looms Daisen--enormous, ghostly blue and ghostly white, lifting the cusps of its dead crater into the region of eternal snow. Over all arches a sky of colour faint as a dream. There seems to be a sense of divine magic in the very atmosphere, through all the luminous day, brooding over the vapoury land, over the ghostly blue of the flood--a sense of Shinto. With my fancy full of the legends of the Kojiki, the rhythmic chant of the engines comes to my ears as the rhythm of a Shinto ritual mingled with the names of gods: Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami. Sec. 2 The great range on the right grows loftier as we steam on; and its hills, always slowly advancing toward us, begin to reveal all the rich details of their foliage. And lo! on the tip of one grand wood-clad peak is visible against the pure sky the many-angled roof of a great Buddhist temple. That is the temple of Ichibata, upon the mountain Ichibata-yama, the temple of Yakushi-Nyorai, the Physician of Souls. But at Ichibata he reveals himself more specially as the healer of bodies, the Buddha who giveth sight unto the blind. It is believed that whosoever has an affection of the eyes will be made well by praying earnestly at that great shrine; and thither from many distant provinces do afflicted thousands make pilgrimage, ascending the long weary mountain path and the six hundred and forty steps of stone leading to the windy temple court upon the summit, whence may be seen one of the loveliest landscapes in Japan. There the pilgrims wash their eyes with the water of the sacred spring, and kneel before the shrine and murmur the holy formula of Ichibata: 'On-koro-koro-sendai-matoki-sowaka'--words of which the meaning has long been forgotten, like that of many a Buddhist invocation; Sanscrit words transliterated into Chinese, and thence into Japanese, which are understood by learned priests alone, yet are known by heart throughout the land, and uttered with the utmost fervour of devotion. I descend from the cabin roof, and squat upon the deck, under the awnings, to have a smoke with Akira. And I ask: 'How many Buddhas are there, O Akira? Is the number of the Enlightened known?' 'Countless the Buddhas are,' makes answer Akira; 'yet there is truly but one Buddha; the many are forms only. Each of us contains a future Buddha. Alike we all are except in that we are more or less unconscious of the truth. But the vulgar may not understand these things, and so seek refuge in symbols and in forms.' 'And the Kami,--the deities of Shinto?' 'Of Shinto I know little. But there are eight hundred myriads of Kami in the Plain of High Heaven--so says the Ancient Book. Of these, three thousand one hundred and thirty and two dwell in the various provinces of the land; being enshrined in two thousand eight hundred and sixty-one temples. And the tenth month of our year is called the "No-God-month," because in that month all the deities leave their temples to assemble in the province of Izumo, at the great temple of Kitzuki; and for the same reason that month is called in Izumo, and only in Izumo, the "God-is-month." But educated persons sometimes call it the "God-present-festival," using Chinese words. Then it is believed the serpents come from the sea to the land, and coil upon the sambo, which is the table of the gods, for the serpents announce the coming; and the Dragon-King sends messengers to the temples of Izanagi and Izanami, the parents of gods and men.' 'O Akira, many millions of Kami there must be of whom I shall always remain ignorant, for there is a limit to the power of memory; but tell me something of the gods whose names are most seldom uttered, the deities of strange places and of strange things, the most extraordinary gods.' 'You cannot learn much about them from me,' replies Akira. 'You will have to ask others more learned than I. But there are gods with whom it is not desirable to become acquainted. Such are the God of Poverty, and the God of Hunger, and the God of Penuriousness, and the God of Hindrances and Obstacles. These are of dark colour, like the clouds of gloomy days, and their faces are like the faces of gaki.' [3] 'With the God of Hindrances and Obstacles, O Akira I have had more than a passing acquaintance. Tell me of the others.' 'I know little about any of them,' answers Akira, 'excepting Bimbogami. It is said there are two gods who always go together,--Fuku-no-Kami, who is the God of Luck, and Bimbogami, who is the God of Poverty. The first is white, and the second is black.' 'Because the last,' I venture to interrupt, 'is only the shadow of the first. Fuku-no-Kami is the Shadow-caster, and Bimbogami the Shadow; and I have observed, in wandering about this world, that wherever the one goeth, eternally followeth after him the other.' Akira refuses his assent to this interpretation, and resumes: 'When Bimbogami once begins to follow anyone it is extremely difficult to be free from him again. In the village of Umitsu, which is in the province of Omi, and not far from Kyoto, there once lived a Buddhist priest who during many years was grievously tormented by Bimbogami. He tried oftentimes without avail to drive him away; then he strove to deceive him by proclaiming aloud to all the people that he was going to Kyoto. But instead of going to Kyoto he went to Tsuruga, in the province of Echizen; and when he reached the inn at Tsuruga there came forth to meet him a boy lean and wan like a gaki. The boy said to him, "I have been waiting for you"--and the boy was Bimbogami. 'There was another priest who for sixty years had tried in vain to get rid of Bimbogami, and who resolved at last to go to a distant province. On the night after he had formed this resolve he had a strange dream, in which he saw a very much emaciated boy, naked and dirty, weaving sandals of straw (waraji), such as pilgrims and runners wear; and he made so many that the priest wondered, and asked him, "For what purpose are you making so many sandals?" And the boy answered, "I am going to travel with you. I am Bimbogami."' 'Then is there no way, Akira, by which Bimbogami may be driven away?' 'It is written,' replies Akira, 'in the book called Jizo-Kyo-Kosui that the aged Enjobo, a priest dwelling in the province of Owari, was able to get rid of Bimbogami by means of a charm. On the last day of the last month of the year he and his disciples and other priests of the Shingon sect took branches of peach-trees and recited a formula, and then, with the branches, imitated the action of driving a person out of the temple, after which they shut all the gates and recited other formulas. The same night Enjobo dreamed of a skeleton priest in a broken temple weeping alone, and the skeleton priest said to him, "After I had been with you for so many years, how could you drive me away?" But always thereafter until the day of his death, Enjobo lived in prosperity.' Sec. 3 For an hour and a half the ranges to left and right alternately recede and approach. Beautiful blue shapes glide toward us, change to green, and then, slowly drifting behind us, are all blue again. But the far mountains immediately before us--immovable, unchanging--always remain ghosts. Suddenly the little steamer turns straight into the land--a land so low that it came into sight quite unexpectedly--and we puff up a narrow stream between rice-fields to a queer, quaint, pretty village on the canal bank--Shobara. Here I must hire jinricksha to take us to Kitzuki. There is not time to see much of Shobara if I hope to reach Kitzuki before bedtime, and I have only a flying vision of one long wide street (so picturesque that I wish I could pass a day in it), as our kuruma rush through the little town into the open country, into a vast plain covered with rice-fields. The road itself is only a broad dike, barely wide enough for two jinricksha to pass each other upon it. On each side the superb plain is bounded by a mountain range shutting off the white horizon. There is a vast silence, an immense sense of dreamy peace, and a glorious soft vapoury light over everything, as we roll into the country of Hyasugi to Kaminawoe. The jagged range on the left is Shusai-yama, all sharply green, with the giant Daikoku-yama overtopping all; and its peaks bear the names of gods. Much more remote, upon our right, enormous, pansy-purple, tower the shapes of the Kita-yama, or northern range; filing away in tremendous procession toward the sunset, fading more and more as they stretch west, to vanish suddenly at last, after the ghostliest conceivable manner, into the uttermost day. All this is beautiful; yet there is no change while hours pass. Always the way winds on through miles of rice-fields, white-speckled with paper-winged shafts which are arrows of prayer. Always the voice of frogs--a sound as of infinite bubbling. Always the green range on the left, the purple on the right, fading westward into a tall file of tinted spectres which always melt into nothing at last, as if they were made of air. The monotony of the scene is broken only by our occasional passing through some pretty Japanese village, or by the appearance of a curious statue or monument at an angle of the path, a roadside Jizo, or the grave of a wrestler, such as may be seen on the bank of the Hiagawa, a huge slab of granite sculptured with the words, 'Ikumo Matsu kikusuki.' But after reaching Kandogori, and passing over a broad but shallow river, a fresh detail appears in the landscape. Above the mountain chain on our left looms a colossal blue silhouette, almost saddle-shaped, recognisable by its outline as a once mighty volcano. It is now known by various names, but it was called in ancient times Sa-hime-yama; and it has its Shinto legend. It is said that in the beginning the God of Izumo, gazing over the land, said, 'This new land of Izumo is a land of but small extent, so I will make it a larger land by adding unto it.' Having so said, he looked about him over to Korea, and there he saw land which was good for the purpose. With a great rope he dragged therefrom four islands, and added the land of them to Izumo. The first island was called Ya-o-yo-ne, and it formed the land where Kitzuki now is. The second island was called Sada-no-kuni, and is at this day the site of the holy temple where all the gods do yearly hold their second assembly, after having first gathered together at Kitzuki. The third island was called in its new place Kurami-no-kuni, which now forms Shimane-gori. The fourth island became that place where stands the temple of the great god at whose shrine are delivered unto the faithful the charms which protect the rice-fields. [4] Now in drawing these islands across the sea into their several places the god looped his rope over the mighty mountain of Daisen and over the mountain Sa-hime-yama; and they both bear the marks of that wondrous rope even unto this day. As for the rope itself, part of it was changed into the long island of ancient times [5] called Yomi-ga-hama, and a part into the Long Beach of Sono. After we pass the Hori-kawa the road narrows and becomes rougher and rougher, but always draws nearer to the Kitayama range. Toward sundown we have come close enough to the great hills to discern the details of their foliage. The path begins to rise; we ascend slowly through the gathering dusk. At last there appears before us a great multitude of twinkling lights. We have reached Kitzuki, the holy city. Sec. 4 Over a long bridge and under a tall torii we roll into upward-sloping streets. Like Enoshima, Kitzuki has a torii for its city gate; but the torii is not of bronze. Then a flying vision of open lamp-lighted shop-fronts, and lines of luminous shoji under high-tilted eaves, and Buddhist gateways guarded by lions of stone, and long, low, tile-coped walls of temple courts overtopped by garden shrubbery, and Shinto shrines prefaced by other tall torii; but no sign of the great temple itself. It lies toward the rear of the city proper, at the foot of the wooded mountains; and we are too tired and hungry to visit it now. So we halt before a spacious and comfortable-seeming inn,--the best, indeed, in Kitzuki--and rest ourselves and eat, and drink sake out of exquisite little porcelain cups, the gift of some pretty singing-girl to the hotel. Thereafter, as it has become much too late to visit the Guji, I send to his residence by a messenger my letter of introduction, with an humble request in Akira's handwriting, that I may be allowed to present myself at the house before noon the next day. Then the landlord of the hotel, who seems to be a very kindly person, comes to us with lighted paper lanterns, and invites us to accompany him to the Oho-yashiro. Most of the houses have already closed their wooden sliding doors for the night, so that the streets are dark, and the lanterns of our landlord indispensable; for there is no moon, and the night is starless. We walk along the main street for a distance of about six squares, and then, making a turn, find ourselves before a superb bronze torii, the gateway to the great temple avenue. Sec. 5 Effacing colours and obliterating distances, night always magnifies by suggestion the aspect of large spaces and the effect of large objects. Viewed by the vague light of paper lanterns, the approach to the great shrine is an imposing surprise--such a surprise that I feel regret at the mere thought of having to see it to-morrow by disenchanting day: a superb avenue lined with colossal trees, and ranging away out of sight under a succession of giant torii, from which are suspended enormous shimenawa, well worthy the grasp of that Heavenly-Hand-Strength Deity whose symbols they are. But, more than by the torii and their festooned symbols, the dim majesty of the huge avenue is enhanced by the prodigious trees--many perhaps thousands of years old--gnarled pines whose shaggy summits are lost in darkness. Some of the mighty trunks are surrounded with a rope of straw: these trees are sacred. The vast roots, far-reaching in every direction, look in the lantern-light like a writhing and crawling of dragons. The avenue is certainly not less than a quarter of a mile in length; it crosses two bridges and passes between two sacred groves. All the broad lands on either side of it belong to the temple. Formerly no foreigner was permitted to pass beyond the middle torii The avenue terminates at a lofty wall pierced by a gateway resembling the gateways of Buddhist temple courts, but very massive. This is the entrance to the outer court; the ponderous doors are still open, and many shadowy figures are passing in or out. Within the court all is darkness, against which pale yellow lights are gliding to and fro like a multitude of enormous fireflies--the lanterns of pilgrims. I can distinguish only the looming of immense buildings to left and right, constructed with colossal timbers. Our guide traverses a very large court, passes into a second, and halts before an imposing structure whose doors are still open. Above them, by the lantern glow, I can see a marvellous frieze of dragons and water, carved in some rich wood by the hand of a master. Within I can see the symbols of Shinto, in a side shrine on the left; and directly before us the lanterns reveal a surface of matted floor vaster than anything I had expected to find. Therefrom I can divine the scale of the edifice which I suppose to be the temple. But the landlord tells us this is not the temple, but only the Haiden or Hall of Prayer, before which the people make their orisons, By day, through the open doors, the temple can be seen But we cannot see it to-night, and but few visitors are permitted to go in. 'The people do not enter even the court of the great shrine, for the most part,' interprets Akira; 'they pray before it at a distance. Listen!' All about me in the shadow I hear a sound like the plashing and dashing of water--the clapping of many hands in Shinto prayer. 'But this is nothing,' says the landlord; 'there are but few here now. Wait until to-morrow, which is a festival day.' As we wend our way back along the great avenue, under the torii and the giant trees, Akira interprets for me what our landlord tells him about the sacred serpent. 'The little serpent,' he says, 'is called by the people the august Dragon-Serpent; for it is sent by the Dragon-King to announce the coming of the gods. The sea darkens and rises and roars before the coming of Ryu-ja-Sama. Ryu-ja. Sama we call it because it is the messenger of Ryugu-jo, the palace of the dragons; but it is also called Hakuja, or the 'White Serpent.' [6] 'Does the little serpent come to the temple of its own accord?' 'Oh, no. It is caught by the fishermen. And only one can be caught in a year, because only one is sent; and whoever catches it and brings it either to the Kitzuki-no-oho-yashiro, or to the temple Sadajinja, where the gods hold their second assembly during the Kami-ari-zuki, receives one hyo [7] of rice in recompense. It costs much labour and time to catch a serpent; but whoever captures one is sure to become rich in after time.' [8] 'There are many deities enshrined at Kitzuki, are there not?' I ask. 'Yes; but the great deity of Kitzuki is Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, [9] whom the people more commonly call Daikoku. Here also is worshipped his son, whom many call Ebisu. These deities are usually pictured together: Daikoku seated upon bales of rice, holding the Red Sun against his breast with one hand, and in the other grasping the magical mallet of which a single stroke gives wealth; and Ebisu bearing a fishing-rod, and holding under his arm a great tai-fish. These gods are always represented with smiling faces; and both have great ears, which are the sign of wealth and fortune.' Sec. 6 A little wearied by the day's journeying, I get to bed early, and sleep as dreamlessly as a plant until I am awakened about daylight by a heavy, regular, bumping sound, shaking the wooden pillow on which my ear rests--the sound of the katsu of the kometsuki beginning his eternal labour of rice-cleaning. Then the pretty musume of the inn opens the chamber to the fresh mountain air and the early sun, rolls back all the wooden shutters into their casings behind the gallery, takes down the brown mosquito net, brings a hibachi with freshly kindled charcoal for my morning smoke, and trips away to get our breakfast. Early as it is when she returns, she brings word that a messenger has already arrived from the Guji, Senke Takanori, high descendant of the Goddess of the Sun. The messenger is a dignified young Shinto priest, clad in the ordinary Japanese full costume, but wearing also a superb pair of blue silken hakama, or Japanese ceremonial trousers, widening picturesquely towards the feet. He accepts my invitation to a cup of tea, and informs me that his august master is waiting for us at the temple. This is delightful news, but we cannot go at once. Akira's attire is pronounced by the messenger to be defective. Akira must don fresh white tabi and put on hakama before going into the august presence: no one may enter thereinto without hakama. Happily Akira is able to borrow a pair of hakama from the landlord; and, after having arranged ourselves as neatly as we can, we take our way to the temple, guided by the messenger. Sec. 7 I am agreeably surprised to find, as we pass again under a magnificent bronze torii which I admired the night before, that the approaches to the temple lose very little of their imposing character when seen for the first time by sunlight. The majesty of the trees remains astonishing; the vista of the avenue is grand; and the vast spaces of groves and grounds to right and left are even more impressive than I had imagined. Multitudes of pilgrims are going and coming; but the whole population of a province might move along such an avenue without jostling. Before the gate of the first court a Shinto priest in full sacerdotal costume waits to receive us: an elderly man, with a pleasant kindly face. The messenger commits us to his charge, and vanishes through the gateway, while the elderly priest, whose name is Sasa, leads the way. Already I can hear a heavy sound, as of surf, within the temple court; and as we advance the sound becomes sharper and recognisable--a volleying of handclaps. And passing the great gate, I see thousands of pilgrims before the Haiden, the same huge structure which I visited last night. None enter there: all stand before the dragon-swarming doorway, and cast their offerings into the money-chest placed before the threshold; many making contribution of small coin, the very poorest throwing only a handful of rice into the box. [10] Then they clap their hands and bow their heads before the threshold, and reverently gaze through the Hall of Prayer at the loftier edifice, the Holy of Holies, beyond it. Each pilgrim remains but a little while, and claps his hands but four times; yet so many are coming and going that the sound of the clapping is like the sound of a cataract. Passing by the multitude of worshippers to the other side of the Haiden, we find ourselves at the foot of a broad flight of iron-bound steps leading to the great sanctuary--steps which I am told no European before me was ever permitted to approach. On the lower steps the priests of the temple, in full ceremonial costume, are waiting to receive us. Tall men they are, robed in violet and purple silks shot through with dragon-patterns in gold. Their lofty fantastic head-dresses, their voluminous and beautiful costume, and the solemn immobility of their hierophantic attitudes make them at first sight seem marvellous statues only. Somehow or other there comes suddenly back to me the memory of a strange French print I used to wonder at when a child, representing a group of Assyrian astrologers. Only their eyes move as we approach. But as I reach the steps all simultaneously salute me with a most gracious bow, for I am the first foreign pilgrim to be honoured by the privilege of an interview in the holy shrine itself with the princely hierophant, their master, descendant of the Goddess of the Sun--he who is still called by myriads of humble worshippers in the remoter districts of this ancient province Ikigami, 'the living deity.' Then all become absolutely statuesque again. I remove my shoes, and am about to ascend the steps, when the tall priest who first received us before the outer gate indicates, by a single significant gesture, that religion and ancient custom require me, before ascending to the shrine of the god, to perform the ceremonial ablution. I hold out my hands; the priest pours the pure water over them thrice from a ladle-shaped vessel of bamboo with a long handle, and then gives me a little blue towel to wipe them upon, a votive towel with mysterious white characters upon it. Then we all ascend; I feeling very much like a clumsy barbarian in my ungraceful foreign garb. Pausing at the head of the steps, the priest inquires my rank in society. For at Kitzuki hierarchy and hierarchical forms are maintained with a rigidity as precise as in the period of the gods; and there are special forms and regulations for the reception of visitors of every social grade. I do not know what flattering statements Akira may have made about me to the good priest; but the result is that I can rank only as a common person--which veracious fact doubtless saves me from some formalities which would have proved embarrassing, all ignorant as I still am of that finer and more complex etiquette in which the Japanese are the world's masters. Sec. 8 The priest leads the way into a vast and lofty apartment opening for its entire length upon the broad gallery to which the stairway ascends. I have barely time to notice, while following him, that the chamber contains three immense shrines, forming alcoves on two sides of it. Ofthese, two are veiled by white curtains reaching from ceiling to matting--curtains decorated with perpendicular rows of black disks about four inches in diameter, each disk having in its centre a golden blossom. But from before the third shrine, in the farther angle of the chamber, the curtains have been withdrawn; and these are of gold brocade, and the shrine before which they hang is the chief shrine, that of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami. Within are visible only some of the ordinary emblems of Shinto, and the exterior of that Holy of Holies into which none may look. Before it a long low bench, covered with strange objects, has been placed, with one end toward the gallery and one toward the alcove. At the end of this bench, near the gallery, I see a majestic bearded figure, strangely coifed and robed all in white, seated upon the matted floor in hierophantic attitude. Our priestly guide motions us to take our places in front of him and to bow down before him. For this is Senke Takanori, the Guji of Kitzuki, to whom even in his own dwelling none may speak save on bended knee, descendant of the Goddess of the Sun, and still by multitudes revered in thought as a being superhuman. Prostrating myself before him, according to the customary code of Japanese politeness, I am saluted in return with that exquisite courtesy which puts a stranger immediately at ease. The priest who acted as our guide now sits down on the floor at the Guji's left hand; while the other priests, who followed us to the entrance of the sanctuary only, take their places upon the gallery without. Sec. 9 Senke Takanori is a youthful and powerful man. As he sits there before me in his immobile hieratic pose, with his strange lofty head-dress, his heavy curling beard, and his ample snowy sacerdotal robe broadly spreading about him in statuesque undulations, he realises for me all that I had imagined, from the suggestion of old Japanese pictures, about the personal majesty of the ancient princes and heroes. The dignity alone of the man would irresistibly compel respect; but with that feeling of respect there also flashes through me at once the thought of the profound reverence paid him by the population of the most ancient province of Japan, the idea of the immense spiritual power in his hands, the tradition of his divine descent, the sense of the immemorial nobility of his race--and my respect deepens into a feeling closely akin to awe. So motionless he is that he seems a sacred statue only--the temple image of one of his own deified ancestors. But the solemnity of the first few moments is agreeably broken by his first words, uttered in a low rich basso, while his dark, kindly eyes remain motionlessly fixed upon my face. Then my interpreter translates his greeting--large fine phrases of courtesy--to which I reply as I best know how, expressing my gratitude for the exceptional favour accorded me. 'You are, indeed,' he responds through Akira, 'the first European ever permitted to enter into the Oho-yashiro. Other Europeans have visited Kitzuki and a few have been allowed to enter the temple court; but you only have been admitted into the dwelling of the god. In past years, some strangers who desired to visit the temple out of common curiosity only were not allowed to approach even the court; but the letter of Mr. Nishida, explaining the object of your visit, has made it a pleasure for us to receive you thus.' Again I express my thanks; and after a second exchange of courtesies the conversation continues through the medium of Akira. 'Is not this great temple of Kitzuki,' I inquire, 'older than the temples of Ise?' 'Older by far,' replies the Guji; 'so old, indeed, that we do not well know the age of it. For it was first built by order of the Goddess of the Sun, in the time when deities alone existed. Then it was exceedingly magnificent; it was three hundred and twenty feet high. The beams and the pillars were larger than any existing timber could furnish; and the framework was bound together firmly with a rope made of taku [11] fibre, one thousand fathoms long. 'It was first rebuilt in the time of the Emperor Sui-nin. [12] The temple so rebuilt by order of the Emperor Sui-nin was called the Structure of the Iron Rings, because the pieces of the pillars, which were composed of the wood of many great trees, had been bound fast together with huge rings of iron. This temple was also splendid, but far less splendid than the first, which had been built by the gods, for its height was only one hundred and sixty feet. 'A third time the temple was rebuilt, in the reign of the Empress Sai-mei; but this third edifice was only eighty feet high. Since then the structure of the temple has never varied; and the plan then followed has been strictly preserved to the least detail in the construction of the present temple. 'The Oho-yashiro has been rebuilt twenty-eight times; and it has been the custom to rebuild it every sixty-one years. But in the long period of civil war it was not even repaired for more than a hundred years. In the fourth year of Tai-ei, one Amako Tsune Hisa, becoming Lord of Izumo, committed the great temple to the charge of a Buddhist priest, and even built pagodas about it, to the outrage of the holy traditions. But when the Amako family were succeeded by Moro Mototsugo, this latter purified the temple, and restored the ancient festivals and ceremonies which before had been neglected.' 'In the period when the temple was built upon a larger scale,' I ask, 'were the timbers for its construction obtained from the forests of Izumo?' The priest Sasa, who guided us into the shrine, makes answer: 'It is recorded that on the fourth day of the seventh month of the third year of Ten-in one hundred large trees came floating to the sea coast of Kitzuki, and were stranded there by the tide. With these timbers the temple was rebuilt in the third year of Ei-kyu; and that structure was called the Building-of-the-Trees-which-came-floating. Also in the same third year of Ten-in, a great tree-trunk, one hundred and fifty feet long, was stranded on the seashore near a shrine called Ube-no-yashiro, at Miyanoshita-mura, which is in Inaba. Some people wanted to cut the tree; but they found a great serpent coiled around it, which looked so terrible that they became frightened, and prayed to the deity of Ube-noyashiro to protect them; and the deity revealed himself, and said: "Whensoever the great temple in Izumo is to be rebuilt, one of the gods of each province sends timber for the building of it, and this time it is my turn. Build quickly, therefore, with that great tree which is mine." And therewith the god disappeared. From these and from other records we learn that the deities have always superintended or aided the building of the great temple of Kitzuki.' 'In what part of the Oho-yashiro,' I ask, 'do the august deities assemble during the Kami-ari-zuki?' 'On the east and west sides of the inner court,' replies the priest Sasa, 'there are two long buildings called the Jiu-kusha. These contain nineteen shrines, no one of which is dedicated to any particular god; and we believe it is in the Jiu-ku-sha that the gods assemble.' 'And how many pilgrims from other provinces visit the great shrine yearly?' I inquire. 'About two hundred and fifty thousand,' the Guji answers. 'But the number increases or diminishes according to the condition of the agricultural classes; the more prosperous the season, the larger the number of pilgrims. It rarely falls below two hundred thousand.' Sec. 10 Many other curious things the Guji and his chief priest then related to me; telling me the sacred name of each of the courts, and of the fences and holy groves and the multitudinous shrines and their divinities; even the names of the great pillars of the temple, which are nine in number, the central pillar being called the august Heart-Pillar of the Middle. All things within the temple grounds have sacred names, even the torii and the bridges. The priest Sasa called my attention to the fact that the great shrine of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami faces west, though the great temple faces east, like all Shinto temples. In the other two shrines of the same apartment, both facing east, are the first divine Kokuzo of Izumo, his seventeenth descendant, and the father of Nominosukune, wise prince and famous wrestler. For in the reign of the Emperor Sui-nin one Kehaya of Taima had boasted that no man alive was equal to himself in strength. Nominosukune, by the emperor's command, wrestled with Kehaya, and threw him down so mightily that Kehaya's ghost departed from him. This was the beginning of wrestling in Japan; and wrestlers still pray unto Nominosukune for power and skill. There are so many other shrines that I could not enumerate the names of all their deities without wearying those readers unfamiliar with the traditions and legends of Shinto. But nearly all those divinities who appear in the legend of the Master of the Great Land are still believed to dwell here with him, and here their shrines are: the beautiful one, magically born from the jewel worn in the tresses of the Goddess of the Sun, and called by men the Torrent-Mist Princess--and the daughter of the Lord of the World of Shadows, she who loved the Master of the Great Land, and followed him out of the place of ghosts to become his wife--and the deity called 'Wondrous-Eight-Spirits,' grandson of the 'Deity of Water-Gates,' who first made a fire-drill and platters of red clay for the august banquet of the god at Kitzuki--and many of the heavenly kindred of these. Sec. 11 The priest Sasa also tells me this: When Naomasu, grandson of the great Iyeyasu, and first daimyo of that mighty Matsudaira family who ruled Izumo for two hundred and fifty years, came to this province, he paid a visit to the Temple of Kitzuki, and demanded that the miya of the shrine within the shrine should be opened that he might look upon the sacred objects--upon the shintai or body of the deity. And this being an impious desire, both of the Kokuzo [13] unitedly protested against it. But despite their remonstrances and their pleadings, he persisted angrily in his demand, so that the priests found themselves compelled to open the shrine. And the miya being opened, Naomasu saw within it a great awabi [14] of nine holes--so large that it concealed everything behind it. And when he drew still nearer to look, suddenly the awabi changed itself into a huge serpent more than fifty feet in length; [15]--and it massed its black coils before the opening of the shrine, and hissed like the sound of raging fire, and looked so terrible, that Naomasu and those with him fled away having been able to see naught else. And ever thereafter Naomasu feared and reverenced the god. Sec. 12 The Guji then calls my attention to the quaint relics lying upon the long low bench between us, which is covered with white silk: a metal mirror, found in preparing the foundation of the temple when rebuilt many hundred years ago; magatama jewels of onyx and jasper; a Chinese flute made of jade; a few superb swords, the gifts of shoguns and emperors; helmets of splendid antique workmanship; and a bundle of enormous arrows with double-pointed heads of brass, fork-shaped and keenly edged. After I have looked at these relics and learned something of their history, the Guji rises and says to me, 'Now we will show you the ancient fire-drill of Kitzuki, with which the sacred fire is kindled.' Descending the steps, we pass again before the Haiden, and enter a spacious edifice on one side of the court, of nearly equal size with the Hall of Prayer. Here I am agreeably surprised to find a long handsome mahogany table at one end of the main apartment into which we are ushered, and mahogany chairs placed all about it for the reception of guests. I am motioned to one chair, my interpreter to another; and the Guji and his priests take their seats also at the table. Then an attendant sets before me a handsome bronze stand about three feet long, on which rests an oblong something carefully wrapped in snow-white cloths. The Guji removes the wrappings; and I behold the most primitive form of fire-drill known to exist in the Orient. [16] It is simply a very thick piece of solid white plank, about two and a half feet long, with a line of holes drilled along its upper edge, so that the upper part of each hole breaks through the sides of the plank. The sticks which produce the fire, when fixed in the holes and rapidly rubbed between the palms of the hands, are made of a lighter kind of white wood; they are about two feet long, and as thick as a common lead pencil. While I am yet examining this curious simple utensil, the invention of which tradition ascribes to the gods, and modern science to the earliest childhood of the human race, a priest places upon the table a light, large wooden box, about three feet long, eighteen inches wide, and four inches high at the sides, but higher in the middle, as the top is arched like the shell of a tortoise. This object is made of the same hinoki wood as the drill; and two long slender sticks are laid beside it. I at first suppose it to be another fire-drill. But no human being could guess what it really is. It is called the koto-ita, and is one of the most primitive of musical instruments; the little sticks are used to strike it. At a sign from the Guji two priests place the box upon the floor, seat themselves on either side of it, and taking up the little sticks begin to strike the lid with them, alternately and slowly, at the same time uttering a most singular and monotonous chant. One intones only the sounds, 'Ang! ang!' and the other responds, 'Ong! ong!' The koto-ita gives out a sharp, dead, hollow sound as the sticks fall upon it in time to each utterance of 'Ang! ang!' 'Ong! ong!' [17] Sec. 13 These things I learn: Each year the temple receives a new fire-drill; but the fire-drill is never made in Kitzuki, but in Kumano, where the traditional regulations as to the manner of making it have been preserved from the time of the gods. For the first Kokuzo of Izumo, on becoming pontiff, received the fire-drill for the great temple from the hands of the deity who was the younger brother of the Sun-Goddess, and is now enshrined at Kumano. And from his time the fire-drills for the Oho-yashiro of Kitzuki have been made only at Kumano. Until very recent times the ceremony of delivering the new fire-drill to the Guji of Kitzuki always took place at the great temple of Oba, on the occasion of the festival called Unohimatauri. This ancient festival, which used to be held in the eleventh month, became obsolete after the Revolution everywhere except at Oba in Izumo, where Izanami-no-Kami, the mother of gods and men, is enshrined. Once a year, on this festival, the Kokuzo always went to Oba, taking with him a gift of double rice-cakes. At Oba he was met by a personage called the Kame-da-yu, who brought the fire-drill from Kumano and delivered it to the priests at Oba. According to tradition, the Kame-da-yu had to act a somewhat ludicrous role so that no Shinto priest ever cared to perform the part, and a man was hired for it. The duty of the Kame-da-yu was to find fault with the gift presented to the temple by the Kokuzo; and in this district of Japan there is still a proverbial saying about one who is prone to find fault without reason, 'He is like the Kame-da-yu.' The Kame-da-yu would inspect the rice-cakes and begin to criticise them. 'They are much smaller this year,' he would observe, 'than they were last year.' The priests would reply: 'Oh, you are honourably mistaken; they are in truth very much larger.' 'The colour is not so white this year as it was last year; and the rice-flour is not finely ground.' For all these imaginary faults of the mochi the priests would offer elaborate explanations or apologies. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the sakaki branches used in it were eagerly bid for, and sold at high prices, being believed to possess talismanic virtues. Sec. 14 It nearly always happened that there was a great storm either on the day the Kokuzo went to Oba, or upon the day he returned therefrom. The journey had to be made during what is in Izumo the most stormy season (December by the new calendar). But in popular belief these storms were in some tremendous way connected with the divine personality of the Kokuzo whose attributes would thus appear to present some curious analogy with those of the Dragon-God. Be that as it may, the great periodical storms of the season are still in this province called Kokuzo-are [18]; it is still the custom in Izumo to say merrily to the guest who arrives or departs in a time of tempest, 'Why, you are like the Kokuzo!' Sec. 15 The Guji waves his hand, and from the farther end of the huge apartment there comes a sudden burst of strange music--a sound of drums and bamboo flutes; and turning to look, I see the musicians, three men, seated upon the matting, and a young girl with them. At another sign from the Guji the girl rises. She is barefooted and robed in snowy white, a virgin priestess. But below the hem of the white robe I see the gleam of hakama of crimson silk. She advances to a little table in the middle of the apartment, upon which a queer instrument is lying, shaped somewhat like a branch with twigs bent downward, from each of which hangs a little bell. Taking this curious object in both hands, she begins a sacred dance, unlike anything I ever saw before. Her every movement is a poem, because she is very graceful; and yet her performance could scarcely be called a dance, as we understand the word; it is rather a light swift walk within a circle, during which she shakes the instrument at regular intervals, making all the little bells ring. Her face remains impassive as a beautiful mask, placid and sweet as the face of a dreaming Kwannon; and her white feet are pure of line as the feet of a marble nymph. Altogether, with her snowy raiment and white flesh and passionless face, she seems rather a beautiful living statue than a Japanese maiden. And all the while the weird flutes sob and shrill, and the muttering of the drums is like an incantation. What I have seen is called the Dance of the Miko, the Divineress. Sec. 16 Then we visit the other edifices belonging to the temple: the storehouse; the library; the hall of assembly, a massive structure two stories high, where may be seen the portraits of the Thirty-Six Great Poets, painted by Tosano Mitsu Oki more than a thousand years ago, and still in an excellent state of preservation. Here we are also shown a curious magazine, published monthly by the temple--a record of Shinto news, and a medium for the discussion of questions relating to the archaic texts. After we have seen all the curiosities of the temple, the Guji invites us to his private residence near the temple to show us other treasures--letters of Yoritomo, of Hideyoshi, of Iyeyasu; documents in the handwriting of the ancient emperors and the great shoguns, hundreds of which precious manuscripts he keeps in a cedar chest. In case of fire the immediate removal of this chest to a place of safety would be the first duty of the servants of the household. Within his own house the Guji, attired in ordinary Japanese full dress only, appears no less dignified as a private gentleman than he first seemed as pontiff in his voluminous snowy robe. But no host could be more kindly or more courteous or more generous. I am also much impressed by the fine appearance of his suite of young priests, now dressed, like himself, in the national costume; by the handsome, aquiline, aristocratic faces, totally different from those of ordinary Japanese--faces suggesting the soldier rather than the priest. One young man has a superb pair of thick black moustaches, which is something rarely to be seen in Japan. At parting our kind host presents me with the ofuda, or sacred charms given to pilgrimsh--two pretty images of the chief deities of Kitzuki--and a number of documents relating to the history of the temple and of its treasures. Sec. 17 Having taken our leave of the kind Guji and his suite, we are guided to Inasa-no-hama, a little sea-bay at the rear of the town, by the priest Sasa, and another kannushi. This priest Sasa is a skilled poet and a man of deep learning in Shinto history and the archaic texts of the sacred books. He relates to us many curious legends as we stroll along the shore. This shore, now a popular bathing resort--bordered with airy little inns and pretty tea-houses--is called Inasa because of a Shinto tradition that here the god Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, the Master-of-the-Great-Land, was first asked to resign his dominion over the land of Izumo in favour of Masa-ka-a-katsu-kachi-hayabi-ame-no-oshi-ho-mimi-no-mikoto; the word Inasa signifying 'Will you consent or not?' [19] In the thirty-second section of the first volume of the Kojiki the legend is written: I cite a part thereof: 'The two deities (Tori-bune-no-Kami and Take-mika-dzuchi-no-wo-no-Kami), descending to the little shore of Inasa in the land of Izumo, drew their swords ten handbreadths long, and stuck them upside down on the crest of a wave, and seated themselves cross-legged upon the points of the swords, and asked the Deity Master-of-the-Great-Land, saying: "The Heaven-Shining-Great-August-Deity and the High-Integrating-Deity have charged us and sent us to ask, saying: 'We have deigned to charge our august child with thy dominion, as the land which he should govern. So how is thy heart?'" He replied, saying: "I am unable to say. My son Ya-he-koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami will be the one to tell you." . . . So they asked the Deity again, saying: "Thy son Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami has now spoken thus. Hast thou other sons who should speak?" He spoke again, saying: "There is my other son, Take-mi-na-gata-no-Kami."... While he was thus speaking the Deity Take-mi-na-gata-no-Kami came up [from the sea], bearing on the tips of his fingers a rock which it would take a thousand men to lift, and said, "I should like to have a trial of strength."' Here, close to the beach, stands a little miya called Inasa-no-kami-no-yashiro, or, the Temple of the God of Inasa; and therein Take-mika-dzu-chi-no-Kami, who conquered in the trial of strength, is enshrined. And near the shore the great rock which Take-mi-na-gata-no-Kami lifted upon the tips of his fingers, may be seen rising from the water. And it is called Chihiki-noiha. We invite the priests to dine with us at one of the little inns facing the breezy sea; and there we talk about many things, but particularly about Kitzuki and the Kokuzo. Sec. 18 Only a generation ago the religious power of the Kokuzo extended over the whole of the province of the gods; he was in fact as well as in name the Spiritual Governor of Izumo. His jurisdiction does not now extend beyond the limits of Kitzuki, and his correct title is no longer Kokuzo, but Guji. [20] Yet to the simple-hearted people of remoter districts he is still a divine or semi-divine being, and is mentioned by his ancient title, the inheritance of his race from the epoch of the gods. How profound a reverence was paid to him in former ages can scarcely be imagined by any who have not long lived among the country folk of Izumo. Outside of Japan perhaps no human being, except the Dalai Lama of Thibet, was so humbly venerated and so religiously beloved. Within Japan itself only the Son of Heaven, the 'Tenshi-Sama,' standing as mediator 'between his people and the Sun,' received like homage; but the worshipful reverence paid to the Mikado was paid to a dream rather than to a person, to a name rather than to a reality, for the Tenshi-Sama was ever invisible as a deity 'divinely retired,' and in popular belief no man could look upon his face and live. [21] Invisibility and mystery vastly enhanced the divine legend of the Mikado. But the Kokuzo, within his own province, though visible to the multitude and often journeying among the people, received almost equal devotion; so that his material power, though rarely, if ever, exercised, was scarcely less than that of the Daimyo of Izumo himself. It was indeed large enough to render him a person with whom the shogunate would have deemed it wise policy to remain upon good terms. An ancestor of the present Guji even defied the great Taiko Hideyoshi, refusing to obey his command to furnish troops with the haughty answer that he would receive no order from a man of common birth. [22] This defiance cost the family the loss of a large part of its estates by confiscation, but the real power of the Kokuzo remained unchanged until the period of the new civilisation. Out of many hundreds of stories of a similar nature, two little traditions may be cited as illustrations of the reverence in which the Kokuzo was formerly held. It is related that there was a man who, believing himself to have become rich by favour of the Daikoku of Kitzuki, desired to express his gratitude by a gift of robes to the Kokuzo. The Kokuzo courteously declined the proffer; but the pious worshipper persisted in his purpose, and ordered a tailor to make the robes. The tailor, having made them, demanded a price that almost took his patron's breath away. Being asked to give his reason for demanding such a price, he made answer: Having made robes for the Kokuzo, I cannot hereafter make garments for any other person. Therefore I must have money enough to support me for the rest of my life.' The second story dates back to about one hundred and seventy years ago. Among the samurai of the Matsue clan in the time of Nobukori, fifth daimyo of the Matsudaira family, there was one Sugihara Kitoji, who was stationed in some military capacity at Kitzuki. He was a great favourite with the Kokuzo, and used often to play at chess with him. During a game, one evening, this officer suddenly became as one paralysed, unable to move or speak. For a moment all was anxiety and confusion; but the Kokuzo said: 'I know the cause. My friend was smoking, and although smoking disagrees with me, I did not wish to spoil his pleasure by telling him so. But the Kami, seeing that I felt ill, became angry with him. Now I shall make him well.' Whereupon the Kokuzo uttered some magical word, and the officer was immediately as well as before. Sec. 19 Once more we are journeying through the silence of this holy land of mists and of legends; wending our way between green leagues of ripening rice white-sprinkled with arrows of prayer between the far processions of blue and verdant peaks whose names are the names of gods. We have left Kitzuki far behind. But as in a dream I still see the mighty avenue, the long succession of torii with their colossal shimenawa, the majestic face of the Guji, the kindly smile of the priest Sasa, and the girl priestess in her snowy robes dancing her beautiful ghostly dance. It seems to me that I can still hear the sound of the clapping of hands, like the crashing of a torrent. I cannot suppress some slight exultation at the thought that I have been allowed to see what no other foreigner has been privileged to see--the interior of Japan's most ancient shrine, and those sacred utensils and quaint rites of primitive worship so well worthy the study of the anthropologist and the evolutionist. But to have seen Kitzuki as I saw it is also to have seen something much more than a single wonderful temple. To see Kitzuki is to see the living centre of Shinto, and to feel the life-pulse of the ancient faith, throbbing as mightily in this nineteenth century as ever in that unknown past whereof the Kojiki itself, though written in a tongue no longer spoken, is but a modern record. [23] Buddhism, changing form or slowly decaying through the centuries, might seem doomed to pass away at last from this Japan to which it came only as an alien faith; but Shinto, unchanging and vitally unchanged, still remains all dominant in the land of its birth, and only seems to gain in power and dignity with time.[24] Buddhism has a voluminous theology, a profound philosophy, a literature vast as the sea. Shinto has no philosophy, no code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet, by its very immateriality, it can resist the invasion of Occidental religious thought as no other Orient faith can. Shinto extends a welcome to Western science, but remains the irresistible opponent of Western religion; and the foreign zealots who would strive against it are astounded to find the power that foils their uttermost efforts indefinable as magnetism and invulnerable as air. Indeed the best of our scholars have never been able to tell us what Shinto is. To some it appears to be merely ancestor-worship, to others ancestor-worship combined with nature-worship; to others, again, it seems to be no religion at all; to the missionary of the more ignorant class it is the worst form of heathenism. Doubtless the difficulty of explaining Shinto has been due simply to the fact that the sinologists have sought for the source of it in books: in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, which are its histories; in the Norito, which are its prayers; in the commentaries of Motowori and Hirata, who were its greatest scholars. But the reality of Shinto lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive. Trusting to know something of that Oriental soul in whose joyous love of nature and of life even the unlearned may discern a strange likeness to the soul of the old Greek race, I trust also that I may presume some day to speak of the great living power of that faith now called Shinto, but more anciently Kami-no-michi, or 'The Way of the Gods.' Chapter Nine In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts Sec. 1 IT is forbidden to go to Kaka if there be wind enough 'to move three hairs.' Now an absolutely windless day is rare on this wild western coast. Over the Japanese Sea, from Korea, or China, or boreal Siberia, some west or north-west breeze is nearly always blowing. So that I have had to wait many long months for a good chance to visit Kaka. Taking the shortest route, one goes first to Mitsu-ura from Matsue, either by kuruma or on foot. By kuruma this little journey occupies nearly two hours and a half, though the distance is scarcely seven miles, the road being one of the worst in all Izumo. You leave Matsue to enter at once into a broad plain, level as a lake, all occupied by rice-fields and walled in by wooded hills. The path, barely wide enough for a single vehicle, traverses this green desolation, climbs the heights beyond it, and descends again into another and a larger level of rice-fields, surrounded also by hills. The path over the second line of hills is much steeper; then a third rice-plain must be crossed and a third chain of green altitudes, lofty enough to merit the name of mountains. Of course one must make the ascent on foot: it is no small labour for a kurumaya to pull even an empty kuruma up to the top; and how he manages to do so without breaking the little vehicle is a mystery, for the path is stony and rough as the bed of a torrent. A tiresome climb I find it; but the landscape view from the summit is more than compensation. Then descending, there remains a fourth and last wide level of rice-fields to traverse. The absolute flatness of the great plains between the ranges, and the singular way in which these latter 'fence off' the country into sections, are matters for surprise even in a land of surprises like Japan. Beyond the fourth rice-valley there is a fourth hill-chain, lower and richly wooded, on reaching the base of which the traveller must finally abandon his kuruma, and proceed over the hills on foot. Behind them lies the sea. But the very worst bit of the journey now begins. The path makes an easy winding ascent between bamboo growths and young pine and other vegetation for a shaded quarter of a mile, passing before various little shrines and pretty homesteads surrounded by high-hedged gardens. Then it suddenly breaks into steps, or rather ruins of steps--partly hewn in the rock, partly built, everywhere breached and worn which descend, all edgeless, in a manner amazingly precipitous, to the village of Mitsu-ura. With straw sandals, which never slip, the country folk can nimbly hurry up or down such a path; but with foreign footgear one slips at nearly every step; and when you reach the bottom at last, the wonder of how you managed to get there, even with the assistance of your faithful kurumaya, keeps you for a moment quite unconscious of the fact that you are already in Mitsu-ura. Sec. 2 Mitsu-ura stands with its back to the mountains, at the end of a small deep bay hemmed in by very high cliffs. There is only one narrow strip of beach at the foot of the heights; and the village owes its existence to that fact, for beaches are rare on this part of the coast. Crowded between the cliffs and the sea, the houses have a painfully compressed aspect; and somehow the greater number give one the impression of things created out of wrecks of junks. The little streets, or rather alleys, are full of boats and skeletons of boats and boat timbers; and everywhere, suspended from bamboo poles much taller than the houses, immense bright brown fishing-nets are drying in the sun. The whole curve of the beach is also lined with boats, lying side by side so that I wonder how it will be possible to get to the water's edge without climbing over them. There is no hotel; but I find hospitality in a fisherman's dwelling, while my kurumaya goes somewhere to hire a boat for Kaka-ura. In less than ten minutes there is a crowd of several hundred people about the house, half-clad adults and perfectly naked boys. They blockade the building; they obscure the light by filling up the doorways and climbing into the windows to look at the foreigner. The aged proprietor of the cottage protests in vain, says harsh things; the crowd only thickens. Then all the sliding screens are closed. But in the paper panes there are holes; and at all the lower holes the curious take regular turns at peeping. At a higher hole I do some peeping myself. The crowd is not prepossessing: it is squalid, dull-featured, remarkably ugly. But it is gentle and silent; and there are one or two pretty faces in it which seem extraordinary by reason of the general homeliness of the rest. At last my kurumaya has succeeded in making arrangements for a boat; and I effect a sortie to the beach, followed by the kurumaya and by all my besiegers. Boats have been moved to make a passage for us, and we embark without trouble of any sort. Our crew consists of two scullers--an old man at the stem, wearing only a rokushaku about his loins, and an old woman at the bow, fully robed and wearing an immense straw hat shaped like a mushroom. Both of course stand to their work and it would be hard to say which is the stronger or more skilful sculler. We passengers squat Oriental fashion upon a mat in the centre of the boat, where a hibachi, well stocked with glowing charcoal, invites us to smoke. Sec. 3 The day is clear blue to the end of the world, with a faint wind from the east, barely enough to wrinkle the sea, certainly more than enough to 'move three hairs.' Nevertheless the boatwoman and the boatman do not seem anxious; and I begin to wonder whether the famous prohibition is not a myth. So delightful the transparent water looks, that before we have left the bay I have to yield to its temptation by plunging in and swimming after the boat. When I climb back on board we are rounding the promontory on the right; and the little vessel begins to rock. Even under this thin wind the sea is moving in long swells. And as we pass into the open, following the westward trend of the land, we find ourselves gliding over an ink-black depth, in front of one of the very grimmest coasts I ever saw. A tremendous line of dark iron-coloured cliffs, towering sheer from the sea without a beach, and with never a speck of green below their summits; and here and there along this terrible front, monstrous beetlings, breaches, fissures, earthquake rendings, and topplings-down. Enormous fractures show lines of strata pitched up skyward, or plunging down into the ocean with the long fall of cubic miles of cliff. Before fantastic gaps, prodigious masses of rock, of all nightmarish shapes, rise from profundities unfathomed. And though the wind to-day seems trying to hold its breath, white breakers are reaching far up the cliffs, and dashing their foam into the faces of the splintered crags. We are too far to hear the thunder of them; but their ominous sheet-lightning fully explains to me the story of the three hairs. Along this goblin coast on a wild day there would be no possible chance for the strongest swimmer, or the stoutest boat; there is no place for the foot, no hold for the hand, nothing but the sea raving against a precipice of iron. Even to-day, under the feeblest breath imaginable, great swells deluge us with spray as they splash past. And for two long hours this jagged frowning coast towers by; and, as we toil on, rocks rise around us like black teeth; and always, far away, the foam-bursts gleam at the feet of the implacable cliffs. But there are no sounds save the lapping and plashing of passing swells, and the monotonous creaking of the sculls upon their pegs of wood. At last, at last, a bay--a beautiful large bay, with a demilune of soft green hills about it, overtopped by far blue mountains--and in the very farthest point of the bay a miniature village, in front of which many junks are riding at anchor: Kaka-ura. But we do not go to Kaka-ura yet; the Kukedo are not there. We cross the broad opening of the bay, journey along another half-mile of ghastly sea-precipice, and finally make for a lofty promontory of naked Plutonic rock. We pass by its menacing foot, slip along its side, and lo! at an angle opens the arched mouth of a wonderful cavern, broad, lofty, and full of light, with no floor but the sea. Beneath us, as we slip into it, I can see rocks fully twenty feet down. The water is clear as air. This is the Shin-Kukedo, called the New Cavern, though assuredly older than human record by a hundred thousand years. Sec. 4 A more beautiful sea-cave could scarcely be imagined. The sea, tunnelling the tall promontory through and through, has also, like a great architect, ribbed and groined and polished its mighty work. The arch of the entrance is certainly twenty feet above the deep water, and fifteen wide; and trillions of wave tongues have licked the vault and walls into wondrous smoothness. As we proceed, the rock-roof steadily heightens and the way widens. Then we unexpectedly glide under a heavy shower of fresh water, dripping from overhead. This spring is called the o-chozubachi or mitarashi [1] of Shin-Kukedo-San.. From the high vault at this point it is believed that a great stone will detach itself and fall upon any evil-hearted person who should attempt to enter the cave. I safely pass through the ordeal! Suddenly as we advance the boatwoman takes a stone from the bottom of the boat, and with it begins to rap heavily on the bow; and the hollow echoing is reiterated with thundering repercussions through all the cave. And in another instant we pass into a great burst of light, coming from the mouth of a magnificent and lofty archway on the left, opening into the cavern at right angles. This explains the singular illumination of the long vault, which at first seemed to come from beneath; for while the opening was still invisible all the water appeared to be suffused with light. Through this grand arch, between outlying rocks, a strip of beautiful green undulating coast appears, over miles of azure water. We glide on toward the third entrance to the Kukedo, opposite to that by which we came in; and enter the dwelling-place of the Kami and the Hotoke, for this grotto is sacred both to Shinto and to Buddhist faith. Here the Kukedo reaches its greatest altitude and breadth. Its vault is fully forty feet above the water, and its walls thirty feet apart. Far up on the right, near the roof, is a projecting white rock, and above the rock an orifice wherefrom a slow stream drips, seeming white as the rock itself. This is the legendary Fountain of Jizo, the fountain of milk at which the souls of dead children drink. Sometimes it flows more swiftly, sometimes more slowly; but it never ceases by night or day. And mothers suffering from want of milk come hither to pray that milk may be given unto them; and their prayer is heard. And mothers having more milk than their infants need come hither also, and pray to Jizo that so much as they can give may be taken for the dead children; and their prayer is heard, and their milk diminishes. At least thus the peasants of Izumo say. And the echoing of the swells leaping against the rocks without, the rushing and rippling of the tide against the walls, the heavy rain of percolating water, sounds of lapping and gurgling and plashing, and sounds of mysterious origin coming from no visible where, make it difficult for us to hear each other speak. The cavern seems full of voices, as if a host of invisible beings were holding tumultuous converse. Below us all the deeply lying rocks are naked to view as if seen through glass. It seems to me that nothing could be more delightful than to swim through this cave and let one's self drift with the sea-currents through all its cool shadows. But as I am on the point of jumping in, all the other occupants of the boat utter wild cries of protest. It is certain death! men who jumped in here only six months ago were never heard of again! this is sacred water, Kami-no-umi! And as if to conjure away my temptation, the boatwoman again seizes her little stone and raps fearfully upon the bow. On finding, however, that I am not sufficiently deterred by these stories of sudden death and disappearance, she suddenly screams into my ear the magical word, 'SAME!' Sharks! I have no longer any desire whatever to swim through the many-sounding halls of Shin-Kukedo-San. I have lived in the tropics! And we start forthwith for Kyu-Kukedo-San, the Ancient Cavern. Sec. 5 For the ghastly fancies about the Kami-no-umi, the word 'same' afforded a satisfactory explanation. But why that long, loud, weird rapping on the bow with a stone evidently kept on board for no other purpose? There was an exaggerated earnestness about the action which gave me an uncanny sensation--something like that which moves a man while walking at night upon a lonesome road, full of queer shadows, to sing at the top of his voice. The boatwoman at first declares that the rapping was made only for the sake of the singular echo. But after some cautious further questioning, I discover a much more sinister reason for the performance. Moreover, I learn that all the seamen and seawomen of this coast do the same thing when passing through perilous places, or places believed to be haunted by the Ma. What are the Ma? Goblins! Sec. 6 From the caves of the Kami we retrace our course for about a quarter of a mile; then make directly for an immense perpendicular wrinkle in the long line of black cliffs. Immediately before it a huge dark rock towers from the sea, whipped by the foam of breaking swells. Rounding it, we glide behind it into still water and shadow, the shadow of a monstrous cleft in the precipice of the coast. And suddenly, at an unsuspected angle, the mouth of another cavern yawns before us; and in another moment our boat touches its threshold of stone with a little shock that sends a long sonorous echo, like the sound of a temple drum, booming through all the abysmal place. A single glance tells me whither we have come. Far within the dusk I see the face of a Jizo, smiling in pale stone, and before him, and all about him, a weird congregation of grey shapes without shape--a host of fantasticalities that strangely suggest the wreck of a cemetery. From the sea the ribbed floor of the cavern slopes high through deepening shadows back to the black mouth of a farther grotto; and all that slope is covered with hundreds and thousands of forms like shattered haka. But as the eyes grow accustomed to the gloaming it becomes manifest that these were never haka; they are only little towers of stone and pebbles deftly piled up by long and patient labour. 'Shinda kodomo no shigoto,' my kurumaya murmurs with a compassionate smile; 'all this is the work of the dead children.' And we disembark. By counsel, I take off my shoes and put on a pair of zori, or straw sandals provided for me, as the rock is extremely slippery. The others land barefoot. But how to proceed soon becomes a puzzle: the countless stone-piles stand so close together that no space for the foot seems to be left between them. 'Mada michiga arimasu!' the boatwoman announces, leading the way. There is a path. Following after her, we squeeze ourselves between the wall of the cavern on the right and some large rocks, and discover a very, very narrow passage left open between the stone-towers. But we are warned to be careful for the sake of the little ghosts: if any of their work be overturned, they will cry. So we move very cautiously and slowly across the cave to a space bare of stone-heaps, where the rocky floor is covered with a thin layer of sand, detritus of a crumbling ledge above it. And in that sand I see light prints of little feet, children's feet, tiny naked feet, only three or four inches long--the footprints of the infant ghosts. Had we come earlier, the boatwoman says, we should have seen many more. For 'tis at night, when the soil of the cavern is moist with dews and drippings from the roof, that They leave Their footprints upon it; but when the heat of the day comes, and the sand and the rocks dry up, the prints of the little feet vanish away. There are only three footprints visible, but these are singularly distinct. One points toward the wall of the cavern; the others toward the sea. Here and there, upon ledges or projections of the rock, all about the cavern, tiny straw sandals--children's zori--are lying: offerings of pilgrims to the little ones, that their feet may not be wounded by the stones. But all the ghostly footprints are prints of naked feet. Then we advance, picking our way very, very carefully between the stone-towers, toward the mouth of the inner grotto, and reach the statue of Jizo before it. A seated Jizo carven in granite, holding in one hand the mystic jewel by virtue of which all wishes may be fulfilled; in the other his shakujo, or pilgrim's staff. Before him (strange condescension of Shinto faith!) a little torii has been erected, and a pair of gohei! Evidently this gentle divinity has no enemies; at the feet of the lover of children's ghosts, both creeds unite in tender homage. I said feet. But this subterranean Jizo has only one foot. The carven lotus on which he reposes has been fractured and broken: two great petals are missing; and the right foot, which must have rested upon one of them, has been knocked off at the ankle. This, I learn upon inquiry, has been done by the waves. In times of great storm the billows rush into the cavern like raging Oni, and sweep all the little stone towers into shingle as they come, and dash the statues against the rocks. But always during the first still night after the tempest the work is reconstructed as before! Hotoke ga shimpai shite: naki-naki tsumi naoshi-masu.' They make mourning, the hotoke; weeping, they pile up the stones again, they rebuild their towers of prayer. All about the black mouth of the inner grotto the bone-coloured rock bears some resemblance to a vast pair of yawning jaws. Downward from this sinister portal the cavern-floor slopes into a deeper and darker aperture. And within it, as one's eyes become accustomed to the gloom, a still larger vision of stone towers is disclosed; and beyond them, in a nook of the grotto, three other statues of Jizo smile, each one with a torii before it. Here I have the misfortune to upset first one stone-pile and then another, while trying to proceed. My kurumaya, almost simultaneously, ruins a third. To atone therefore, we must build six new towers, or double the number of those which we have cast down. And while we are thus busied, the boatwoman tells of two fishermen who remained in the cavern through all one night, and heard the humming of the viewless gathering, and sounds of speech, like the speech of children murmuring in multitude. Only at night do the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the feet of Jizo; and it is said that every night the stones are changed. When I ask why they do not work by day, when there is none to see them, I am answered: 'O-Hi-San [2] might see them; the dead exceedingly fear the Lady-Sun.' To the question, 'Why do they come from the sea?' I can get no satisfactory answer. But doubtless in the quaint imagination of this people, as also in that of many another, there lingers still the primitive idea of some communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls, that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day of the seventh moon. Even when these are launched upon rivers, or when floating lanterns are set adrift upon lakes or canals to light the ghosts upon their way, or when a mother bereaved drops into some running stream one hundred little prints of Jizo for the sake of her lost darling, the vague idea behind the pious act is that all waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the 'Nether-distant Land.' Some time, somewhere, this day will come back to me at night, with its visions and sounds: the dusky cavern, and its grey hosts of stone climbing back into darkness, and the faint prints of little naked feet, and the weirdly smiling images, and the broken syllables of the waters inward-borne, multiplied by husky echoings, blending into one vast ghostly whispering, like the humming of the Sai-no-Kawara. And over the black-blue bay we glide to the rocky beach of Kaka-ura. Sec. 8 As at Mitsu-ura, the water's edge is occupied by a serried line of fishing-boats, each with its nose to the sea; and behind these are ranks of others; and it is only just barely possible to squeeze one's way between them over the beach to the drowsy, pretty, quaint little streets behind them. Everybody seems to be asleep when we first land: the only living creature visible is a cat, sitting on the stern of a boat; and even that cat, according to Japanese beliefs, might not be a real cat, but an o-bake or a nekomata--in short, a goblin-cat, for it has a long tail. It is hard work to discover the solitary hotel: there are no signs; and every house seems a private house, either a fisherman's or a farmer's. But the little place is worth wandering about in. A kind of yellow stucco is here employed to cover the exterior of walls; and this light warm tint under the bright blue day gives to the miniature streets a more than cheerful aspect. When we do finally discover the hotel, we have to wait quite a good while before going in; for nothing is ready; everybody is asleep or away, though all the screens and sliding-doors are open. Evidently there are no thieves in Kaka-ura. The hotel is on a little hillock, and is approached from the main street (the rest are only miniature alleys) by two little flights of stone steps. Immediately across the way I see a Zen temple and a Shinto temple, almost side by side. At last a pretty young woman, naked to the waist, with a bosom like a Naiad, comes running down the street to the hotel at a surprising speed, bowing low with a smile as she hurries by us into the house. This little person is the waiting-maid of the inn, O-Kayo-San--name signifying 'Years of Bliss.' Presently she reappears at the threshold, fully robed in a nice kimono, and gracefully invites us to enter, which we are only too glad to do. The room is neat and spacious; Shinto kakemono from Kitzuki are suspended in the toko and upon the walls; and in one corner I see a very handsome Zen-but-sudan, or household shrine. (The form of the shrine, as well as the objects of worship therein, vary according to the sect of the worshippers.) Suddenly I become aware that it is growing strangely dark; and looking about me, perceive that all the doors and windows and other apertures of the inn are densely blocked up by a silent, smiling crowd which has gathered to look at me. I could not have believed there were so many people in Kaka-ura. In a Japanese house, during the hot season, everything is thrown open to the breeze. All the shoji or sliding paper-screens, which serve for windows; and all the opaque paper-screens (fusuma) used in other seasons to separate apartments, are removed. There is nothing left between floor and roof save the frame or skeleton of the building; the dwelling is literally unwalled, and may be seen through in any direction. The landlord, finding the crowd embarrassing, closes up the building in front. The silent, smiling crowd goes to the rear. The rear is also closed. Then the crowd masses to right and left of the house; and both sides have to be closed, which makes it insufferably hot. And the crowd make gentle protest. Wherefore our host, being displeased, rebukes the multitude with argument and reason, yet without lifting his voice. (Never do these people lift up their voices in anger.) And what he says I strive to translate, with emphasis, as follows: 'You-as-for! outrageousness doing--what marvellous is? 'Theatre is not! 'Juggler is not! 'Wrestler is not! 'What amusing is? 'Honourable-Guest this is! 'Now august-to-eat-time-is; to-look-at evil matter is. Honourable-returning-time-in-to-look-at-as-for-is-good.' But outside, soft laughing voices continue to plead; pleading, shrewdly enough, only with the feminine portion of the family: the landlord's heart is less easily touched. And these, too, have their arguments: 'Oba-San! 'O-Kayo-San! 'Shoji-to-open-condescend!--want to see! 'Though-we-look-at, Thing-that-by-looking-at-is-worn-out-it-is-not! 'So that not-to-hinder looking-at is good. 'Hasten therefore to open!' As for myself, I would gladly protest against this sealing-up, for there is nothing offensive nor even embarrassing in the gaze of these innocent, gentle people; but as the landlord seems to be personally annoyed, I do not like to interfere. The crowd, however, does not go away: it continues to increase, waiting for my exit. And there is one high window in the rear, of which the paper-panes contain some holes; and I see shadows of little people climbing up to get to the holes. Presently there is an eye at every hole. When I approach the window, the peepers drop noiselessly to the ground, with little timid bursts of laughter, and run away. But they soon come back again. A more charming crowd could hardly be imagined: nearly all boys and girls, half-naked because of the heat, but fresh and clean as flower-buds. Many of the faces are surprisingly pretty; there are but very few which are not extremely pleasing. But where are the men, and the old women? Truly, this population seems not of Kaka-ura, but rather of the Sai-no-Kawara. The boys look like little Jizo. During dinner, I amuse myself by poking pears and little pieces of radish through the holes in the shoji. At first there is much hesitation and silvery laughter; but in a little while the silhouette of a tiny hand reaches up cautiously, and a pear vanishes away. Then a second pear is taken, without snatching, as softly as if a ghost had appropriated it. Thereafter hesitation ceases, despite the effort of one elderly woman to create a panic by crying out the word Mahotsukai, 'wizard.' By the time the dinner is over and the shoji removed, we have all become good friends. Then the crowd resumes its silent observation from the four cardinal points. I never saw a more striking difference in the appearance of two village populations than that between the youth of Mitsu-ura and of Kaka. Yet the villages are but two hours' sailing distance apart. In remoter Japan, as in certain islands of the West Indies, particular physical types are developed apparently among communities but slightly isolated; on one side of a mountain a population may be remarkably attractive, while upon the other you may find a hamlet whose inhabitants are decidedly unprepossessing. But nowhere in this country have I seen a prettier jeunesse than that of Kaka-ura. 'Returning-time-in-to-look-at-as-for-is-good.' As we descend to the bay, the whole of Kaka-ura, including even the long-invisible ancients of the village, accompanies us; making no sound except the pattering of geta. Thus we are escorted to our boat. Into all the other craft drawn up on the beach the younger folk clamber lightly, and seat themselves on the prows and the gunwales to gaze at the marvellous Thing-that-by-looking-at-worn-out-is-not. And all smile, but say nothing, even to each other: somehow the experience gives me the sensation of being asleep; it is so soft, so gentle, and so queer withal, just like things seen in dreams. And as we glide away over the blue lucent water I look back to see the people all waiting and gazing still from the great semicircle of boats; all the slender brown child-limbs dangling from the prows; all the velvety-black heads motionless in the sun; all the boy-faces smiling Jizo-smiles; all the black soft eyes still watching, tirelessly watching, the Thing-that-by-looking-at-worn-out-is-not. And as the scene, too swiftly receding, diminishes to the width of a kakemono, I vainly wish that I could buy this last vision of it, to place it in my toko, and delight my soul betimes with gazing thereon. Yet another moment, and we round a rocky point; and Kaka-ura vanishes from my sight for ever. So all things pass away. Assuredly those impressions which longest haunt recollection are the most transitory: we remember many more instants than minutes, more minutes than hours; and who remembers an entire day? The sum of the remembered happiness of a lifetime is the creation of seconds. 'What is more fugitive than a smile? yet when does the memory of a vanished smile expire? or the soft regret which that memory may evoke? Regret for a single individual smile is something common to normal human nature; but regret for the smile of a population, for a smile considered as an abstract quality, is certainly a rare sensation, and one to be obtained, I fancy, only in this Orient land whose people smile for ever like their own gods of stone. And this precious experience is already mine; I am regretting the smile of Kaka. Simultaneously there comes the recollection of a strangely grim Buddhist legend. Once the Buddha smiled; and by the wondrous radiance of that smile were countless worlds illuminated. But there came a Voice, saying: 'It is not real! It cannot last!' And the light passed. Chapter Ten At Mionoseki Seki wa yoi toko, Asahi wo ukete; O-Yama arashiga Soyo-soyoto! (SONG OF MIONOSEKI.) [Seki is a goodly place, facing the morning sun. There, from the holy mountains, the winds blow softly, softly--soyosoyoto.] Sec. 1 THE God of Mionoseki hates eggs, hen's eggs. Likewise he hates hens and chickens, and abhors the Cock above all living creatures. And in Mionoseki there are no cocks or hens or chickens or eggs. You could not buy a hen's egg in that place even for twenty times its weight in gold. And no boat or junk or steamer could be hired to convey to Mionoseki so much as the feather of a chicken, much less an egg. Indeed, it is even held that if you have eaten eggs in the morning you must not dare to visit Mionoseki until the following day. For the great deity of Mionoseki is the patron of mariners and the ruler of storms; and woe unto the vessel which bears unto his shrine even the odour of an egg. Once the tiny steamer which runs daily from Matsue to Mionoseki encountered some unexpectedly terrible weather on her outward journey, just after reaching the open sea. The crew insisted that something displeasing to Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami must have been surreptitiously brought on board. All the passengers were questioned in vain. Suddenly the captain discerned upon the stem of a little brass pipe which one of the men was smoking, smoking in the face of death, like a true Japanese, the figure of a crowing cock! Needless to say, that pipe was thrown overboard. Then the angry sea began to grow calm; and the little vessel safely steamed into the holy port, and cast anchor before the great torii of the shrine of the god! Sec. 2 Concerning the reason why the Cock is thus detested by the Great Deity of Mionoseki, and banished from his domain, divers legends are told; but the substance of all of them is about as follows: As we read in the Kojiki, Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, Son of the Great Deity of Kitsuki, was wont to go to Cape Miho, [1] 'to pursue birds and catch fish.' And for other reasons also he used to absent himself from home at night, but had always to return before dawn. Now, in those days the Cock was his trusted servant, charged with the duty of crowing lustily when it was time for the god to return. But one morning the bird failed in its duty; and the god, hurrying back in his boat, lost his oars, and had to paddle with his hands; and his hands were bitten by the wicked fishes. Now the people of Yasugi, a pretty little town on the lagoon of Naka-umi, through which we pass upon our way to Mionoseki, most devoutly worship the same Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami; and nevertheless in Yasugi there are multitudes of cocks and hens and chickens; and the eggs of Yasugi cannot be excelled for size and quality. And the people of Yasugi aver that one may better serve the deity by eating eggs than by doing as the people of Mionoseki do; for whenever one eats a chicken or devours an egg, one destroys an enemy of Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami. Sec. 3 From Matsue to Mionoseki by steamer is a charming journey in fair weather. After emerging from the beautiful lagoon of Naka-umi into the open sea, the little packet follows the long coast of Izumo to the left. Very lofty this coast is, all cliffs and hills rising from the sea, mostly green to their summits, and many cultivated in terraces, so as to look like green pyramids of steps. The bases of the cliffs are very rocky; and the curious wrinklings and corrugations of the coast suggest the work of ancient volcanic forces. Far away to the right, over blue still leagues of sea, appears the long low shore of Hoki, faint as a mirage, with its far beach like an endless white streak edging the blue level, and beyond it vapoury lines of woods and cloudy hills, and over everything, looming into the high sky, the magnificent ghostly shape of Daisen, snow-streaked at its summit. So for perhaps an hour we steam on, between Hoki and Izumo; the rugged and broken green coast on our left occasionally revealing some miniature hamlet sheltered in a wrinkle between two hills; the phantom coast on the right always unchanged. Then suddenly the little packet whistles, heads for a grim promontory to port, glides by its rocky foot, and enters one of the prettiest little bays imaginable, previously concealed from view. A shell-shaped gap in the coast--a semicircular basin of clear deep water, framed in by high corrugated green hills, all wood-clad. Around the edge of the bay the quaintest of little Japanese cities, Mionoseki. There is no beach, only a semicircle of stone wharves, and above these the houses, and above these the beautiful green of the sacred hills, with a temple roof or two showing an angle through the foliage. From the rear of each house steps descend to deep water; and boats are moored at all the back-doors. We moor in front of the great temple, the Miojinja. Its great paved avenue slopes to the water's edge, where boats are also moored at steps of stone; and looking up the broad approach, one sees a grand stone torii, and colossal stone lanterns, and two magnificent sculptured lions, karashishi, seated upon lofty pedestals, and looking down upon the people from a height of fifteen feet or more. Beyond all this the walls and gate of the outer temple court appear, and beyond them, the roofs of the great haiden, and the pierced projecting cross-beams of the loftier Go-Miojin, the holy shrine itself, relieved against the green of the wooded hills. Picturesque junks are lying in ranks at anchor; there are two deep-sea vessels likewise, of modern build, ships from Osaka. And there is a most romantic little breakwater built of hewn stone, with a stone lantern perched at the end of it; and there is a pretty humped bridge connecting it with a tiny island on which I see a shrine of Benten, the Goddess of Waters. I wonder if I shall be able to get any eggs! Sec. 4 Unto the pretty waiting maiden of the inn Shimaya I put this scandalous question, with an innocent face but a remorseful heart: 'Ano ne! tamago wa arimasenka?' With the smile of a Kwannon she makes reply:-'He! Ahiru-no tamago-ga sukoshi gozarimasu.' Delicious surprise! There augustly exist eggs--of ducks! But there exist no ducks. For ducks could not find life worth living in a city where there is only deep-sea water. And all the ducks' eggs come from Sakai. Sec. 5 This pretty little hotel, whose upper chambers overlook the water, is situated at one end, or nearly at one end, of the crescent of Mionoseki, and the Miojinja almost at the other, so that one must walk through the whole town to visit the temple, or else cross the harbour by boat. But the whole town is well worth seeing. It is so tightly pressed between the sea and the bases of the hills that there is only room for one real street; and this is so narrow that a man could anywhere jump from the second story of a house upon the water-side into the second story of the opposite house upon the land-side. And it is as picturesque as it is narrow, with its awnings and polished balconies and fluttering figured draperies. From this main street several little ruelles slope to the water's edge, where they terminate in steps; and in all these miniature alleys long boats are lying, with their prows projecting over the edge of the wharves, as if eager to plunge in. The temptation to take to the water I find to be irresistible: before visiting the Miojinja I jump from the rear of our hotel into twelve feet of limpid sea, and cool myself by a swim across the harbour. On the way to Miojinja, I notice, in multitudes of little shops, fascinating displays of baskets and utensils made of woven bamboo. Fine bamboo-ware is indeed the meibutsu, the special product of Mionoseki; and almost every visitor buys some nice little specimen to carry home with him. The Miojinja is not in its architecture more remarkable than ordinary Shinto temples in Izumo; nor are its interior decorations worth describing in detail. Only the approach to it over the broad sloping space of level pavement, under the granite torii, and between the great lions and lamps of stone, is noble. Within the courts proper there is not much to be seen except a magnificent tank of solid bronze, weighing tons, which must have cost many thousands of yen. It is a votive offering. Of more humble ex-votos, there is a queer collection in the shamusho or business building on the right of the haiden: a series of quaintly designed and quaintly coloured pictures, representing ships in great storms, being guided or aided to port by the power of Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami. These are gifts from ships. The ofuda are not so curious as those of other famous Izumo temples; but they are most eagerly sought for. Those strips of white paper, bearing the deity's name, and a few words of promise, which are sold for a few rin, are tied to rods of bamboo, and planted in all the fields of the country roundabout. The most curious things sold are tiny packages of rice-seeds. It is alleged that whatever you desire will grow from these rice-seeds, if you plant them uttering a prayer. If you desire bamboos, cotton-plants, peas, lotus-plants, or watermelons, it matters not; only plant the seed and believe, and the desired crop will arise. Sec. 6 Much more interesting to me than the ofuda of the Miojinja are the yoraku, the pendent ex-votos in the Hojinji, a temple of the Zen sect which stands on the summit of the beautiful hill above the great Shinto shrine. Before an altar on which are ranged the images of the Thirty-three Kwannons, the thirty-three forms of that Goddess of Mercy who represents the ideal of all that is sweet and pure in the Japanese maiden, a strange, brightly coloured mass of curious things may be seen, suspended from the carven ceiling. There are hundreds of balls of worsted and balls of cotton thread of all colours; there are skeins of silk and patterns of silk weaving and of cotton weaving; there are broidered purses in the shape of sparrows and other living creatures; there are samples of bamboo plaiting and countless specimens of needlework. All these are the votive offerings of school children, little girls only, to the Maid-mother of all grace and sweetness and pity. So soon as a baby girl learns something in the way of woman's work--sewing, or weaving, or knitting, or broidering, she brings her first successful effort to the temple as an offering to the gentle divinity, 'whose eyes are beautiful,' she 'who looketh down above the sound of prayer.' Even the infants of the Japanese kindergarten bring their first work here--pretty paper-cuttings, scissored out and plaited into divers patterns by their own tiny flower-soft hands. Sec. 7 Very sleepy and quiet by day is Mionoseki: only at long intervals one hears laughter of children, or the chant of oarsmen rowing the most extraordinary boats I ever saw outside of the tropics; boats heavy as barges, which require ten men to move them. These stand naked to the work, wielding oars with cross-handles (imagine a letter T with the lower end lengthened out into an oar-blade). And at every pull they push their feet against the gunwales to give more force to the stroke; intoning in every pause a strange refrain of which the soft melancholy calls back to me certain old Spanish Creole melodies heard in West Indian waters: A-ra-ho-no-san-no-sa, Iya-ho-en-ya! Ghi! Ghi! The chant begins with a long high note, and descends by fractional tones with almost every syllable, and faints away a last into an almost indistinguishable hum. Then comes the stroke, 'Ghi!--ghi!' But at night Mionoseki is one of the noisiest and merriest little havens of Western Japan. From one horn of its crescent to the other the fires of the shokudai, which are the tall light of banquets, mirror themselves in the water; and the whole air palpitates with sounds of revelry. Everywhere one hears the booming of the tsudzumi, the little hand-drums of the geisha, and sweet plaintive chants of girls, and tinkling of samisen, and the measured clapping of hands in the dance, and the wild cries and laughter of the players at ken. And all these are but echoes of the diversions of sailors. Verily, the nature of sailors differs but little the world over. Every good ship which visits Mionoseki leaves there, so I am assured, from three hundred to five hundred yen for sake and for dancing-girls. Much do these mariners pray the Great Deity who hates eggs to make calm the waters and favourable the winds, so that Mionoseki may be reached in good time without harm. But having come hither over an unruffled sea with fair soft breezes all the way, small indeed is the gift which they give to the temple of the god, and marvellously large the sums which they pay unto geisha and keepers of taverns. But the god is patient and long-suffering--except in the matter of eggs. However, these Japanese seamen are very gentle compared with our own Jack Tars, and not without a certain refinement and politeness of their own. I see them sitting naked to the waist at their banquets; for it is very hot, but they use their chopsticks as daintily and pledge each other in sake almost as graciously as men of a better class. Likewise they seem to treat their girls very kindly. It is quite pleasant to watch them feasting across the street. Perhaps their laughter is somewhat more boisterous and their gesticulation a little more vehement than those of the common citizens; but there is nothing resembling real roughness--much less rudeness. All become motionless and silent as statues--fifteen fine bronzes ranged along the wall of the zashiki, [2] --when some pretty geisha begins one of those histrionic dances which, to the Western stranger, seem at first mysterious as a performance of witchcraft--but which really are charming translations of legend and story into the language of living grace and the poetry of woman's smile. And as the wine flows, the more urbane becomes the merriment--until there falls upon all that pleasant sleepiness which sake brings, and the guests, one by one, smilingly depart. Nothing could be happier or gentler than their evening's joviality--yet sailors are considered in Japan an especially rough class. What would be thought of our own roughs in such a country? Well, I have been fourteen months in Izumo; and I have not yet heard voices raised in anger, or witnessed a quarrel: never have I seen one man strike another, or a woman bullied, or a child slapped. Indeed I have never seen any real roughness anywhere that I have been in Japan, except at the open ports, where the poorer classes seem, through contact with Europeans, to lose their natural politeness, their native morals--even their capacity for simple happiness. Sec. 8 Last night I saw the seamen of Old Japan: to-day I shall see those of New Japan. An apparition in the offing has filled all this little port with excitement--an Imperial man-of-war. Everybody is going out to look at her; and all the long boats that were lying in the alleys are already hastening, full of curious folk, to the steel colossus. A cruiser of the first class, with a crew of five hundred. I take passage in one of those astounding craft I mentioned before--a sort of barge propelled by ten exceedingly strong naked men, wielding enormous oars--or rather, sweeps--with cross-handles. But I do not go alone: indeed I can scarcely find room to stand, so crowded the boat is with passengers of all ages, especially women who are nervous about going to sea in an ordinary sampan. And a dancing-girl jumps into the crowd at the risk of her life, just as we push off--and burns her arm against my cigar in the jump. I am very sorry for her; but she laughs merrily at my solicitude. And the rowers begin their melancholy somnolent song: A-ra-ho-no-san-no-sa, Iya-ho-en-ya! Ghi! Ghi! It is a long pull to reach her--the beautiful monster, towering motionless there in the summer sea, with scarce a curling of thin smoke from the mighty lungs of her slumbering engines; and that somnolent song of our boatmen must surely have some ancient magic in it; for by the time we glide alongside I feel as if I were looking at a dream. Strange as a vision of sleep, indeed, this spectacle: the host of quaint craft hovering and trembling around that tremendous bulk; and all the long-robed, wide-sleeved multitude of the antique port--men, women, children--the grey and the young together--crawling up those mighty flanks in one ceaseless stream, like a swarming of ants. And all this with a great humming like the humming of a hive,--a sound made up of low laughter, and chattering in undertones, and subdued murmurs of amazement. For the colossus overawes them--this ship of the Tenshi-Sama, the Son of Heaven; and they wonder like babies at the walls and the turrets of steel, and the giant guns and the mighty chains, and the stern bearing of the white-uniformed hundreds looking down upon the scene without a smile, over the iron bulwarks. Japanese those also--yet changed by some mysterious process into the semblance of strangers. Only the experienced eye could readily decide the nationality of those stalwart marines: but for the sight of the Imperial arms in gold, and the glimmering ideographs upon the stern, one might well suppose one's self gazing at some Spanish or Italian ship-of-war manned by brown Latin men. I cannot possibly get on board. The iron steps are occupied by an endless chain of clinging bodies--blue-robed boys from school, and old men with grey queues, and fearless young mothers holding fast to the ropes with over-confident babies strapped to their backs, and peasants, and fishers, and dancing-girls. They are now simply sticking there like flies: somebody has told them they must wait fifteen minutes. So they wait with smiling patience, and behind them in the fleet of high-prowed boats hundreds more wait and wonder. But they do not wait for fifteen minutes! All hopes are suddenly shattered by a stentorian announcement from the deck: 'Mo jikan ga naikara, miseru koto dekimasen!' The monster is getting up steam--going away: nobody else will be allowed to come on board. And from the patient swarm of clingers to the hand-ropes, and the patient waiters in the fleet of boats, there goes up one exceedingly plaintive and prolonged 'Aa!' of disappointment, followed by artless reproaches in Izumo dialect: 'Gun-jin wa uso iwanuka to omoya!-uso-tsuki dana!--aa! so dana!' ('War-people-as-for-lies-never-say-that-we-thought!--Aa-aa-aa!') Apparently the gunjin are accustomed to such scenes; for they do not even smile. But we linger near the cruiser to watch the hurried descent of the sightseers into their boats, and the slow ponderous motion of the chain-cables ascending, and the swarming of sailors down over the bows to fasten and unfasten mysterious things. One, bending head-downwards, drops his white cap; and there is a race of boats for the honour of picking it up. A marine leaning over the bulwarks audibly observes to a comrade: 'Aa! gwaikojn dana!--nani ski ni kite iru daro?'--The other vainly suggests: 'Yasu-no-senkyoshi daro.' My Japanese costume does not disguise the fact that I am an alien; but it saves me from the imputation of being a missionary. I remain an enigma. Then there are loud cries of 'Abunail'--if the cruiser were to move now there would be swamping and crushing and drowning unspeakable. All the little boats scatter and flee away. Our ten naked oarsmen once more bend to their cross-handled oars, and recommence their ancient melancholy song. And as we glide back, there comes to me the idea of the prodigious cost of that which we went forth to see, the magnificent horror of steel and steam and all the multiple enginery of death--paid for by those humble millions who toil for ever knee-deep in the slime of rice-fields, yet can never afford to eat their own rice! Far cheaper must be the food they live upon; and nevertheless, merely to protect the little that they own, such nightmares must be called into existence--monstrous creations of science mathematically applied to the ends of destruction. How delightful Mionoseki now seems, drowsing far off there under its blue tiles at the feet of the holy hills!--immemorial Mionoseki, with its lamps and lions of stone, and its god who hates eggs!--pretty fantastic Mionoseki, where all things, save the schools, are medieval still: the high-pooped junks, and the long-nosed boats, and the plaintive chants of oarsmen! A-ra-ho-no-san-no-sa, Iya-ho-en-ya! Ghi! Ghi! And we touch the mossed and ancient wharves of stone again: over one mile of lucent sea we have floated back a thousand years! I turn to look at the place of that sinister vision--and lo!--there is nothing there! Only the level blue of the flood under the hollow blue of the sky--and, just beyond the promontory, one far, small white speck: the sail of a junk. The horizon is naked. Gone!--but how soundlessly, how swiftly! She makes nineteen knots. And, oh! Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, there probably existed eggs on board! Chapter Eleven Notes on Kitzuki Sec. 1 KITZUKI, July 20, 1891. AKIRA is no longer with me. He has gone to Kyoto, the holy Buddhist city, to edit a Buddhist magazine; and I already feel without him like one who has lost his way--despite his reiterated assurances that he could never be of much service to me in Izumo, as he knew nothing about Shinto. But for the time being I am to have plenty of company at Kitzuki, where I am spending the first part of the summer holidays; for the little city is full of students and teachers who know me. Kitzuki is not only the holiest place in the San-indo; it is also the most fashionable bathing resort. The beach at Inasa bay is one of the best in all Japan; the beach hotels are spacious, airy, and comfortable; and the bathing houses, with hot and cold freshwater baths in which to wash off the brine after a swim, are simply faultless. And in fair weather, the scenery is delightful, as you look out over the summer space of sea. Closing the bay on the right, there reaches out from the hills overshadowing the town a mighty, rugged, pine-clad spur--the Kitzuki promontory. On the left a low long range of mountains serrate the horizon beyond the shore-sweep, with one huge vapoury shape towering blue into the blue sky behind them--the truncated silhouette of Sanbeyama. Before you the Japanese Sea touches the sky. And there, upon still clear nights, there appears a horizon of fire--the torches of hosts of fishing-boats riding at anchor three and four miles away--so numerous that their lights seem to the naked eye a band of unbroken flame. The Guji has invited me and one of my friends to see a great harvest dance at his residence on the evening of the festival of Tenjin. This dance--Honen-odori--is peculiar to Izumo; and the opportunity to witness it in this city is a rare one, as it is going to be performed only by order of the Guji. The robust pontiff himself loves the sea quite as much as anyone in Kitzuki; yet he never enters a beach hotel, much less a public bathing house. For his use alone a special bathing house has been built upon a ledge of the cliff overhanging the little settlement of Inasa: it is approached by a narrow pathway shadowed by pine-trees; and there is a torii before it, and shimenawa. To this little house the Guji ascends daily during the bathing season, accompanied by a single attendant, who prepares his bathing dresses, and spreads the clean mats upon which he rests after returning from the sea. The Guji always bathes robed. No one but himself and his servant ever approaches the little house, which commands a charming view of the bay: public reverence for the pontiff's person has made even his resting-place holy ground. As for the country-folk, they still worship him with hearts and bodies. They have ceased to believe as they did in former times, that anyone upon whom the Kokuzo fixes his eye at once becomes unable to speak or move; but when he passes among them through the temple court they still prostrate themselves along his way, as before the Ikigami. KITZUKI, July 23rd Always, through the memory of my first day at Kitzuki, there will pass the beautiful white apparition of the Miko, with her perfect passionless face, and strange, gracious, soundless tread, as of a ghost. Her name signifies 'the Pet,' or 'The Darling of the Gods,'--Mi-ko. The kind Guji, at my earnest request, procured me--or rather, had taken for me--a photograph of the Miko, in the attitude of her dance, upholding the mystic suzu, and wearing, over her crimson hakama, the snowy priestess-robe descending to her feet. And the learned priest Sasa told me these things concerning the Pet of the Gods, and the Miko-kagura--which is the name of her sacred dance. Contrary to the custom at the other great Shinto temples of Japan, such as Ise, the office of miko at Kitzuki has always been hereditary. Formerly there were in Kitzuki more than thirty families whose daughters served the Oho-yashiro as miko: to-day there are but two, and the number of virgin priestesses does not exceed six--the one whose portrait I obtained being the chief. At Ise and elsewhere the daughter of any Shinto priest may become a miko; but she cannot serve in that capacity after becoming nubile; so that, except in Kitzuki, the miko of all the greater temples are children from ten to twelve years of age. But at the Kitzuki Oho-yashiro the maiden-priestesses are beautiful girls of between sixteen and nineteen years of age; and sometimes a favourite miko is allowed to continue to serve the gods even after having been married. The sacred dance is not difficult to learn: the mother or sister teaches it to the child destined to serve in the temple. The miko lives at home, and visits the temple only upon festival days to perform her duties. She is not placed under any severe discipline or restrictions; she takes no special vows; she risks no dreadful penalties for ceasing to remain a virgin. But her position being one of high honour, and a source of revenue to her family, the ties which bind her to duty are scarcely less cogent than those vows taken by the priestesses of the antique Occident. Like the priestesses of Delphi, the miko was in ancient times also a divineress--a living oracle, uttering the secrets of the future when possessed by the god whom she served. At no temple does the miko now act as sibyl, oracular priestess, or divineress. But there still exists a class of divining-women, who claim to hold communication with the dead, and to foretell the future, and who call themselves miko--practising their profession secretly; for it has been prohibited by law. In the various great Shinto shrines of the Empire the Mikokagura is differently danced. In Kitzuki, most ancient of all, the dance is the most simple and the most primitive. Its purpose being to give pleasure to the gods, religious conservatism has preserved its traditions and steps unchanged since the period of the beginning of the faith. The origin of this dance is to be found in the Kojiki legend of the dance of Ame-nouzume-no-mikoto--she by whose mirth and song the Sun-goddess was lured from the cavern into which she had retired, and brought back to illuminate the world. And the suzu--the strange bronze instrument with its cluster of bells which the miko uses in her dance--still preserves the form of that bamboo-spray to which Ame-no-uzume-no-mikoto fastened small bells with grass, ere beginning her mirthful song. Sec. 4 Behind the library in the rear of the great shrine, there stands a more ancient structure which is still called the Miko-yashiki, or dwelling-place of the miko. Here in former times all the maiden-priestesses were obliged to live, under a somewhat stricter discipline than now. By day they could go out where they pleased; but they were under obligation to return at night to the yashiki before the gates of the court were closed. For it was feared that the Pets of the Gods might so far forget themselves as to condescend to become the darlings of adventurous mortals. Nor was the fear at all unreasonable; for it was the duty of a miko to be singularly innocent as well as beautiful. And one of the most beautiful miko who belonged to the service of the Oho-yashiro did actually so fall from grace--giving to the Japanese world a romance which you can buy in cheap printed form at any large bookstore in Japan. Her name was O-Kuni, and she was the daughter of one Nakamura Mongoro of Kitzuki, where her descendants still live at the present day. While serving as dancer in the great temple she fell in love with a ronin named Nagoya Sanza--a desperate, handsome vagabond, with no fortune in the world but his sword. And she left the temple secretly, and fled away with her lover toward Kyoto. All this must have happened not less than three hundred years ago. On their way to Kyoto they met another ronin, whose real name I have not been able to learn. For a moment only this 'wave-man' figures in the story, and immediately vanishes into the eternal Night of death and all forgotten things. It is simply recorded that he desired permission to travel with them, that he became enamoured of the beautiful miko, and excited the jealousy of her lover to such an extent that a desperate duel was the result, in which Sanza slew his rival. Thereafter the fugitives pursued their way to Kyoto without other interruption. Whether the fair O-Kuni had by this time found ample reason to regret the step she had taken, we cannot know. But from the story of her after-life it would seem that the face of the handsome ronin who had perished through his passion for her became a haunting memory. We next hear of her in a strange role at Kyoto. Her lover appears to have been utterly destitute; for, in order to support him, we find her giving exhibitions of the Miko-kagura in the Shijo-Kawara--which is the name given to a portion of the dry bed of the river Kamagawa--doubtless the same place in which the terrible executions by torture took place. She must have been looked upon by the public of that day as an outcast. But her extraordinary beauty seems to have attracted many spectators, and to have proved more than successful as an exhibition. Sanza's purse became well filled. Yet the dance of O-Kuni in the Shijo-Kawara was nothing more than the same dance which the miko of Kitzuki dance to-day, in their crimson hakama and snowy robes--a graceful gliding walk. The pair next appear in Tokyo--or, as it was then called, Yedo--as actors. O-Kuni, indeed, is universally credited by tradition, with having established the modern Japanese stage--the first profane drama. Before her time only religious plays, of Buddhist authorship, seem to have been known. Sanza himself became a popular and successful actor, under his sweetheart's tuition. He had many famous pupils, among them the great Saruwaka, who subsequently founded a theatre in Yedo; and the theatre called after him Saruwakaza, in the street Saruwakacho, remains even unto this day. But since the time of O-Kuni, women have been--at least until very recently--excluded from the Japanese stage; their parts, as among the old Greeks, being taken by men or boys so effeminate in appearance and so skilful in acting that the keenest observer could never detect their sex. Nagoya Sanza died many years before his companion. O-Kuni then returned to her native place, to ancient Kitzuki, where she cut off her beautiful hair, and became a Buddhist nun. She was learned for her century, and especially skilful in that art of poetry called Renga; and this art she continued to teach until her death. With the small fortune she had earned as an actress she built in Kitzuki the little Buddhist temple called Rengaji, in the very heart of the quaint town--so called because there she taught the art of Renga. Now the reason she built the temple was that she might therein always pray for the soul of the man whom the sight of her beauty had ruined, and whose smile, perhaps, had stirred something within her heart whereof Sanza never knew. Her family enjoyed certain privileges for several centuries because she had founded the whole art of the Japanese stage; and until so recently as the Restoration the chief of the descendants of Nakamura Mongoro was always entitled to a share in the profits of the Kitzuki theatre, and enjoyed the title of Zamoto. The family is now, however, very poor. I went to see the little temple of Rengaji, and found that it had disappeared. Until within a few years it used to stand at the foot of the great flight of stone steps leading to the second Kwannondera, the most imposing temple of Kwannon in Kitzuki. Nothing now remains of the Rengaji but a broken statue of Jizo, before which the people still pray. The former court of the little temple has been turned into a vegetable garden, and the material of the ancient building utilised, irreverently enough, for the construction of some petty cottages now occupying its site. A peasant told me that the kakemono and other sacred objects had been given to the neighbouring temple, where they might be seen. Sec. 5 Not far from the site of the Rengaji, in the grounds of the great hakaba of the Kwannondera, there stands a most curious pine. The trunk of the tree is supported, not on the ground, but upon four colossal roots which lift it up at such an angle that it looks like a thing walking upon four legs. Trees of singular shape are often considered to be the dwelling-places of Kami; and the pine in question affords an example of this belief. A fence has been built around it, and a small shrine placed before it, prefaced by several small torii; and many poor people may be seen, at almost any hour of the day, praying to the Kami of the place. Before the little shrine I notice, besides the usual Kitzuki ex-voto of seaweed, several little effigies of horses made of straw. Why these offerings of horses of straw? It appears that the shrine is dedicated to Koshin, the Lord of Roads; and those who are anxious about the health of their horses pray to the Road-God to preserve their animals from sickness and death, at the same time bringing these straw effigies in token of their desire. But this role of veterinarian is not commonly attributed to Koshin; and it appears that something in the fantastic form of the tree suggested the idea. Sec. 6 KITZUKI, July 24th Within the first court of the Oho-yashiro, and to the left of the chief gate, stands a small timber structure, ashen-coloured with age, shaped like a common miya or shrine. To the wooden gratings of its closed doors are knotted many of those white papers upon which are usually written vows or prayers to the gods. But on peering through the grating one sees no Shinto symbols in the dimness within. It is a stable! And there, in the central stall, is a superb horse--looking at you. Japanese horseshoes of straw are suspended to the wall behind him. He does not move. He is made of bronze! Upon inquiring of the learned priest Sasa the story of this horse, I was told the following curious things: On the eleventh day of the seventh month, by the ancient calendar,[1] falls the strange festival called Minige, or 'The Body-escaping.' Upon that day, 'tis said that the Great Deity of Kitzuki leaves his shrine to pass through all the streets of the city, and along the seashore, after which he enters into the house of the Kokuzo. Wherefore upon that day the Kokuzo was always wont to leave his house; and at the present time, though he does not actually abandon his home, he and his family retire into certain apartments, so as to leave the larger part of the dwelling free for the use of the god. This retreat of the Kokuzo is still called the Minige. Now while the great Deity Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami is passing through the streets, he is followed by the highest Shinto priest of the shrine--this kannushi having been formerly called Bekkwa. The word 'Bekkwa' means 'special' or 'sacred fire'; and the chief kannushi was so called because for a week before the festival he had been nourished only with special food cooked with the sacred fire, so that he might be pure in the presence of the God. And the office of Bekkwa was hereditary; and the appellation at last became a family name. But he who performs the rite to-day is no longer called Bekkwa. Now while performing his function, if the Bekkwa met anyone upon the street, he ordered him to stand aside with the words: 'Dog, give way!' And the common people believed, and still believe, that anybody thus spoken to by the officiating kannushi would be changed into a dog. So on that day of the Minige nobody used to go out into the streets after a certain hour, and even now very few of the people of the little city leave their homes during the festival.[2] After having followed the deity through all the city, the Bekkwa used to perform, between two and three o'clock in the darkness of the morning, some secret rite by the seaside. (I am told this rite is still annually performed at the same hour.) But, except the Bekkwa himself, no man might be present; and it was believed, and is still believed by the common people, that were any man, by mischance, to see the rite he would instantly fall dead, or become transformed into an animal. So sacred was the secret of that rite, that the Bekkwa could not even utter it until after he was dead, to his successor in office. Therefore, when he died, the body was laid upon the matting of a certain inner chamber of the temple, and the son was left alone with the corpse, after all the doors had been carefully closed. Then, at a certain hour of the night, the soul returned into the body of the dead priest, and he lifted himself up, and whispered the awful secret into the ear of his son--and fell back dead again. But what, you may ask, has all this to do with the Horse of Bronze? Only this: Upon the festival of the Minige, the Great Deity of Kitzuki rides through the streets of his city upon the Horse of Bronze. Sec. 7 The Horse of Bronze, however, is far from being the only statue in Izumo which is believed to run about occasionally at night: at least a score of other artistic things are, or have been, credited with similar ghastly inclinations. The great carven dragon which writhes above the entrance of the Kitzuki haiden used, I am told, to crawl about the roofs at night--until a carpenter was summoned to cut its wooden throat with a chisel, after which it ceased its perambulations. You can see for yourself the mark of the chisel on its throat! At the splendid Shinto temple of Kasuga, in Matsue, there are two pretty life-size bronze deer--stag and doe--the heads of which seemed to me to have been separately cast, and subsequently riveted very deftly to the bodies. Nevertheless I have been assured by some good country-folk that each figure was originally a single casting, but that it was afterwards found necessary to cut off the heads of the deer to make them keep quiet at night. But the most unpleasant customer of all this uncanny fraternity to have encountered after dark was certainly the monster tortoise of Gesshoji temple in Matsue, where the tombs of the Matsudairas are. This stone colossus is almost seventeen feet in length and lifts its head six feet from the ground. On its now broken back stands a prodigious cubic monolith about nine feet high, bearing a half-obliterated inscription. Fancy--as Izumo folks did--this mortuary incubus staggering abroad at midnight, and its hideous attempts to swim in the neighbouring lotus- pond! Well, the legend runs that its neck had to be broken in consequence of this awful misbehaviour. But really the thing looks as if it could only have been broken by an earthquake. Sec. 8 KITZUKI, July 25th. At the Oho-yashiro it is the annual festival of the God of Scholarship, the God of Calligraphy--Tenjin. Here in Kitzuki, the festival of the Divine Scribe, the Tenjin-Matsuri, is still observed according to the beautiful old custom which is being forgotten elsewhere. Long ranges of temporary booths have been erected within the outer court of the temple; and in these are suspended hundreds of long white tablets, bearing specimens of calligraphy. Every schoolboy in Kitzuki has a sample of his best writing on exhibition. The texts are written only in Chinese characters--not in hirakana or katakana--and are mostly drawn from the works of Confucius or Mencius. To me this display of ideographs seems a marvellous thing of beauty--almost a miracle, indeed, since it is all the work of very, very young boys. Rightly enough, the word 'to write' (kaku) in Japanese signifies also to 'paint' in the best artistic sense. I once had an opportunity of studying the result of an attempt to teach English children the art of writing Japanese. These children were instructed by a Japanese writing-master; they sat upon the same bench with Japanese pupils of their own age, beginners likewise. But they could never learn like the Japanese children. The ancestral tendencies within them rendered vain the efforts of the instructor to teach them the secret of a shapely stroke with the brush. It is not the Japanese boy alone who writes; the fingers of the dead move his brush, guide his strokes. Beautiful, however, as this writing seems to me, it is far from winning the commendation of my Japanese companion, himself a much experienced teacher. 'The greater part of this work,' he declares, 'is very bad.' While I am still bewildered by this sweeping criticism, he points out to me one tablet inscribed with rather small characters, adding: 'Only that is tolerably good.' 'Why,' I venture to observe, 'that one would seem to have cost much less trouble; the characters are so small.' 'Oh, the size of the characters has nothing to do with the matter,' interrupts the master, 'it is a question of form.' 'Then I cannot understand. What you call very bad seems to me exquisitely beautiful.' 'Of course you cannot understand,' the critic replies; 'it would take you many years of study to understand. And even then-- 'And even then?' 'Well, even then you could only partly understand.' Thereafter I hold my peace on the topic of calligraphy. Sec. 9 Vast as the courts of the Oho-yashiro are, the crowd within them is now so dense that one must move very slowly, for the whole population of Kitzuki and its environs has been attracted here by the matsuri. All are making their way very gently toward a little shrine built upon an island in the middle of an artificial lake and approached by a narrow causeway. This little shrine, which I see now for the first time (Kitzuki temple being far too large a place to be all seen and known in a single visit), is the Shrine of Tenjin. As the sound of a waterfall is the sound of the clapping of hands before it, and myriads of nin, and bushels of handfuls of rice, are being dropped into the enormous wooden chest there placed to receive the offerings. Fortunately this crowd, like all Japanese crowds, is so sympathetically yielding that it is possible to traverse it slowly in any direction, and thus to see all there is to be seen. After contributing my mite to the coffer of Tenjin, I devote my attention to the wonderful display of toys in the outer courts. At almost every temple festival in Japan there is a great sale of toys, usually within the court itself--a miniature street of small booths being temporarily erected for this charming commence. Every matsuri is a children's holiday. No mother would think of attending a temple-festival without buying her child a toy: even the poorest mother can afford it; for the price of the toys sold in a temple court varies from one-fifth of one sen [3] or Japanese cent, to three or four sen; toys worth so much as five sen being rarely displayed at these little shops. But cheap as they are, these frail playthings are full of beauty and suggestiveness, and, to one who knows and loves Japan, infinitely more interesting than the costliest inventions of a Parisian toy-manufacturer. Many of them, however, would be utterly incomprehensible to an English child. Suppose we peep at a few of them. Here is a little wooden mallet, with a loose tiny ball fitted into a socket at the end of the handle. This is for the baby to suck. On either end of the head of the mallet is painted the mystic tomoye--that Chinese symbol, resembling two huge commas so united as to make a perfect circle, which you may have seen on the title-page of Mr. Lowell's beautiful Soul of the Far East. To you, however, this little wooden mallet would seem in all probability just a little wooden mallet and nothing more. But to the Japanese child it is full of suggestions. It is the mallet of the Great Deity of Kitzuki, Ohokuni-nushi-no-Kami--vulgarly called Daikoku--the God of Wealth, who, by one stroke of his hammer, gives fortune to his worshippers. Perhaps this tiny drum, of a form never seen in the Occident (tsudzumi), or this larger drum with a mitsudomoye, or triple-comma symbol, painted on each end, might seem to you without religious signification; but both are models of drums used in the Shinto and the Buddhist temples. This queer tiny table is a miniature sambo: it is upon such a table that offerings are presented to the gods. This curious cap is a model of the cap of a Shinto priest. Here is a toy miya, or Shinto shrine, four inches high. This bunch of tiny tin bells attached to a wooden handle might seem to you something corresponding to our Occidental tin rattles; but it is a model of the sacred suzu used by the virgin priestess in her dance before the gods. This face of a smiling chubby girl, with two spots upon her forehead--a mask of baked clay--is the traditional image of Ame-no-uzume-no-mikoto, commonly called Otafuku, whose merry laughter lured the Goddess of the Sun out of the cavern of darkness. And here is a little Shinto priest in full hieratic garb: when this little string between his feet is pulled, he claps his hands as if in prayer. Hosts of other toys are here--mysterious to the uninitiated European, but to the Japanese child full of delightful religious meaning. In these faiths of the Far East there is little of sternness or grimness--the Kami are but the spirits of the fathers of the people; the Buddhas and the Bosatsu were men. Happily the missionaries have not succeeded as yet in teaching the Japanese to make religion a dismal thing. These gods smile for ever: if you find one who frowns, like Fudo, the frown seems but half in earnest; it is only Emma, the Lord of Death, who somewhat appals. Why religion should be considered too awful a subject for children to amuse themselves decently with never occurs to the common Japanese mind. So here we have images of the gods and saints for toys--Tenjin, the Deity of Beautiful Writing--and Uzume, the laughter-loving--and Fukusuke, like a happy schoolboy--and the Seven Divinities of Good Luck, in a group--and Fukurojin, the God of Longevity, with head so elongated that only by the aid of a ladder can his barber shave the top of it--and Hotei, with a belly round and huge as a balloon--and Ebisu, the Deity of Markets and of fishermen, with a tai-fish under his arm--and Daruma, ancient disciple of Buddha, whose legs were worn off by uninterrupted meditation. Here likewise are many toys which a foreigner could scarcely guess the meaning of, although they have no religious signification. Such is this little badger, represented as drumming upon its own belly with both forepaws. The badger is believed to be able to use its belly like a drum, and is credited by popular superstition with various supernatural powers. This toy illustrates a pretty fairy-tale about some hunter who spared a badger's life and was rewarded by the creature with a wonderful dinner and a musical performance. Here is a hare sitting on the end of the handle of a wooden pestle which is set horizontally upon a pivot. By pulling a little string, the pestle is made to rise and fall as if moved by the hare. If you have been even a week in Japan you will recognise the pestle as the pestle of a kometsuki, or rice-cleaner, who works it by treading on the handle. But what is the hare? This hare is the Hare-in-the-Moon, called Usagi-no-kometsuki: if you look up at the moon on a clear night you can see him cleaning his rice. Now let us see what we can discover in the way of cheap ingenuities. Tombo, 'the Dragon-Fly.' Merely two bits of wood joined together in the form of a T. The lower part is a little round stick, about as thick as a match, but twice as long; the upper piece is flat, and streaked with paint. Unless you are accustomed to look for secrets, you would scarcely be able to notice that the flat piece is trimmed along two edges at a particular angle. Twirl the lower piece rapidly between the palms of both hands, and suddenly let it go. At once the strange toy rises revolving in the air, and then sails away slowly to quite a distance, performing extraordinary gyrations, and imitating exactly--to the eye at least--the hovering motion of a dragon-fly. Those little streaks of paint you noticed upon the top-piece now reveal their purpose; as the tombo darts hither and thither, even the tints appear to be those of a real dragon-fly; and even the sound of the flitting toy imitates the dragon-fly's hum. The principle of this pretty invention is much like that of the boomerang; and an expert can make his tombo, after flying across a large room, return into his hand. All the tombo sold, however, are not as good as this one; we have been lucky. Price, one-tenth of one cent! Here is a toy which looks like a bow of bamboo strung with wire. The wire, however, is twisted into a corkscrew spiral. On this spiral a pair of tiny birds are suspended by a metal loop. When the bow is held perpendicularly with the birds at the upper end of the string, they descend whirling by their own weight, as if circling round one another; and the twittering of two birds is imitated by the sharp grating of the metal loop upon the spiral wire. One bird flies head upward, and the other tail upward. As soon as they have reached the bottom, reverse the bow, and they will recommence their wheeling flight. Price, two cents--because the wire is dear. O-Saru, the 'Honourable Monkey.' [4] A little cotton monkey, with a blue head and scarlet body, hugging a bamboo rod. Under him is a bamboo spring; and when you press it, he runs up to the top of the rod. Price, one-eighth of one cent. O-Saru. Another Honourable Monkey. This one is somewhat more complex in his movements, and costs a cent. He runs up a string, hand over hand, when you pull his tail. Tori-Kago. A tiny gilded cage, with a bird in it, and plum flowers. Press the edges of the bottom of the cage, and a minuscule wind-instrument imitates the chirping of the bird. Price, one cent. Karuwazashi, the Acrobat. A very loose-jointed wooden boy clinging with both hands to a string stretched between two bamboo sticks, which are curiously rigged together in the shape of an open pair of scissors. Press the ends of the sticks at the bottom; and the acrobat tosses his legs over the string, seats himself upon it, and finally turns a somersault. Price, one-sixth of one cent. Kobiki, the Sawyer. A figure of a Japanese workman, wearing only a fundoshi about his loins, and standing on a plank, with a long saw in his hands. If you pull a string below his feet, he will go to work in good earnest, sawing the plank. Notice that he pulls the saw towards him, like a true Japanese, instead of pushing it from him, as our own carpenters do. Price, one-tenth of one cent. Chie-no-ita, the 'Intelligent Boards,' or better, perhaps, 'The Planks of Intelligence.' A sort of chain composed of about a dozen flat square pieces of white wood, linked together by ribbons. Hold the thing perpendicularly by one end-piece; then turn the piece at right angles to the chain; and immediately all the other pieces tumble over each other in the most marvellous way without unlinking. Even an adult can amuse himself for half an hour with this: it is a perfect trompe-l'oeil in mechanical adjustment. Price, one cent. Kitsune-Tanuki. A funny flat paper mask with closed eyes. If you pull a pasteboard slip behind it, it will open its eyes and put out a tongue of surprising length. Price, one-sixth of one cent. Chin. A little white dog, with a collar round its neck. It is in the attitude of barking. From a Buddhist point of view, I should think this toy somewhat immoral. For when you slap the dog's head, it utters a sharp yelp, as of pain. Price, one sen and five rin. Rather dear. Fuki-agari-koboshi, the Wrestler Invincible. This is still dearer; for it is made of porcelain, and very nicely coloured The wrestler squats upon his hams. Push him down in any direction, he always returns of his own accord to an erect position. Price, two sen. Oroga-Heika-Kodomo, the Child Reverencing His Majesty the Emperor. A Japanese schoolboy with an accordion in his hands, singing and playing the national anthem, or Kimiga. There is a little wind-bellows at the bottom of the toy; and when you operate it, the boy's arms move as if playing the instrument, and a shrill small voice is heard. Price, one cent and a half. Jishaku. This, like the preceding, is quite a modern toy. A small wooden box containing a magnet and a tiny top made of a red wooden button with a steel nail driven through it. Set the top spinning with a twirl of the fingers; then hold the magnet over the nail, and the top will leap up to the magnet and there continue to spin, suspended in air. Price, one cent. It would require at least a week to examine them all. Here is a model spinning-wheel, absolutely perfect, for one-fifth of one cent. Here are little clay tortoises which swim about when you put them into water--one rin for two. Here is a box of toy-soldiers--samurai in full armour--nine rin only. Here is a Kaze-Kuruma, or wind-wheel--a wooden whistle with a paper wheel mounted before the orifice by which the breath is expelled, so that the wheel turns furiously when the whistle is blown--three rin. Here is an Ogi, a sort of tiny quadruple fan sliding in a sheath. When expanded it takes the shape of a beautiful flower--one rin. The most charming of all these things to me, however, is a tiny doll--O-Hina-San (Honourable Miss Hina)--or beppin ('beautiful woman'). The body is a phantom, only--a flat stick covered with a paper kimono--but the head is really a work of art. A pretty oval face with softly shadowed oblique eyes--looking shyly downward--and a wonderful maiden coiffure, in which the hair is arranged in bands and volutes and ellipses and convolutions and foliole curlings most beautiful and extraordinary. In some respects this toy is a costume model, for it imitates exactly the real coiffure of Japanese maidens and brides. But the expression of the face of the beppin is, I think, the great attraction of the toy; there is a shy, plaintive sweetness about it impossible to describe, but deliciously suggestive of a real Japanese type of girl-beauty. Yet the whole thing is made out of a little crumpled paper, coloured with a few dashes of the brush by an expert hand. There are no two O-Hina-San exactly alike out of millions; and when you have become familiar by long residence with Japanese types, any such doll will recall to you some pretty face that you have seen. These are for little girls. Price, five rin. Sec. 10 Here let me tell you something you certainly never heard of before in relation to Japanese dolls--not the tiny O-Hina-San I was just speaking about, but the beautiful life-sized dolls representing children of two or three years old; real toy-babes which, although far more cheaply and simply constructed than our finer kinds of Western dolls, become, under the handling of a Japanese girl, infinitely more interesting. Such dolls are well dressed, and look so life-like--little slanting eyes, shaven pates, smiles, and all!--that as seen from a short distance the best eyes might be deceived by them. Therefore in those stock photographs of Japanese life, of which so many thousands are sold in the open ports, the conventional baby on the mother's back is most successfully represented by a doll. Even the camera does not betray the substitution. And if you see such a doll, though held quite close to you, being made by a Japanese mother to reach out his hands, to move its little bare feet, and to turn its head, you would be almost afraid to venture a heavy wager that it was only a doll. Even after having closely examined the thing, you would still, I fancy, feel a little nervous at being left alone with it, so perfect the delusion of that expert handling. Now there is a belief that some dolls do actually become alive. Formerly the belief was less rare than it is now. Certain dolls were spoken of with a reverence worthy of the Kami, and their owners were envied folk. Such a doll was treated like a real son or daughter: it was regularly served with food; it had a bed, and plenty of nice clothes, and a name. If in the semblance of a girl, it was O-Toku-San; if in that of a boy, Tokutaro-San. It was thought that the doll would become angry and cry if neglected, and that any ill-treatment of it would bring ill-fortune to the house. And, moreover, it was believed to possess supernatural powers of a very high order. In the family of one Sengoku, a samurai of Matsue, there was a Tokutaro-San which had a local reputation scarcely inferior to that of Kishibojin--she to whom Japanese wives pray for offspring. And childless couples used to borrow that doll, and keep it for a time--ministering unto it--and furnish it with new clothes before gratefully returning it to its owners. And all who did so, I am assured, became parents, according to their heart's desire. 'Sengoku's doll had a soul.' There is even a legend that once, when the house caught fire, the Tokutar O-San ran out safely into the garden of its own accord! The idea about such a doll seems to be this: The new doll is only a doll. But a doll which is preserved for a great many years in one family, [5] and is loved and played with by generations of children, gradually acquires a soul. I asked a charming Japanese girl: 'How can a doll live?' 'Why,' she answered, 'if you love it enough, it will live!' What is this but Renan's thought of a deity in process of evolution, uttered by the heart of a child? Sec. 11 But even the most beloved dolls are worn out at last, or get broken in the course of centuries. And when a doll must be considered quite dead, its remains are still entitled to respect. Never is the corpse of a doll irreverently thrown away. Neither is it burned or cast into pure running water, as all sacred objects of the miya must be when they have ceased to be serviceable. And it is not buried. You could not possibly imagine what is done with it. It is dedicated to the God Kojin, [6]--a somewhat mysterious divinity, half-Buddhist, half-Shinto. The ancient Buddhist images of Kojin represented a deity with many arms; the Shinto Kojin of Izumo has, I believe, no artistic representation whatever. But in almost every Shinto, and also in many Buddhist, temple grounds, is planted the tree called enoki [7] which is sacred to him, and in which he is supposed by the peasantry to dwell; for they pray before the enoki always to Kojin. And there is usually a small shrine placed before the tree, and a little torii also. Now you may often see laid upon such a shrine of Kojin, or at the foot of his sacred tree, or in a hollow thereof--if there be any hollow--pathetic remains of dolls. But a doll is seldom given to Kojin during the lifetime of its possessor. When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman--the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and of her mother's mother. Sec. 12 And now we are to see the Honen-odori--which begins at eight o'clock. There is no moon; and the night is pitch-black overhead: but there is plenty of light in the broad court of the Guji's residence, for a hundred lanterns have been kindled and hung out. I and my friend have been provided with comfortable places in the great pavilion which opens upon the court, and the pontiff has had prepared for us a delicious little supper. Already thousands have assembled before the pavilion--young men of Kitzuki and young peasants from the environs, and women and children in multitude, and hundreds of young girls. The court is so thronged that it is difficult to assume the possibility of any dance. Illuminated by the lantern-light, the scene is more than picturesque: it is a carnivalesque display of gala-costume. Of course the peasants come in their ancient attire: some in rain-coats (mino), or overcoats of yellow straw; others with blue towels tied round their heads; many with enormous mushroom hats--all with their blue robes well tucked up. But the young townsmen come in all guises and disguises. Many have dressed themselves in female attire; some are all in white duck, like police; some have mantles on; others wear shawls exactly as a Mexican wears his zarape; numbers of young artisans appear almost as lightly clad as in working-hours, barelegged to the hips, and barearmed to the shoulders. Among the girls some wonderful dressing is to be seen--ruby-coloured robes, and rich greys and browns and purples, confined with exquisite obi, or girdles of figured satin; but the best taste is shown in the simple and very graceful black and white costumes worn by some maidens of the better classes--dresses especially made for dancing, and not to be worn at any other time. A few shy damsels have completely masked themselves by tying down over their cheeks the flexible brims of very broad straw hats. I cannot attempt to talk about the delicious costumes of the children: as well try to describe without paint the variegated loveliness of moths and butterflies. In the centre of this multitude I see a huge rice-mortar turned upside down; and presently a sandalled peasant leaps upon it lightly, and stands there--with an open paper umbrella above his head. Nevertheless it is not raining. That is the Ondo-tori, the leader of the dance, who is celebrated through all Izumo as a singer. According to ancient custom, the leader of the Honen-odori [8] always holds an open umbrella above his head while he sings. Suddenly, at a signal from the Guji, who has just taken his place in the pavilion, the voice of the Ondo-tori, intoning the song of thanksgiving, rings out over all the murmuring of the multitude like a silver cornet. A wondrous voice, and a wondrous song, full of trills and quaverings indescribable, but full also of sweetness and true musical swing. And as he sings, he turns slowly round upon his high pedestal, with the umbrella always above his head; never halting in his rotation from right to left, but pausing for a regular interval in his singing, at the close of each two verses, when the people respond with a joyous outcry: 'Ya-ha-to-nai!-ya-ha-to-nai!' Simultaneously, an astonishingly rapid movement of segregation takes place in the crowd; two enormous rings of dancers form, one within the other, the rest of the people pressing back to make room for the odori. And then this great double-round, formed by fully five hundred dancers, begins also to revolve from right to left--lightly, fantastically--all the tossing of arms and white twinkling of feet keeping faultless time to the measured syllabification of the chant. An immense wheel the dance is, with the Ondo-tori for its axis--always turning slowly upon his rice-mortar, under his open umbrella, as he sings the song of harvest thanksgiving: [9] Ichi-wa--Izumo-no-Taisha-Sama-ye; Ni-ni-wa--Niigata-no-Irokami-Sama-ye; San-wa--Sanuki-no-Kompira-Sama-ye; Shi-ni-wa--Shinano-no-Zenkoji-Sama-ye; Itsutsu--Ichibata-O-Yakushi-Sama-ye; Roku-niwa--Rokkakudo-no-O-Jizo-Sama-ye; Nanatsu--Nana-ura-no-O-Ebisu-Sama-ye; Yattsu--Yawata-no-Hachiman-Sama-ye; Kokonotsu--Koya-no-O-teradera-ye; To-niwa--Tokoro-no-Ujigami-Sama-ye. And the voices of all the dancers in unison roll out the chorus: Ya-ha-to-nai! Ya-ha-to-nail Utterly different this whirling joyous Honen-odori from the Bon-odori which I witnessed last year at Shimo-Ichi, and which seemed to me a very dance of ghosts. But it is also much more difficult to describe. Each dancer makes a half-wheel alternately to left and right, with a peculiar bending of the knees and tossing up of the hands at the same time--as in the act of lifting a weight above the head; but there are other curious movements--jerky with the men, undulatory with the women--as impossible to describe as water in motion. These are decidedly complex, yet so regular that five hundred pairs of feet and hands mark the measure of the song as truly as if they were under the control of a single nervous system. It is strangely difficult to memorise the melody of a Japanese popular song, or the movements of a Japanese dance; for the song and the dance have been evolved through an aesthetic sense of rhythm in sound and in motion as different from the corresponding Occidental sense as English is different from Chinese. We have no ancestral sympathies with these exotic rhythms, no inherited aptitudes for their instant comprehension, no racial impulses whatever in harmony with them. But when they have become familiar through study, after a long residence in the Orient, how nervously fascinant the oscillation of the dance, and the singular swing of the song! This dance, I know, began at eight o'clock; and the Ondo-tori, after having sung without a falter in his voice for an extraordinary time, has been relieved by a second. But the great round never breaks, never slackens its whirl; it only enlarges as the night wears on. And the second Ondo-tori is relieved by a third; yet I would like to watch that dance for ever. 'What time do you think it is?' my friend asks, looking at his watch. 'Nearly eleven o'clock,' I make answer. 'Eleven o'clock! It is exactly eight minutes to three o'clock. And our host will have little time for sleep before the rising of the sun.' Chapter Twelve At Hinomisaki KITZUKI, August 10, 1891. MY Japanese friends urge me to visit Hinomisaki, where no European has ever been, and where there is a far-famed double temple dedicated to Amaterasu-oho-mi-Kami, the Lady of Light, and to her divine brother Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto. Hinomisaki is a little village on the Izumo coast about five miles from Kitzuki. It maybe reached by a mountain path, but the way is extremely steep, rough, and fatiguing. By boat, when the weather is fair, the trip is very agreeable. So, with a friend, I start for Hinomisaki in a very cozy ryosen, skilfully sculled by two young fishermen. Leaving the pretty bay of Inasa, we follow the coast to the right--a very lofty and grim coast without a beach. Below us the clear water gradually darkens to inky blackness, as the depth increases; but at intervals pale jagged rocks rise up from this nether darkness to catch the light fifty feet under the surface. We keep tolerably close to the cliffs, which vary in height from three hundred to six hundred feet--their bases rising from the water all dull iron-grey, their sides and summits green with young pines and dark grasses that toughen in sea-wind. All the coast is abrupt, ravined, irregular--curiously breached and fissured. Vast masses of it have toppled into the sea; and the black ruins project from the deep in a hundred shapes of menace. Sometimes our boat glides between a double line of these; or takes a zigzag course through labyrinths of reef-channels. So swiftly and deftly is the little craft impelled to right and left, that one could almost believe it sees its own way and moves by its own intelligence. And again we pass by extraordinary islets of prismatic rock whose sides, just below the water-line, are heavily mossed with seaweed. The polygonal masses composing these shapes are called by the fishermen 'tortoise-shell stones.' There is a legend that once Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, to try his strength, came here, and, lifting up one of these masses of basalt, flung it across the sea to the mountain of Sanbeyama. At the foot of Sanbe the mighty rock thus thrown by the Great Deity of Kitzuki may still be seen, it is alleged, even unto this day. More and more bare and rugged and ghastly the coast becomes as we journey on, and the sunken ledges more numerous, and the protruding rocks more dangerous, splinters of strata piercing the sea-surface from a depth of thirty fathoms. Then suddenly our boat makes a dash for the black cliff, and shoots into a tremendous cleft of it--an earthquake fissure with sides lofty and perpendicular as the walls of a canyon-and lo! there is daylight ahead. This is a miniature strait, a short cut to the bay. We glide through it in ten minutes, reach open water again, and Hinomisaki is before us--a semicircle of houses clustering about a bay curve, with an opening in their centre, prefaced by a torii. Of all bays I have ever seen, this is the most extraordinary. Imagine an enormous sea-cliff torn out and broken down level with the sea, so as to leave a great scoop-shaped hollow in the land, with one original fragment of the ancient cliff still standing in the middle of the gap--a monstrous square tower of rock, bearing trees upon its summit. And a thousand yards out from the shore rises another colossal rock, fully one hundred feet high. This is known by the name of Fumishima or Okyogashima; and the temple of the Sun-goddess, which we are now about to see, formerly stood upon that islet. The same appalling forces which formed the bay of Hinomisaki doubtless also detached the gigantic mass of Fumishima from this iron coast. We land at the right end of the bay. Here also there is no beach; the water is black-deep close to the shore, which slopes up rapidly. As we mount the slope, an extraordinary spectacle is before us. Upon thousands and thousands of bamboo frames--shaped somewhat like our clothes-horses--are dangling countless pale yellowish things, the nature of which I cannot discern at first glance. But a closer inspection reveals the mystery. Millions of cuttlefish drying in the sun! I could never have believed that so many cuttlefish existed in these waters. And there is scarcely any variation in the dimensions of them: out of ten thousand there is not the difference of half an inch in length. Sec. 2 The great torii which forms the sea-gate of Hinomisaki is of white granite, and severely beautiful. Through it we pass up the main street of the village--surprisingly wide for about a thousand yards, after which it narrows into a common highway which slopes up a wooded hill and disappears under the shadow of trees. On the right, as you enter the street, is a long vision of grey wooden houses with awnings and balconies--little shops, little two-story dwellings of fishermen--and ranging away in front of these other hosts of bamboo frames from which other millions of freshly caught cuttlefish are hanging. On the other side of the street rises a cyclopean retaining wall, massive as the wall of a daimyo's castle, and topped by a lofty wooden parapet pierced with gates; and above it tower the roofs of majestic buildings, whose architecture strongly resembles that of the structures of Kitzuki; and behind all appears a beautiful green background of hills. This is the Hinomisaki-jinja. But one must walk some considerable distance up the road to reach the main entrance of the court, which is at the farther end of the inclosure, and is approached by an imposing broad flight of granite steps. The great court is a surprise. It is almost as deep as the outer court of the Kitzuki-no-oho-yashiro, though not nearly so wide; and a paved cloister forms two sides of it. From the court gate a broad paved walk leads to the haiden and shamusho at the opposite end of the court--spacious and dignified structures above whose roofs appears the quaint and massive gable of the main temple, with its fantastic cross-beams. This temple, standing with its back to the sea, is the shrine of the Goddess of the Sun. On the right side of the main court, as you enter, another broad flight of steps leads up to a loftier court, where another fine group of Shinto buildings stands--a haiden and a miya; but these are much smaller, like miniatures of those below. Their woodwork also appears to be quite new. The upper miya is the shrine of the god Susano-o, [1]--brother of Amaterasu-oho-mi-Kami. Sec. 3 To me the great marvel of the Hinomisaki-jinja is that structures so vast, and so costly to maintain, can exist in a mere fishing hamlet, in an obscure nook of the most desolate coast of Japan. Assuredly the contributions of peasant pilgrims alone could not suffice to pay the salary of a single kannushi; for Hinomisaki, unlike Kitzuki, is not a place possible to visit in all weathers. My friend confirms me in this opinion; but I learn from him that the temples have three large sources of revenue. They are partly supported by the Government; they receive yearly large gifts of money from pious merchants; and the revenues from lands attached to them also represent a considerable sum. Certainly a great amount of money must have been very recently expended here; for the smaller of the two miya seems to have just been wholly rebuilt; the beautiful joinery is all white with freshness, and even the carpenters' odorous chips have not yet been all removed. At the shamusho we make the acquaintance of the Guji of Hinomisaki, a noble-looking man in the prime of life, with one of those fine aquiline faces rarely to be met with except among the high aristocracy of Japan. He wears a heavy black moustache, which gives him, in spite of his priestly robes, the look of a retired army officer. We are kindly permitted by him to visit the sacred shrines; and a kannushi is detailed to conduct us through the buildings. Something resembling the severe simplicity of the Kitzuki-no-oho-yashiro was what I expected to see. But this shrine of the Goddess of the Sun is a spectacle of such splendour that for the first moment I almost doubt whether I am really in a Shinto temple. In very truth there is nothing of pure Shinto here. These shrines belong to the famous period of Ryobu-Shinto, when the ancient faith, interpenetrated and allied with Buddhism, adopted the ceremonial magnificence and the marvellous decorative art of the alien creed. Since visiting the great Buddhist shrines of the capital, I have seen no temple interior to be compared with this. Daintily beautiful as a casket is the chamber of the shrine. All its elaborated woodwork is lacquered in scarlet and gold; the altar-piece is a delight of carving and colour; the ceiling swarms with dreams of clouds and dragons. And yet the exquisite taste of the decorators--buried, doubtless, five hundred years ago--has so justly proportioned the decoration to the needs of surface, so admirably blended the colours, that there is no gaudiness, no glare, only an opulent repose. This shrine is surrounded by a light outer gallery which is not visible from the lower court; and from this gallery one can study some remarkable friezes occupying the spaces above the doorways and below the eaves--friezes surrounding the walls of the miya. These, although exposed for many centuries to the terrific weather of the western coast, still remain masterpieces of quaint carving. There are apes and hares peeping through wonderfully chiselled leaves, and doves and demons, and dragons writhing in storms. And while looking up at these, my eye is attracted by a peculiar velvety appearance of the woodwork forming the immense projecting eaves of the roof. Under the tiling it is more than a foot thick. By standing on tiptoe I can touch it; and I discover that it is even more velvety to the touch than to the sight. Further examination reveals the fact that this colossal roofing is not solid timber, only the beams are solid. The enormous pieces they support are formed of countless broad slices thin as the thinnest shingles, superimposed and cemented together into one solid-seeming mass. I am told that this composite woodwork is more enduring than any hewn timber could be. The edges, where exposed to wind and sun, feel to the touch just like the edges of the leaves of some huge thumb-worn volume; and their stained velvety yellowish aspect so perfectly mocks the appearance of a book, that while trying to separate them a little with my fingers, I find myself involuntarily peering for a running-title and the number of a folio! We then visit the smaller temple. The interior of the sacred chamber is equally rich in lacquered decoration and gilding; and below the miya itself there are strange paintings of weird foxes--foxes wandering in the foreground of a mountain landscape. But here the colours have been damaged somewhat by time; the paintings have a faded look. Without the shrine are other wonderful carvings, doubtless executed by the same chisel which created the friezes of the larger temple. I learn that only the shrine-chambers of both temples are very old; all the rest has been more than once rebuilt. The entire structure of the smaller temple and its haiden, with the exception of the shrine-room, has just been rebuilt--in fact, the work is not yet quite done--so that the emblem of the deity is not at present in the sanctuary. The shrines proper are never repaired, but simply reinclosed in the new buildings when reconstruction becomes a necessity. To repair them or restore them to-day would be impossible: the art that created them is dead. But so excellent their material and its lacquer envelope that they have suffered little in the lapse of many centuries from the attacks of time. One more surprise awaits me--the homestead of the high pontiff, who most kindly invites us to dine with him; which hospitality is all the more acceptable from the fact that there is no hotel in Hinomisaki, but only a kichinyado [2] for pilgrims. The ancestral residence of the high pontiffs of Hinomisaki occupies, with the beautiful gardens about it, a space fully equal to that of the great temple courts themselves. Like most of the old-fashioned homes of the nobility and of the samurai, it is but one story high--an immense elevated cottage, one might call it. But the apartments are lofty, spacious, and very handsome--and there is a room of one hundred mats. [3] A very nice little repast, with abundance of good wine, is served up to us, and I shall always remember one curious dish, which I at first mistake for spinach. It is seaweed, deliciously prepared--not the common edible seaweed, but a rare sort, fine like moss. After bidding farewell to our generous host, we take an uphill stroll to the farther end of the village. We leave the cuttlefish behind; but before us the greater part of the road is covered with matting, upon which indigo is drying in the sun. The village terminates abruptly at the top of the hill, where there is another grand granite torii--a structure so ponderous that it is almost as difficult to imagine how it was ever brought up the hill as to understand the methods of the builders of Stonehenge. From this torii the road descends to the pretty little seaport of U-Ryo, on the other side of the cape; for Hinomisaki is situated on one side of a great promontory, as its name implies--a mountain-range projecting into the Japanese Sea. Sec. 4 The family of the Guji of Hinomisaki is one of the oldest of the Kwazoku or noble families of Izumo; and the daughters are still addressed by the antique title of Princess--O-Hime-San. The ancient official designation of the pontiff himself was Kengyo, as that of the Kitzuki pontiff was Kokuzo; and the families of the Hinomisaki and of the Kitzuki Guji are closely related. There is one touching and terrible tradition in the long history of the Kengyos of Hinomisaki, which throws a strange light upon the social condition of this province in feudal days. Seven generations ago, a Matsudaira, Daimyo of Izumo, made with great pomp his first official visit to the temples of Hinomisaki, and was nobly entertained by the Kengyo--doubtless in the same chamber of a hundred mats which we to-day were privileged to see. According to custom, the young wife of the host waited upon the regal visitor, and served him with dainties and with wine. She was singularly beautiful; and her beauty, unfortunately, bewitched the Daimyo. With kingly insolence he demanded that she should leave her husband and become his concubine. Although astounded and terrified, she answered bravely, like the true daughter of a samurai, that she was a loving wife and mother, and that, sooner than desert her husband and her child, she would put an end to her life with her own hand. The great Lord of Izumo sullenly departed without further speech, leaving the little household plunged in uttermost grief and anxiety; for it was too well known that the prince would suffer no obstacle to remain in the way of his lust or his hate. The anxiety, indeed, proved to be well founded. Scarcely had the Daimyo returned to his domains when he began to devise means for the ruin of the Kengyo. Soon afterward, the latter was suddenly and forcibly separated from his family, hastily tried for some imaginary offence, and banished to the islands of Oki. Some say the ship on which he sailed went down at sea with all on board. Others say that he was conveyed to Oki, but only to die there of misery and cold. At all events, the old Izumo records state that, in the year corresponding to A.D. 1661 'the Kengyo Takatoshi died in the land of Oki.' On receiving news of the Kengyo's death, Matsudaira scarcely concealed his exultation. The object of his passion was the daughter of his own Karo, or minister, one of the noblest samurai of Matsue, by name Kamiya. Kamiya was at once summoned before the Daimyo, who said to him: 'Thy daughter's husband being dead, there exists no longer any reason that she should not enter into my household. Do thou bring her hither.' The Karo touched the floor with his forehead, and departed on his errand. Upon the following day he re-entered the prince's apartment, and, performing the customary prostration, announced that his lord's commands had been obeyed--that the victim had arrived. Smiling for pleasure, the Matsudaira ordered that she should be brought at once into his presence. The Karo prostrated himself, retired and presently returning, placed before his master a kubi-oke [4] upon which lay the freshly-severed head of a beautiful woman--the head of the young wife of the dead Kengyo--with the simple utterance: 'This is my daughter.' Dead by her own brave will--but never dishonoured. Seven generations have been buried since the Matsudaira strove to appease his remorse by the building of temples and the erection of monuments to the memory of his victim. His own race died with him: those who now bear the illustrious name of that long line of daimyos are not of the same blood; and the grim ruin of his castle, devoured by vegetation, is tenanted only by lizards and bats. But the Kamiya family endures; no longer wealthy, as in feudal times, but still highly honoured in their native city. And each high pontiff of Hinomisakei chooses always his bride from among the daughters of that valiant race. NOTE.--The Kengyo of the above tradition was enshrined by Matsudaira in the temple of Shiyekei-jinja, at Oyama, near Matsue. This miya was built for an atonement; and the people still pray to the spirit of the Kengyo. Near this temple formerly stood a very popular theatre, also erected by the Daimyo in his earnest desire to appease the soul of his victim; for he had heard that the Kengyo was very fond of theatrical performances. The temple is still in excellent preservation; but the theatre has long since disappeared; and its site is occupied by a farmer's vegetable garden. Chapter Thirteen Shinju Sec. 1 SOMETIMES they simply put their arms round each other, and lie down together on the iron rails, just in front of an express train. (They cannot do it in Izumo, however, because there are no railroads there yet.) Sometimes they make a little banquet for themselves, write very strange letters to parents and friends, mix something bitter with their rice-wine, and go to sleep for ever. Sometimes they select a more ancient and more honoured method: the lover first slays his beloved with a single sword stroke, and then pierces his own throat. Sometimes with the girl's long crape-silk under-girdle (koshi-obi) they bind themselves fast together, face to face, and so embracing leap into some deep lake or stream. Many are the modes by which they make their way to the Meido, when tortured by that world-old sorrow about which Schopenhauer wrote so marvellous a theory. Their own theory is much simpler. None love life more than the Japanese; none fear death less. Of a future world they have no dread; they regret to leave this one only because it seems to them a world of beauty and of happiness; but the mystery of the future, so long oppressive to Western minds, causes them little concern. As for the young lovers of whom I speak, they have a strange faith which effaces mysteries for them. They turn to the darkness with infinite trust. If they are too unhappy to endure existence, the fault is not another's, nor yet the world's; it is their own; it is innen, the result of errors in a previous life. If they can never hope to be united in this world, it is only because in some former birth they broke their promise to wed, or were otherwise cruel to each other. All this is not heterodox. But they believe likewise that by dying together they will find themselves at once united in another world, though Buddhism proclaims that self-destruction is a deadly sin. Now this idea of winning union through death is incalculably older than the faith of Shaka; but it has somehow borrowed in modern time from Buddhism a particular ecstatic colouring, a mystical glow. Hasu no hana no ue ni oite matan. On the lotus-blossoms of paradise they shall rest together. Buddhism teaches of transmigrations countless, prolonged through millions of millions of years, before the soul can acquire the Infinite Vision, the Infinite Memory, and melt into the bliss of Nehan, as a white cloud melts into the summer 's blue. But these suffering ones think never of Nehan; love's union, their supremest wish, may be reached, they fancy, through the pang of a single death. The fancies of all, indeed--as their poor letters show--are not the same. Some think themselves about to enter Amida's paradise of light; some see in their visional hope the saki-no-yo only, the future rebirth, when beloved shall meet beloved again, in the all-joyous freshness of another youth; while the idea of many, indeed of the majority, is vaguer far--only a shadowy drifting together through vapoury silences, as in the faint bliss of dreams. They always pray to be buried together. Often this prayer is refused by the parents or the guardians, and the people deem this refusal a cruel thing, for 'tis believed that those who die for love of each other will find no rest, if denied the same tomb. But when the prayer is granted the ceremony of burial is beautiful and touching. From the two homes the two funeral processions issue to meet in the temple court, by light of lanterns. There, after the recitation of the kyo and the accustomed impressive ceremonies, the chief priest utters an address to the souls of the dead. Compassionately he speaks of the error and the sin; of the youth of the victims, brief and comely as the flowers that blossom and fall in the first burst of spring. He speaks of the Illusion--Mayoi--which so wrought upon them; he recites the warning of the Teacher. But sometimes he will even predict the future reunion of the lovers in some happier and higher life, re-echoing the popular heart-thought with a simple eloquence that makes his hearers weep. Then the two processions form into one, which takes its way to the cemetery where the grave has already been prepared. The two coffins are lowered together, so that their sides touch as they rest at the bottom of the excavation. Then the yama-no-mono [1] folk remove the planks which separate the pair--making the two coffins into one; above the reunited dead the earth is heaped; and a haka, bearing in chiselled letters the story of their fate, and perhaps a little poem, is placed above the mingling of their dust. Sec. 2 These suicides of lovers are termed 'joshi' or 'shinju'--(both words being written with the same Chinese characters)--signifying 'heart-death,' 'passion-death,' or 'love-death.' They most commonly occur, in the case of women, among the joro [2] class; but occasionally also among young girls of a more respectable class. There is a fatalistic belief that if one shinju occurs among the inmates of a joroya, two more are sure to follow. Doubtless the belief itself is the cause that cases of shinju do commonly occur in series of three. The poor girls who voluntarily sell themselves to a life of shame for the sake of their families in time of uttermost distress do not, in Japan (except, perhaps, in those open ports where European vice and brutality have become demoralising influences), ever reach that depth of degradation to which their Western sisters descend. Many indeed retain, through all the period of their terrible servitude, a refinement of manner, a delicacy of sentiment, and a natural modesty that seem, under such conditions, as extraordinary as they are touching. Only yesterday a case of shinju startled this quiet city. The servant of a physician in the street called Nadamachi, entering the chamber of his master's son a little after sunrise, found the young man lying dead with a dead girl in his arms. The son had been disinherited. The girl was a joro. Last night they were buried, but not together; for the father was not less angered than grieved that such a thing should have been. Her name was Kane. She was remarkably pretty and very gentle; and from all accounts it would seem that her master had treated her with a kindness unusual in men of his infamous class. She had sold herself for the sake of her mother and a child-sister. The father was dead, and they had lost everything. She was then seventeen. She had been in the house scarcely a year when she met the youth. They fell seriously in love with each other at once. Nothing more terrible could have befallen them; for they could never hope to become man and wife. The young man, though still allowed the privileges of a son, had been disinherited in favour of an adopted brother of steadier habits. The unhappy pair spent all they had for the privilege of seeing each other: she sold even her dresses to pay for it. Then for the last time they met by stealth, late at night, in the physician's house, drank death, and laid down to sleep for ever. I saw the funeral procession of the girl winding its way by the light of paper lanterns--the wan dead glow that is like a shimmer of phosphorescence--to the Street of the Temples, followed by a long train of women, white-hooded, white-robed, white-girdled, passing all soundlessly--a troop of ghosts. So through blackness to the Meido the white Shapes flit--the eternal procession of Souls--in painted Buddhist dreams of the Underworld. Sec. 3 My friend who writes for the San-in Shimbun, which to-morrow will print the whole sad story, tells me that compassionate folk have already decked the new-made graves with flowers and with sprays of shikimi. [3] Then drawing from a long native envelope a long, light, thin roll of paper covered with beautiful Japanese writing, and unfolding it before me, he adds:--'She left this letter to the keeper of the house in which she lived: it has been given to us for publication. It is very prettily written. But I cannot translate it well; for it is written in woman's language. The language of letters written by women is not the same as that of letters written by men. Women use particular words and expressions. For instance, in men's language "I" is watakushi, or ware, or yo, or boku, according to rank or circumstance, but in the language of woman, it is warawa. And women's language is very soft and gentle; and I do not think it is possible to translate such softness and amiability of words into any other language. So I can only give you an imperfect idea of the letter.' And he interprets, slowly, thus: 'I leave this letter: 'As you know, from last spring I began to love Tashiro-San; and he also fell in love with me. And now, alas!--the influence of our relation in some previous birth having come upon us--and the promise we made each other in that former life to become wife and husband having been broken--even to-day I must travel to the Meido. 'You not only treated me very kindly, though you found me so stupid and without influence, [4] but you likewise aided in many ways for my worthless sake my mother and sister. And now, since I have not been able to repay you even the one myriadth part of that kindness and pity in which you enveloped me--pity great as the mountains and the sea [5]--it would not be without just reason that you should hate me as a great criminal. 'But though I doubt not this which I am about to do will seem a wicked folly, I am forced to it by conditions and by my own heart. Wherefore I still may pray you to pardon my past faults. And though I go to the Meido, never shall I forget your mercy to me--great as the mountains and the sea. From under the shadow of the grasses [6] I shall still try to recompense you--to send back my gratitude to you and to your house. Again, with all my heart I pray you: do not be angry with me. 'Many more things I would like to write. But now my heart is not a heart; and I must quickly go. And so I shall lay down my writing-brush. 'It is written so clumsily, this. 'Kane thrice prostrates herself before you. 'From KANE. 'To---SAMA.' 'Well, it is a characteristic shinju letter,' my friend comments, after a moment's silence, replacing the frail white paper in its envelope. 'So I thought it would interest you. And now, although it is growing dark, I am going to the cemetery to see what has been done at the grave. Would you like to come with me?' We take our way over the long white bridge, up the shadowy Street of the Temples, toward the ancient hakaba of Miokoji--and the darkness grows as we walk. A thin moon hangs just above the roofs of the great temples. Suddenly a far voice, sonorous and sweet--a man's voice-breaks into song under the starred night: a song full of strange charm and tones like warblings--those Japanese tones of popular emotion which seem to have been learned from the songs of birds. Some happy workman returning home. So clear the thin frosty air that each syllable quivers to us; but I cannot understand the words: Saite yuke toya, ano ya wo saite; Yuke ba chikayoru nushi no soba. 'What is that?' I ask my friend. He answers: 'A love-song. "Go forward, straight forward that way, to the house that thou seest before thee;--the nearer thou goest thereto, the nearer to her [7] shalt thou be."' Chapter Fourteen Yaegaki-jinja Sec. 1 UNTO Yaegaki-jinja, which is in the village of Sakusa in Iu, in the Land of Izumo, all youths and maidens go who are in love, and who can make the pilgrimage. For in the temple of Yaegaki at Sakusa, Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto and his wife Inada-hime and their son Sa-ku-sa-no-mikoto are enshrined. And these are the Deities of Wedlock and of Love--and they set the solitary in families--and by their doing are destinies coupled even from the hour of birth. Wherefore one should suppose that to make pilgrimage to their temple to pray about things long since irrevocably settled were simple waste of time. But in what land did ever religious practice and theology agree? Scholiasts and priests create or promulgate doctrine and dogma; but the good people always insist upon making the gods according to their own heart--and these are by far the better class of gods. Moreover, the history of Susano-o the Impetuous Male Deity, does not indicate that destiny had anything to do with his particular case: he fell in love with the Wondrous Inada Princess at first sight--as it is written in the Kojiki: 'Then Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto descended to a place called Tori-kami at the headwaters of the River Hi in the land of Idzumo. At this time a chopstick came floating down the stream. So Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto, thinking that there must be people at the headwaters of the river, went up it in quest of them. And he came upon an old man and an old woman who had a young girl between them, and were weeping. Then he deigned to ask: "Who are ye?" So the old man replied, saying: "I am an Earthly Deity, son of the Deity Oho-yama-tsu-mi-no-Kami. I am called by the name of Ashi-nadzu-chi; my wife is called by the name of Te-nadzu-chi; and my daughter is called by the name of Kushi-Inada-hime." Again he asked: "What is the cause of your crying?" The old man answered, saying: "I had originally eight young daughters. But the eight-forked serpent of Koshi has come every year, and devoured one; and it is now its time to come, wherefore we weep." Then he asked him: "What is its form like?" The old man answered, saying: "Its eyes are like akaka-gachi; it has one body with eight heads and eight tails. Moreover, upon its body grow moss and sugi and hinoki trees. Its length extends over eight valleys and eight hills; and if one look at its belly, it is all constantly bloody and inflamed." Then Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto said to the old man: "If this be thy daughter, wilt thou offer her to me?" He replied: "With reverence; but I know not thine august name." Then he replied, saying: "I am elder brother to Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami. So now I have descended from heaven." Then the Deities Ashi-nadzu-chi and Te-nadzu-chi said: "If that be so, with reverence will we offer her to thee." So Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto, at once taking and changing the young girl into a close-toothed comb, which he stuck into his august hair-bunch, said to the Deities Ashi-nadzu-chi and Te-nadzu-chi: "Do you distil some eightfold refined liquor. Also make a fence round about; in that fence make eight gates; at each gate tie a platform; on each platform put a liquor-vat; and into each vat pour the eightfold refined liquor, and wait." So as they waited after having prepared everything in accordance with his bidding, the eight-forked serpent came and put a head into each vat and drank the liquor. Thereupon it was intoxicated, and all the heads lay down and slept. Then Take-haya-susa-no-wo-nomikoto drew the ten-grasp sabre that was augustly girded upon him, and cut the serpent in pieces, so that the River Hi flowed on changed into a river of blood. 'Then Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto sought in the Land of Idzumo where he might build a palace. 'When this great Deity built the palace, clouds rose up thence. Then he made an august song: 'Ya-kumo tatsu: Idzumo ya-he-gaki; Tsuma-gomi ni Ya-he-gaki-tsukuru: Sono ya-he-gaki wo!' [1] Now the temple of Yaegaki takes its name from the words of the august song Ya-he-gaki, and therefore signifies The Temple of the Eightfold Fence. And ancient commentators upon the sacred books have said that the name of Idzumo (which is now Izumo), as signifying the Land of the Issuing of Clouds, was also taken from that song of the god. [2] Sec. 2 Sakusa, the hamlet where the Yaegaki-jinja stands, is scarcely more than one ri south from Matsue. But to go there one must follow tortuous paths too rough and steep for a kuruma; and of three ways, the longest and roughest happens to be the most interesting. It slopes up and down through bamboo groves and primitive woods, and again serpentines through fields of rice and barley, and plantations of indigo and of ginseng, where the scenery is always beautiful or odd. And there are many famed Shinto temples to be visited on the road, such as Take-uchi-jinja, dedicated to the venerable minister of the Empress Jingo, Take-uchi, to whom men now pray for health and for length of years; and Okusa-no-miya, or Rokusho-jinja, of the five greatest shrines in Izumo; and Manaijinja, sacred to Izanagi, the Mother of Gods, where strange pictures may be obtained of the Parents of the World; and Obano-miya, where Izanami is enshrined, also called Kamoshijinja, which means, 'The Soul of the God.' At the Temple of the Soul of the God, where the sacred fire-drill used to be delivered each year with solemn rites to the great Kokuzo of Kitzuki, there are curious things to be seen--a colossal grain of rice, more than an inch long, preserved from that period of the Kamiyo when the rice grew tall as the tallest tree and bore grains worthy of the gods; and a cauldron of iron in which the peasants say that the first Kokuzo came down from heaven; and a cyclopean toro formed of rocks so huge that one cannot imagine how they were ever balanced upon each other; and the Musical Stones of Oba, which chime like bells when smitten. There is a tradition that these cannot be carried away beyond a certain distance; for 'tis recorded that when a daimyo named Matsudaira ordered one of them to be conveyed to his castle at Matsue, the stone made itself so heavy that a thousand men could not move it farther than the Ohashi bridge. So it was abandoned before the bridge; and it lies there imbedded in the soil even unto this day. All about Oba you may see many sekirei or wagtails-birds sacred to Izanami and Izanagi--for a legend says that from the sekirei the gods first learned the art of love. And none, not even the most avaricious farmer, ever hurts or terrifies these birds. So that they do not fear the people of Oba, nor the scarecrows in the fields. The God of Scarecrows is Sukuna-biko-na-no-Kami. Sec. 3 The path to Sakusa, for the last mile of the journey, at least, is extremely narrow, and has been paved by piety with large flat rocks laid upon the soil at intervals of about a foot, like an interminable line of stepping-stones. You cannot walk between them nor beside them, and you soon tire of walking upon them; but they have the merit of indicating the way, a matter of no small importance where fifty rice-field paths branch off from your own at all bewildering angles. After having been safely guided by these stepping-stones through all kinds of labyrinths in rice valleys and bamboo groves, one feels grateful to the peasantry for that clue-line of rocks. There are some quaint little shrines in the groves along this path--shrines with curious carvings of dragons and of lion-heads and flowing water--all wrought ages ago in good keyaki-wood, [3] which has become the colour of stone. But the eyes of the dragons and the lions have been stolen because they were made of fine crystal quartz, and there was none to guard them, and because neither the laws nor the gods are quite so much feared now as they were before the period of Meiji. Sakusa is a very small cluster of farmers' cottages before a temple at the verge of a wood--the temple of Yaegaki. The stepping-stones of the path vanish into the pavement of the court, just before its lofty unpainted wooden torii between the torii and the inner court, entered by a Chinese gate, some grand old trees are growing, and there are queer monuments to see. On either side of the great gateway is a shrine compartment, inclosed by heavy wooden gratings on two sides; and in these compartments are two grim figures in complete armour, with bows in their hands and quivers of arrows upon their backs--the Zuijin, or ghostly retainers of the gods, and guardians of the gate. Before nearly all the Shinto temples of Izumo, except Kitzuki, these Zuijin keep grim watch. They are probably of Buddhist origin; but they have acquired a Shinto history and Shinto names. [4] Originally, I am told, there was but one Zuijin-Kami, whose name was Toyo-kushi-iwa-mato-no-mikoto. But at a certain period both the god and his name were cut in two--perhaps for decorative purposes. And now he who sits upon the left is called Toyo-iwa-ma-to-no-mikoto; and his companion on the right, Kushi-iwa-ma-to-no-mikoto. Before the gate, on the left side, there is a stone monument upon which is graven, in Chinese characters, a poem in Hokku, or verse of seventeen syllables, composed by Cho-un: Ko-ka-ra-shi-ya Ka-mi-no-mi-yu-ki-no Ya-ma-no-a-to. My companion translates the characters thus:--'Where high heap the dead leaves, there is the holy place upon the hills, where dwell the gods.' Near by are stone lanterns and stone lions, and another monument--a great five-cornered slab set up and chiselled--bearing the names in Chinese characters of the Ji-jin, or Earth-Gods--the Deities who protect the soil: Uga-no-mitama-no-mikoto (whose name signifies the August Spirit-of-Food), Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami, Ona-muji-no-Kami, Kaki-yasu-hime-no-Kami, Sukuna-hiko-na-no-Kami (who is the Scarecrow God). And the figure of a fox in stone sits before the Name of the August Spirit-of-Food. The miya or Shinto temple itself is quite small--smaller than most of the temples in the neighbourhood, and dingy, and begrimed with age. Yet, next to Kitzuki, this is the most famous of Izumo shrines. The main shrine, dedicated to Susano-o and Inada-hime and their son, whose name is the name of the hamlet of Sakusa, is flanked by various lesser shrines to left and right. In one of these smaller miya the spirit of Ashi-nadzu-chi, father of Inada-hime, is supposed to dwell; and in another that of Te-nadzu-chi, the mother of Inada-hime. There is also a small shrine of the Goddess of the Sun. But these shrines have no curious features. The main temple offers, on the other hand, some displays of rarest interest. To the grey weather-worn gratings of the doors of the shrine hundreds and hundreds of strips of soft white paper have been tied in knots: there is nothing written upon them, although each represents a heart's wish and a fervent prayer. No prayers, indeed, are so fervent as those of love. Also there are suspended many little sections of bamboo, cut just below joints so as to form water receptacles: these are tied together in pairs with a small straw cord which also serves to hang them up. They contain offerings of sea-water carried here from no small distance. And mingling with the white confusion of knotted papers there dangle from the gratings many tresses of girls' hair--love-sacrifices [5]--and numerous offerings of seaweed, so filamentary and so sun-blackened that at some little distance it would not be easy to distinguish them from long shorn tresses. And all the woodwork of the doors and the gratings, both beneath and between the offerings, is covered with a speckling of characters graven or written, which are names of pilgrims. And my companion reads aloud the well-remembered name of--AKIRA! If one dare judge the efficacy of prayer to these kind gods of Shinto from the testimony of their worshippers, I should certainly say that Akira has good reason to hope. Planted in the soil, all round the edge of the foundations of the shrine, are multitudes of tiny paper flags of curious shape (nobori), pasted upon splinters of bamboo. Each of these little white things is a banner of victory, and a lover's witness of gratitude. [6] You will find such little flags stuck into the ground about nearly all the great Shinto temples of Izumo. At Kitzuki they cannot even be counted--any more than the flakes of a snowstorm. And here is something else that you will find at most of the famous miya in Izumo--a box of little bamboo sticks, fastened to a post before the doors. If you were to count the sticks, you would find their number to be exactly one thousand. They are counters for pilgrims who make a vow to the gods to perform a sendo-mairi. To perform a sendo-mairi means to visit the temple one thousand times. This, however, is so hard to do that busy pious men make a sort of compromise with the gods, thus: they walk from the shrine one foot beyond the gate, and back again to the shrine, one thousand times--all in one day, keeping count with the little splints of bamboo. There is one more famous thing to be seen before visiting the holy grove behind the temple, and that is the Sacred Tama-tsubaki, or Precious-Camellia of Yaegaki. It stands upon a little knoll, fortified by a projection-wall, in a rice-field near the house of the priest; a fence has been built around it, and votive lamps of stone placed before it. It is of vast age, and has two heads and two feet; but the twin trunks grow together at the middle. Its unique shape, and the good quality of longevity it is believed to possess in common with all of its species, cause it to be revered as a symbol of undying wedded love, and as tenanted by the Kami who hearken to lovers' prayers--enmusubi-no-kami. There is, however, a strange superstition, about tsubaki-trees; and this sacred tree of Yaegaki, in the opinion of some folk, is a rare exception to the general ghastliness of its species. For tsubaki-trees are goblin trees, they say, and walk about at night; and there was one in the garden of a Matsue samurai which did this so much that it had to be cut down. Then it writhed its arms and groaned, and blood spurted at every stroke of the axe. Sec. 4 At the spacious residence of the kannushi some very curious ofuda and o-mamori--the holy talismans and charms of Yaegaki--are sold, together with pictures representing Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto and his bride Inada-hime surrounded by the 'manifold fence' of clouds. On the pictures is also printed the august song whence the temple derives its name of Yaegaki-jinja,--'Ya kumo tatsu Idzumo ya-he-gaki.' Of the o-mamori there is quite a variety; but by far the most interesting is that labelled: 'Izumo-Yaegaki-jinja-en-musubi-on-hina' (August wedlock-producing 'hina' of the temple of Yaegaki of Izumo). This oblong, folded paper, with Chinese characters and the temple seal upon it, is purchased only by those in love, and is believed to assure nothing more than the desired union. Within the paper are two of the smallest conceivable doll-figures (hina), representing a married couple in antique costume--the tiny wife folded to the breast of the tiny husband by one long-sleeved arm. It is the duty of whoever purchases this mamori to return it to the temple if he or she succeed in marrying the person beloved. As already stated, the charm is not supposed to assure anything more than the union: it cannot be accounted responsible for any consequences thereof. He who desires perpetual love must purchase another mamori labelled: 'Renri-tama-tsubaki-aikyo-goki-to-on-mamori' (August amulet of august prayer-for-kindling-love of the jewel-precious tsubaki-tree-of-Union). This charm should maintain at constant temperature the warmth of affection; it contains only a leaf of the singular double-bodied camellia tree before mentioned. There are also small amulets for exciting love, and amulets for the expelling of diseases, but these have no special characteristics worth dwelling upon. Then we take our way to the sacred grove--the Okuno-in, or Mystic Shades of Yaegaki. Sec. 5 This ancient grove--so dense that when you first pass into its shadows out of the sun all seems black--is composed of colossal cedars and pines, mingled with bamboo, tsubaki (Camellia Japonica), and sakaki, the sacred and mystic tree of Shinto. The dimness is chiefly made by the huge bamboos. In nearly all sacred groves bamboos are thickly set between the trees, and their feathery foliage, filling every lofty opening between the heavier crests, entirely cuts off the sun. Even in a bamboo grove where no other trees are, there is always a deep twilight. As the eyes become accustomed to this green gloaming, a pathway outlines itself between the trees--a pathway wholly covered with moss, velvety, soft, and beautifully verdant. In former years, when all pilgrims were required to remove their footgear before entering the sacred grove, this natural carpet was a boon to the weary. The next detail one observes is that the trunks of many of the great trees have been covered with thick rush matting to a height of seven or eight feet, and that holes have been torn through some of the mats. All the giants of the grove are sacred; and the matting was bound about them to prevent pilgrims from stripping off their bark, which is believed to possess miraculous virtues. But many, more zealous than honest, do not hesitate to tear away the matting in order to get at the bark. And the third curious fact which you notice is that the trunks of the great bamboos are covered with ideographs--with the wishes of lovers and the names of girls. There is nothing in the world of vegetation so nice to write a sweetheart's name upon as the polished bark of a bamboo: each letter, however lightly traced at first, enlarges and blackens with the growth of the bark, and never fades away. The deeply mossed path slopes down to a little pond in the very heart of the grove--a pond famous in the land of Izumo. Here there are many imori, or water-newts, about five inches long, which have red bellies. Here the shade is deepest, and the stems of the bamboos most thickly tattooed with the names of girls. It is believed that the flesh of the newts in the sacred pond of Yaegaki possesses aphrodisiac qualities; and the body of the creature, reduced to ashes, by burning, was formerly converted into love-powders. And there is a little Japanese song referring to the practice: 'Hore-gusuri koka niwa naika to imori ni toeba, yubi-wo marumete kore bakari.' [7] The water is very clear; and there are many of these newts to be seen. And it is the custom for lovers to make a little boat of paper, and put into it one rin, and set it afloat and watch it. So soon as the paper becomes wet through, and allows the water to enter it, the weight of the copper coin soon sends it to the bottom, where, owing to the purity of the water, it can be still seen distinctly as before. If the newts then approach and touch it, the lovers believe their happiness assured by the will of the gods; but if the newts do not come near it, the omen is evil. One poor little paper boat, I observe, could not sink at all; it simply floated to the inaccessible side of the pond, where the trees rise like a solid wall of trunks from the water's edge, and there became caught in some drooping branches. The lover who launched it must have departed sorrowing at heart. Close to the pond, near the pathway, there are many camellia-bushes, of which the tips of the branches have been tied together, by pairs, with strips of white paper. These are shrubs of presage. The true lover must be able to bend two branches together, and to keep them united by tying a paper tightly about them--all with the fingers of one hand. To do this well is good luck. Nothing is written upon the strips of paper. But there is enough writing upon the bamboos to occupy curiosity for many an hour, in spite of the mosquitoes. Most of the names are yobi-na,--that is to say, pretty names of women; but there are likewise names of men--jitsumyo; [8] and, oddly enough, a girl's name and a man's are in no instance written together. To judge by all this ideographic testimony, lovers in Japan--or at least in Izumo--are even more secretive than in our Occident. The enamoured youth never writes his own jitsumyo and his sweetheart's yobi-na together; and the family name, or myoji, he seldom ventures to inscribe. If he writes his jitsumyo, then he contents himself with whispering the yobi-na of his sweetheart to the gods and to the bamboos. If he cuts her yobi-na into the bark, then he substitutes for his own name a mention of his existence and his age only, as in this touching instance: Takata-Toki-to-en-musubi-negaimas. Jiu-hassai-no-otoko [9] This lover presumes to write his girl's whole name; but the example, so far as I am able to discover, is unique. Other enamoured ones write only the yobi-na of their bewitchers; and the honourable prefix, 'O,' and the honourable suffix, 'San,' find no place in the familiarity of love. There is no 'O-Haru-San,' 'O-Kin-San,' 'O-Take-San,' 'O-Kiku-San'; but there are hosts of Haru, and Kin, and Take, and Kiku. Girls, of course, never dream of writing their lovers' names. But there are many geimyo here, 'artistic names,'--names of mischievous geisha who worship the Golden Kitten, written by their saucy selves: Rakue and Asa and Wakai, Aikichi and Kotabuki and Kohachi, Kohana and Tamakichi and Katsuko, and Asakichi and Hanakichi and Katsukichi, and Chiyoe and Chiyotsuru. 'Fortunate-Pleasure,' 'Happy-Dawn,' and 'Youth' (such are their appellations), 'Blest-Love' and 'Length-of-Days,' and 'Blossom-Child' and 'Jewel-of-Fortune' and 'Child-of-Luck,' and 'Joyous-Sunrise' and 'Flower-of-Bliss' and 'Glorious Victory,' and 'Life-as-the-Stork's-for-a-thousand-years.' Often shall he curse the day he was born who falls in love with Happy-Dawn; thrice unlucky the wight bewitched by the Child-of-Luck; woe unto him who hopes to cherish the Flower-of-Bliss; and more than once shall he wish himself dead whose heart is snared by Life-as-the-Stork's-for-a-thou sand-years. And I see that somebody who inscribes his age as twenty and three has become enamoured of young Wakagusa, whose name signifies the tender Grass of Spring. Now there is but one possible misfortune for you, dear boy, worse than falling in love with Wakagusa--and that is that she should happen to fall in love with you. Because then you would, both of you, write some beautiful letters to your friends, and drink death, and pass away in each other's arms, murmuring your trust to rest together upon the same lotus-flower in Paradise: 'Hasu no ha no ue ni oite matsu.' Nay! pray the Deities rather to dissipate the bewitchment that is upon you: Te ni toru na, Yahari no ni oke Gengebana. [10] And here is a lover's inscription--in English! Who presumes to suppose that the gods know English? Some student, no doubt, who for pure shyness engraved his soul's secret in this foreign tongue of mine--never dreaming that a foreign eye would look upon it. 'I wish You, Haru!' Not once, but four--no, five times!--each time omitting the preposition. Praying--in this ancient grove--in this ancient Land of Izumo--unto the most ancient gods in English! Verily, the shyest love presumes much upon the forbearance of the gods. And great indeed must be, either the patience of Take-haya-susano-wo-no-mikoto, or the rustiness of the ten-grasp sabre that was augustly girded upon him. Chapter Fifteen Kitsune Sec. 1 By every shady wayside and in every ancient grove, on almost every hilltop and in the outskirts of every village, you may see, while travelling through the Hondo country, some little Shinto shrine, before which, or at either side of which, are images of seated foxes in stone. Usually there is a pair of these, facing each other. But there may be a dozen, or a score, or several hundred, in which case most of the images are very small. And in more than one of the larger towns you may see in the court of some great miya a countless host of stone foxes, of all dimensions, from toy-figures but a few inches high to the colossi whose pedestals tower above your head, all squatting around the temple in tiered ranks of thousands. Such shrines and temples, everybody knows, are dedicated to Inari the God of Rice. After having travelled much in Japan, you will find that whenever you try to recall any country-place you have visited, there will appear in some nook or corner of that remembrance a pair of green-and-grey foxes of stone, with broken noses. In my own memories of Japanese travel, these shapes have become de rigueur, as picturesque detail. In the neighbourhood of the capital and in Tokyo itself--sometimes in the cemeteries--very beautiful idealised figures of foxes may be seen, elegant as greyhounds. They have long green or grey eyes of crystal quartz or some other diaphanous substance; and they create a strong impression as mythological conceptions. But throughout the interior, fox-images are much less artistically fashioned. In Izumo, particularly, such stone-carving has a decidedly primitive appearance. There is an astonishing multiplicity and variety of fox-images in the Province of the Gods--images comical, quaint, grotesque, or monstrous, but, for the most part, very rudely chiselled. I cannot, however, declare them less interesting on that account. The work of the Tokkaido sculptor copies the conventional artistic notion of light grace and ghostliness. The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods--whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about most of them, even those whose noses have been broken off. Moreover, these ancient country foxes have certain natural beauties which their modern Tokyo kindred cannot show. Time has bestowed upon them divers speckled coats of beautiful soft colours while they have been sitting on their pedestals, listening to the ebbing and flowing of the centuries and snickering weirdly at mankind. Their backs are clad with finest green velvet of old mosses; their limbs are spotted and their tails are tipped with the dead gold or the dead silver of delicate fungi. And the places they most haunt are the loveliest--high shadowy groves where the uguisu sings in green twilight, above some voiceless shrine with its lamps and its lions of stone so mossed as to seem things born of the soil--like mushrooms. I found it difficult to understand why, out of every thousand foxes, nine hundred should have broken noses. The main street of the city of Matsue might be paved from end to end with the tips of the noses of mutilated Izumo foxes. A friend answered my expression of wonder in this regard by the simple but suggestive word, 'Kodomo', which means, 'The children.' Sec. 2. Inari the name by which the Fox-God is generally known, signifies 'Load-of-Rice.' But the antique name of the Deity is the August-Spirit-of-Food: he is the Uka-no-mi-tama-no-mikoto of the Kojiki. [1] In much more recent times only has he borne the name that indicates his connection with the fox-cult, Miketsu-no-Kami, or the Three-Fox-God. Indeed, the conception of the fox as a supernatural being does not seem to have been introduced into Japan before the tenth or eleventh century; and although a shrine of the deity, with statues of foxes, may be found in the court of most of the large Shinto temples, it is worthy of note that in all the vast domains of the oldest Shinto shrine in Japan--Kitzuki--you cannot find the image of a fox. And it is only in modern art--the art of Toyokuni and others--that Inari is represented as a bearded man riding a white fox. [2] Inari is not worshipped as the God of Rice only; indeed, there are many Inari just as in antique Greece there were many deities called Hermes, Zeus, Athena, Poseidon--one in the knowledge of the learned, but essentially different in the imagination of the common people. Inari has been multiplied by reason of his different attributes. For instance, Matsue has a Kamiya-San-no-Inari-San, who is the God of Coughs and Bad Colds--afflictions extremely common and remarkably severe in the Land of Izumo. He has a temple in the Kamachi at which he is worshipped under the vulgar appellation of Kaze-no-Kami and the politer one of Kamiya-San-no-Inari. And those who are cured of their coughs and colds after having prayed to him, bring to his temple offerings of tofu. At Oba, likewise, there is a particular Inari, of great fame. Fastened to the wall of his shrine is a large box full of small clay foxes. The pilgrim who has a prayer to make puts one of these little foxes in his sleeve and carries it home. He must keep it, and pay it all due honour, until such time as his petition has been granted. Then he must take it back to the temple, and restore it to the box, and, if he be able, make some small gift to the shrine. Inari is often worshipped as a healer; and still more frequently as a deity having power to give wealth. (Perhaps because all the wealth of Old Japan was reckoned in koku of rice.) Therefore his foxes are sometimes represented holding keys in their mouths. And from being the deity who gives wealth, Inari has also become in some localities the special divinity of the joro class. There is, for example, an Inari temple worth visiting in the neighbourhood of the Yoshiwara at Yokohama. It stands in the same court with a temple of Benten, and is more than usually large for a shrine of Inari. You approach it through a succession of torii one behind the other: they are of different heights, diminishing in size as they are placed nearer to the temple, and planted more and more closely in proportion to their smallness. Before each torii sit a pair of weird foxes--one to the right and one to the left. The first pair are large as greyhounds; the second two are much smaller; and the sizes of the rest lessen as the dimensions of the torii lessen. At the foot of the wooden steps of the temple there is a pair of very graceful foxes of dark grey stone, wearing pieces of red cloth about their necks. Upon the steps themselves are white wooden foxes--one at each end of each step--each successive pair being smaller than the pair below; and at the threshold of the doorway are two very little foxes, not more than three inches high, sitting on sky-blue pedestals. These have the tips of their tails gilded. Then, if you look into the temple you will see on the left something like a long low table on which are placed thousands of tiny fox-images, even smaller than those in the doorway, having only plain white tails. There is no image of Inari; indeed, I have never seen an image of Inari as yet in any Inari temple. On the altar appear the usual emblems of Shinto; and before it, just opposite the doorway, stands a sort of lantern, having glass sides and a wooden bottom studded with nail-points on which to fix votive candles. [3] And here, from time to time, if you will watch, you will probably see more than one handsome girl, with brightly painted lips and the beautiful antique attire that no maiden or wife may wear, come to the foot of the steps, toss a coin into the money-box at the door, and call out: 'O-rosoku!' which means 'an honourable candle.' Immediately, from an inner chamber, some old man will enter the shrine-room with a lighted candle, stick it upon a nail-point in the lantern, and then retire. Such candle-offerings are always accompanied by secret prayers for good-fortune. But this Inari is worshipped by many besides members of the joro class. The pieces of coloured cloth about the necks of the foxes are also votive offerings. Sec. 3 Fox-images in Izumo seem to be more numerous than in other provinces, and they are symbols there, so far as the mass of the peasantry is concerned, of something else besides the worship of the Rice-Deity. Indeed, the old conception of the Deity of Rice-fields has been overshadowed and almost effaced among the lowest classes by a weird cult totally foreign to the spirit of pure Shinto--the Fox-cult. The worship of the retainer has almost replaced the worship of the god. Originally the Fox was sacred to Inari only as the Tortoise is still sacred to Kompira; the Deer to the Great Deity of Kasuga; the Rat to Daikoku; the Tai-fish to Ebisu; the White Serpent to Benten; or the Centipede to Bishamon, God of Battles. But in the course of centuries the Fox usurped divinity. And the stone images of him are not the only outward evidences of his cult. At the rear of almost every Inari temple you will generally find in the wall of the shrine building, one or two feet above the ground, an aperture about eight inches in diameter and perfectly circular. It is often made so as to be closed at will by a sliding plank. This circular orifice is a Fox-hole, and if you find one open, and look within, you will probably see offerings of tofu or other food which foxes are supposed to be fond of. You will also, most likely, find grains of rice scattered on some little projection of woodwork below or near the hole, or placed on the edge of the hole itself; and you may see some peasant clap his hands before the hole, utter some little prayer, and swallow a grain or two of that rice in the belief that it will either cure or prevent sickness. Now the fox for whom such a hole is made is an invisible fox, a phantom fox--the fox respectfully referred to by the peasant as O-Kitsune-San. If he ever suffers himself to become visible, his colour is said to be snowy white. According to some, there are various kinds of ghostly foxes. According to others, there are two sorts of foxes only, the Inari-fox (O-Kitsune-San) and the wild fox (kitsune). Some people again class foxes into Superior and Inferior Foxes, and allege the existence of four Superior Sorts--Byakko, Kokko, Jenko, and Reiko--all of which possess supernatural powers. Others again count only three kinds of foxes--the Field-fox, the Man-fox, and the Inari-fox. But many confound the Field-fox or wild fox with the Man-fox, and others identify the Inari-fox with the Man-fox. One cannot possibly unravel the confusion of these beliefs, especially among the peasantry. The beliefs vary, moreover, in different districts. I have only been able, after a residence of fourteen months in Izumo, where the superstition is especially strong, and marked by certain unique features, to make the following very loose summary of them: All foxes have supernatural power. There are good and bad foxes. The Inari-fox is good, and the bad foxes are afraid of the Inari-fox. The worst fox is the Ninko or Hito-kitsune (Man-fox): this is especially the fox of demoniacal possession. It is no larger than a weasel, and somewhat similar in shape, except for its tail, which is like the tail of any other fox. It is rarely seen, keeping itself invisible, except to those to whom it attaches itself. It likes to live in the houses of men, and to be nourished by them, and to the homes where it is well cared for it will bring prosperity. It will take care that the rice-fields shall never want for water, nor the cooking-pot for rice. But if offended, it will bring misfortune to the household, and ruin to the crops. The wild fox (Nogitsune) is also bad. It also sometimes takes possession of people; but it is especially a wizard, and prefers to deceive by enchantment. It has the power of assuming any shape and of making itself invisible; but the dog can always see it, so that it is extremely afraid of the dog. Moreover, while assuming another shape, if its shadow fall upon water, the water will only reflect the shadow of a fox. The peasantry kill it; but he who kills a fox incurs the risk of being bewitched by that fox's kindred, or even by the ki, or ghost of the fox. Still if one eat the flesh of a fox, he cannot be enchanted afterwards. The Nogitsune also enters houses. Most families having foxes in their houses have only the small kind, or Ninko; but occasionally both kinds will live together under the same roof. Some people say that if the Nogitsune lives a hundred years it becomes all white, and then takes rank as an Inari-fox. There are curious contradictions involved in these beliefs, and other contradictions will be found in the following pages of this sketch. To define the fox-superstition at all is difficult, not only on account of the confusion of ideas on the subject among the believers themselves, but also on account of the variety of elements out of which it has been shapen. Its origin is Chinese [4]; but in Japan it became oddly blended with the worship of a Shinto deity, and again modified and expanded by the Buddhist concepts of thaumaturgy and magic. So far as the common people are concerned, it is perhaps safe to say that they pay devotion to foxes chiefly because they fear them. The peasant still worships what he fears. Sec. 4 It is more than doubtful whether the popular notions about different classes of foxes, and about the distinction between the fox of Inari and the fox of possession, were ever much more clearly established than they are now, except in the books of old literati. Indeed, there exists a letter from Hideyoshi to the Fox-God which would seem to show that in the time of the great Taiko the Inari-fox and the demon fox were considered identical. This letter is still preserved at Nara, in the Buddhist temple called Todaiji: KYOTO, the seventeenth day of the Third Month. TO INARI DAIMYOJIN: My Lord--I have the honour to inform you that one of the foxes under your jurisdiction has bewitched one of my servants, causing her and others a great deal of trouble. I have to request that you will make minute inquiries into the matter, and endeavour to find out the reason of your subject misbehaving in this way, and let me know the result. If it turns out that the fox has no adequate reason to give for his behaviour, you are to arrest and punish him at once. If you hesitate to take action in this matter, I shall issue orders for the destruction of every fox in the land. Any other particulars that you may wish to be informed of in reference to what has occurred, you can learn from the high-priest YOSHIDA. Apologising for the imperfections of this letter, I have the honour to be, Your obedient servant, HIDEYOSHI TAIKO [5] But there certainly were some distinctions established in localities, owing to the worship of Inari by the military caste. With the samurai of Izumo, the Rice-God, for obvious reasons, was a highly popular deity; and you can still find in the garden of almost every old shizoku residence in Matsue, a small shrine of Inari Daimyojin, with little stone foxes seated before it. And in the imagination of the lower classes, all samurai families possessed foxes. But the samurai foxes inspired no fear. They were believed to be 'good foxes'; and the superstition of the Ninko or Hito-kitsune does not seem to have unpleasantly affected any samurai families of Matsue during the feudal era. It is only since the military caste has been abolished, and its name, simply as a body of gentry, changed to shizoku, [6] that some families have become victims of the superstition through intermarriage with the chonin or mercantile classes, among whom the belief has always been strong. By the peasantry the Matsudaira daimyo of Izumo were supposed to be the greatest fox-possessors. One of them was believed to use foxes as messengers to Tokyo (be it observed that a fox can travel, according to popular credence, from Yokohama to London in a few hours); and there is some Matsue story about a fox having been caught in a trap [7] near Tokyo, attached to whose neck was a letter written by the prince of Izumo only the same morning. The great Inari temple of Inari in the castle grounds--O-Shiroyama-no-Inari-Sama--with its thousands upon thousands of foxes of stone, is considered by the country people a striking proof of the devotion of the Matsudaira, not to Inari, but to foxes. At present, however, it is no longer possible to establish distinctions of genera in this ghostly zoology, where each species grows into every other. It is not even possible to disengage the ki or Soul of the Fox and the August-Spirit-of-Food from the confusion in which both have become hopelessly blended, under the name Inari by the vague conception of their peasant-worshippers. The old Shinto mythology is indeed quite explicit about the August-Spirit-of-Food, and quite silent upon the subject of foxes. But the peasantry in Izumo, like the peasantry of Catholic Europe, make mythology for themselves. If asked whether they pray to Inari as to an evil or a good deity, they will tell you that Inari is good, and that Inari-foxes are good. They will tell you of white foxes and dark foxes--of foxes to be reverenced and foxes to be killed--of the good fox which cries 'kon-kon,' and the evil fox which cries 'kwai-kwai.' But the peasant possessed by the fox cries out: 'I am Inari--Tamabushi-no-Inari!'--or some other Inari. Sec. 5 Goblin foxes are peculiarly dreaded in Izumo for three evil habits attributed to them. The first is that of deceiving people by enchantment, either for revenge or pure mischief. The second is that of quartering themselves as retainers upon some family, and thereby making that family a terror to its neighbours. The third and worst is that of entering into people and taking diabolical possession of them and tormenting them into madness. This affliction is called 'kitsune-tsuki.' The favourite shape assumed by the goblin fox for the purpose of deluding mankind is that of a beautiful woman; much less frequently the form of a young man is taken in order to deceive some one of the other sex. Innumerable are the stories told or written about the wiles of fox-women. And a dangerous woman of that class whose art is to enslave men, and strip them of all they possess, is popularly named by a word of deadly insult--kitsune. Many declare that the fox never really assumes human shape; but that he only deceives people into the belief that he does so by a sort of magnetic power, or by spreading about them a certain magical effluvium. The fox does not always appear in the guise of a woman for evil purposes. There are several stories, and one really pretty play, about a fox who took the shape of a beautiful woman, and married a man, and bore him children--all out of gratitude for some favour received--the happiness of the family being only disturbed by some odd carnivorous propensities on the part of the offspring. Merely to achieve a diabolical purpose, the form of a woman is not always the best disguise. There are men quite insusceptible to feminine witchcraft. But the fox is never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus. Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of Time and Space; he can recall the past and reveal the future. His power has not been destroyed by the introduction of Western ideas; for did he not, only a few years ago, cause phantom trains to run upon the Tokkaido railway, thereby greatly confounding, and terrifying the engineers of the company? But, like all goblins, he prefers to haunt solitary places. At night he is fond of making queer ghostly lights, [8] in semblance of lantern-fires, flit about dangerous places; and to protect yourself from this trick of his, it is necessary to learn that by joining your hands in a particular way, so as to leave a diamond-shaped aperture between the crossed fingers, you can extinguish the witch-fire at any distance simply by blowing through the aperture in the direction of the light and uttering a certain Buddhist formula. But it is not only at night that the fox manifests his power for mischief: at high noon he may tempt you to go where you are sure to get killed, or frighten you into going by creating some apparition or making you imagine that you feel an earthquake. Consequently the old-fashioned peasant, on seeing anything extremely queer, is slow to credit the testimony of his own eyes. The most interesting and valuable witness of the stupendous eruption of Bandai-San in 1888--which blew the huge volcano to pieces and devastated an area of twenty-seven square miles, levelling forests, turning rivers from their courses, and burying numbers of villages with all their inhabitants--was an old peasant who had watched the whole cataclysm from a neighbouring peak as unconcernedly as if he had been looking at a drama. He saw a black column of ashes and steam rise to the height of twenty thousand feet and spread out at its summit in the shape of an umbrella, blotting out the sun. Then he felt a strange rain pouring upon him, hotter than the water of a bath. Then all became black; and he felt the mountain beneath him shaking to its roots, and heard a crash of thunders that seemed like the sound of the breaking of a world. But he remained quite still until everything was over. He had made up his mind not to be afraid--deeming that all he saw and heard was delusion wrought by the witchcraft of a fox. Sec. 6 Strange is the madness of those into whom demon foxes enter. Sometimes they run naked shouting through the streets. Sometimes they lie down and froth at the mouth, and yelp as a fox yelps. And on some part of the body of the possessed a moving lump appears under the skin, which seems to have a life of its own. Prick it with a needle, and it glides instantly to another place. By no grasp can it be so tightly compressed by a strong hand that it will not slip from under the fingers. Possessed folk are also said to speak and write languages of which they were totally ignorant prior to possession. They eat only what foxes are believed to like--tofu, aburage, [9] azukimeshi, [10] etc.--and they eat a great deal, alleging that not they, but the possessing foxes, are hungry. It not infrequently happens that the victims of fox-possession are cruelly treated by their relatives--being severely burned and beaten in the hope that the fox may be thus driven away. Then the Hoin [11] or Yamabushi is sent for--the exorciser. The exorciser argues with the fox, who speaks through the mouth of the possessed. When the fox is reduced to silence by religious argument upon the wickedness of possessing people, he usually agrees to go away on condition of being supplied with plenty of tofu or other food; and the food promised must be brought immediately to that particular Inari temple of which the fox declares himself a retainer. For the possessing fox, by whomsoever sent, usually confesses himself the servant of a certain Inari though sometimes even calling himself the god. As soon as the possessed has been freed from the possessor, he falls down senseless, and remains for a long time prostrate. And it is said, also, that he who has once been possessed by a fox will never again be able to eat tofu, aburage, azukimeshi, or any of those things which foxes like. Sec. 7 It is believed that the Man-fox (Hito-kitsune) cannot be seen. But if he goes close to still water, his SHADOW can be seen in the water. Those 'having foxes' are therefore supposed to avoid the vicinity of rivers and ponds. The invisible fox, as already stated, attaches himself to persons. Like a Japanese servant, he belongs to the household. But if a daughter of that household marry, the fox not only goes to that new family, following the bride, but also colonises his kind in all those families related by marriage or kinship with the husband's family. Now every fox is supposed to have a family of seventy-five--neither more, nor less than seventy-five--and all these must be fed. So that although such foxes, like ghosts, eat very little individually, it is expensive to have foxes. The fox-possessors (kitsune-mochi) must feed their foxes at regular hours; and the foxes always eat first--all the seventy-five. As soon as the family rice is cooked in the kama (a great iron cooking-pot), the kitsune-mochi taps loudly on the side of the vessel, and uncovers it. Then the foxes rise up through the floor. And although their eating is soundless to human ear and invisible to human eye, the rice slowly diminishes. Wherefore it is fearful for a poor man to have foxes. But the cost of nourishing foxes is the least evil connected with the keeping of them. Foxes have no fixed code of ethics, and have proved themselves untrustworthy servants. They may initiate and long maintain the prosperity of some family; but should some grave misfortune fall upon that family in spite of the efforts of its seventy-five invisible retainers, then these will suddenly flee away, taking all the valuables of the household along with them. And all the fine gifts that foxes bring to their masters are things which have been stolen from somebody else. It is therefore extremely immoral to keep foxes. It is also dangerous for the public peace, inasmuch as a fox, being a goblin, and devoid of human susceptibilities, will not take certain precautions. He may steal the next-door neighbour's purse by night and lay it at his own master's threshold, so that if the next-door neighbour happens to get up first and see it there is sure to be a row. Another evil habit of foxes is that of making public what they hear said in private, and taking it upon themselves to create undesirable scandal. For example, a fox attached to the family of Kobayashi-San hears his master complain about his neighbour Nakayama-San, whom he secretly dislikes. Therewith the zealous retainer runs to the house of Nakayama-San, and enters into his body, and torments him grievously, saying: 'I am the retainer of Kobayashi-San to whom you did such-and-such a wrong; and until such time as he command me to depart, I shall continue to torment you.' And last, but worst of all the risks of possessing foxes, is the danger that they may become wroth with some member of the family. Certainly a fox may be a good friend, and make rich the home in which he is domiciled. But as he is not human, and as his motives and feelings are not those of men, but of goblins, it is difficult to avoid incurring his displeasure. At the most unexpected moment he may take offence without any cause knowingly having been given, and there is no saying what the consequences may be. For the fox possesses Instinctive Infinite Vision--and the Ten-Ni-Tsun, or All-Hearing Ear--and the Ta-Shin-Tsun, which is the Knowledge of the Most Secret Thoughts of Others--and Shiyuku-Mei-Tsun, which is the Knowledge of the Past--and Zhin-Kiyan-Tsun, which means the Knowledge of the Universal Present--and also the Powers of Transformation and of Transmutation. [12] So that even without including his special powers of bewitchment, he is by nature a being almost omnipotent for evil. Sec. 8 For all these reasons, and, doubtless many more, people believed to have foxes are shunned. Intermarriage with a fox-possessing family is out of the question; and many a beautiful and accomplished girl in Izumo cannot secure a husband because of the popular belief that her family harbours foxes. As a rule, Izumo girls do not like to marry out of their own province; but the daughters of a kitsune-mochi must either marry into the family of another kitsune-mochi, or find a husband far away from the Province of the Gods. Rich fox-possessing families have not overmuch difficulty in disposing of their daughters by one of the means above indicated; but many a fine sweet girl of the poorer kitsune-mochi is condemned by superstition to remain unwedded. It is not because there are none to love her and desirous of marrying her--young men who have passed through public schools and who do not believe in foxes. It is because popular superstition cannot be yet safely defied in country districts except by the wealthy. The consequences of such defiance would have to be borne, not merely by the husband, but by his whole family, and by all other families related thereunto. Which are consequences to be thought about! Among men believed to have foxes there are some who know how to turn the superstition to good account. The country-folk, as a general rule, are afraid of giving offence to a kitsune-mochi, lest he should send some of his invisible servants to take possession of them. Accordingly, certain kitsune-mochi have obtained great ascendancy over the communities in which they live. In the town of Yonago, for example, there is a certain prosperous chonin whose will is almost law, and whose opinions are never opposed. He is practically the ruler of the place, and in a fair way of becoming a very wealthy man. All because he is thought to have foxes. Wrestlers, as a class, boast of their immunity from fox-possession, and care neither for kitsune-mochi nor for their spectral friends. Very strong men are believed to be proof against all such goblinry. Foxes are said to be afraid of them, and instances are cited of a possessing fox declaring: 'I wished to enter into your brother, but he was too strong for me; so I have entered into you, as I am resolved to be revenged upon some one of your family.' Sec. 9 Now the belief in foxes does not affect persons only: it affects property. It affects the value of real estate in Izumo to the amount of hundreds of thousands. The land of a family supposed to have foxes cannot be sold at a fair price. People are afraid to buy it; for it is believed the foxes may ruin the new proprietor. The difficulty of obtaining a purchaser is most great in the case of land terraced for rice-fields, in the mountain districts. The prime necessity of such agriculture is irrigation--irrigation by a hundred ingenious devices, always in the face of difficulties. There are seasons when water becomes terribly scarce, and when the peasants will even fight for water. It is feared that on lands haunted by foxes, the foxes may turn the water away from one field into another, or, for spite, make holes in the dikes and so destroy the crop. There are not wanting shrewd men to take advantage of this queer belief. One gentleman of Matsue, a good agriculturist of the modern school, speculated in the fox-terror fifteen years ago, and purchased a vast tract of land in eastern Izumo which no one else would bid for. That land has sextupled in value, besides yielding generously under his system of cultivation; and by selling it now he could realise an immense fortune. His success, and the fact of his having been an official of the government, broke the spell: it is no longer believed that his farms are fox-haunted. But success alone could not have freed the soil from the curse of the superstition. The power of the farmer to banish the foxes was due to his official character. With the peasantry, the word 'Government' is talismanic. Indeed, the richest and the most successful farmer of Izumo, worth more than a hundred thousand yen--Wakuri-San of Chinomiya in Kandegori--is almost universally believed by the peasantry to be a kitsune-mochi. They tell curious stories about him. Some say that when a very poor man he found in the woods one day a little white fox-cub, and took it home, and petted it, and gave it plenty of tofu, azukimeshi, and aburage--three sorts of food which foxes love--and that from that day prosperity came to him. Others say that in his house there is a special zashiki, or guest-room for foxes; and that there, once in each month, a great banquet is given to hundreds of Hito-kitsune. But Chinomiya-no-Wakuri, as they call him, can afford to laugh at all these tales. He is a refined man, highly respected in cultivated circles where superstition never enters. Sec. 10 When a Ninko comes to your house at night and knocks, there is a peculiar muffled sound about the knocking by which you can tell that the visitor is a fox--if you have experienced ears. For a fox knocks at doors with its tail. If you open, then you will see a man, or perhaps a beautiful girl, who will talk to you only in fragments of words, but nevertheless in such a way that you can perfectly well understand. A fox cannot pronounce a whole word, but a part only--as 'Nish... Sa...' for 'Nishida-San'; 'degoz...' for 'degozarimasu, or 'uch... de...?' for 'uchi desuka?' Then, if you are a friend of foxes, the visitor will present you with a little gift of some sort, and at once vanish away into the darkness. Whatever the gift may be, it will seem much larger that night than in the morning. Only a part of a fox-gift is real. A Matsue shizoku, going home one night by way of the street called Horomachi, saw a fox running for its life pursued by dogs. He beat the dogs off with his umbrella, thus giving the fox a chance to escape. On the following evening he heard some one knock at his door, and on opening the to saw a very pretty girl standing there, who said to him: 'Last night I should have died but for your august kindness. I know not how to thank you enough: this is only a pitiable little present. And she laid a small bundle at his feet and went away. He opened the bundle and found two beautiful ducks and two pieces of silver money--those long, heavy, leaf-shaped pieces of money--each worth ten or twelve dollars--such as are now eagerly sought for by collectors of antique things. After a little while, one of the coins changed before his eyes into a piece of grass; the other was always good. Sugitean-San, a physician of Matsue, was called one evening to attend a case of confinement at a house some distance from the city, on the hill called Shiragayama. He was guided by a servant carrying a paper lantern painted with an aristocratic crest. [13] He entered into a magnificent house, where he was received with superb samurai courtesy. The mother was safely delivered of a fine boy. The family treated the physician to an excellent dinner, entertained him elegantly, and sent him home, loaded with presents and money. Next day he went, according to Japanese etiquette, to return thanks to his hosts. He could not find the house: there was, in fact, nothing on Shiragayama except forest. Returning home, he examined again the gold which had been paid to him. All was good except one piece, which had changed into grass. Sec. 11 Curious advantages have been taken of the superstitions relating to the Fox-God. In Matsue, several years ago, there was a tofuya which enjoyed an unusually large patronage. A tofuya is a shop where tofu is sold--a curd prepared from beans, and much resembling good custard in appearance. Of all eatable things, foxes are most fond of tofu and of soba, which is a preparation of buckwheat. There is even a legend that a fox, in the semblance of an elegantly attired man, once visited Nogi-no-Kuriharaya, a popular sobaya on the lake shore, and ate much soba. But after the guest was gone, the money he had paid changed into wooden shavings. The proprietor of the tofuya had a different experience. A man in wretched attire used to come to his shop every evening to buy a cho of tofu, which he devoured on the spot with the haste of one long famished. Every evening for weeks he came, and never spoke; but the landlord saw one evening the tip of a bushy white tail protruding from beneath the stranger's rags. The sight aroused strange surmises and weird hopes. From that night he began to treat the mysterious visitor with obsequious kindness. But another month passed before the latter spoke. Then what he said was about as follows: 'Though I seem to you a man, I am not a man; and I took upon myself human form only for the purpose of visiting you. I come from Taka-machi, where my temple is, at which you often visit. And being desirous to reward your piety and goodness of heart, I have come to-night to save you from a great danger. For by the power which I possess I know that tomorrow this street will burn, and all the houses in it shall be utterly destroyed except yours. To save it I am going to make a charm. But in order that I may do this, you must open your go-down (kura) that I may enter, and allow no one to watch me; for should living eye look upon me there, the charm will not avail.' The shopkeeper, with fervent words of gratitude, opened his storehouse, and reverently admitted the seeming Inari and gave orders that none of his household or servants should keep watch. And these orders were so well obeyed that all the stores within the storehouse, and all the valuables of the family, were removed without hindrance during the night. Next day the kura was found to be empty. And there was no fire. There is also a well-authenticated story about another wealthy shopkeeper of Matsue who easily became the prey of another pretended Inari. This Inari told him that whatever sum of money he should leave at a certain miya by night, he would find it doubled in the morning--as the reward of his lifelong piety. The shopkeeper carried several small sums to the miya, and found them doubled within twelve hours. Then he deposited larger sums, which were similarly multiplied; he even risked some hundreds of dollars, which were duplicated. Finally he took all his money out of the bank and placed it one evening within the shrine of the god--and never saw it again. Sec. 12 Vast is the literature of the subject of foxes--ghostly foxes. Some of it is old as the eleventh century. In the ancient romances and the modern cheap novel, in historical traditions and in popular fairy-tales, foxes perform wonderful parts. There are very beautiful and very sad and very terrible stories about foxes. There are legends of foxes discussed by great scholars, and legends of foxes known to every child in Japan--such as the history of Tamamonomae, the beautiful favourite of the Emperor Toba--Tamamonomae, whose name has passed into a proverb, and who proved at last to be only a demon fox with Nine Tails and Fur of Gold. But the most interesting part of fox-literature belongs to the Japanese stage, where the popular beliefs are often most humorously reflected--as in the following excerpts from the comedy of Hiza-Kuruge, written by one Jippensha Ikku: [Kidahachi and Iyaji are travelling from Yedo to Osaka. When within a short distance of Akasaka, Kidahachi hastens on in advance to secure good accommodations at the best inn. Iyaji, travelling along leisurely, stops a little while at a small wayside refreshment-house kept by an old woman] OLD WOMAN.--Please take some tea, sir. IYAJI.--Thank you! How far is it from here to the next town?--Akasaka? OLD WOMAN.--About one ri. But if you have no companion, you had better remain here to-night, because there is a bad fox on the way, who bewitches travellers. IYAJI.--I am afraid of that sort of thing. But I must go on; for my companion has gone on ahead of me, and will be waiting for me. [After having paid for his refreshments, Iyaji proceeds on his way. The night is very dark, and he feels quite nervous on account of what the old woman has told him. After having walked a considerable distance, he suddenly hears a fox yelping--kon-kon. Feeling still more afraid, he shouts at the top of his voice:] IYAJI.--Come near me, and I will kill you! [Meanwhile Kidahachi, who has also been frightened by the old woman's stories, and has therefore determined to wait for Iyaji, is saying to himself in the dark: 'If I do not wait for him, we shall certainly be deluded.' Suddenly he hears Iyaji's voice, and cries out to him:] KIDAHACHI.--O Iyaji-San! IYAJI.--What are you doing there? KIDAHACHI.--I did intend to go on ahead; but I became afraid, and so I concluded to stop here and wait for you. IYAJI (who imagines that the fox has taken the shape of Kidahachi to deceive him).--Do not think that you are going to dupe me! KIDAHACHI.--That is a queer way to talk! I have some nice mochi [14] here which I bought for you. IYAJI.--Horse-dung cannot be eaten! [15] KIDAHACHI.--Don't be suspicious!--I am really Kidahachi. IYAJI (springing upon him furiously).--Yes! you took the form of Kidahachi just to deceive me! KIDAHACHI.--What do you mean?--What are you going to do to me? IYAJI.--I am going to kill you! (Throws him down.) KIDAHACHI.--Oh! you have hurt me very much--please leave me alone! IYAJI.--If you are really hurt, then let me see you in your real shape! (They struggle together.) KIDAHACHI.--What are you doing?--putting your hand there? IYAJI.--I am feeling for your tail. If you don't put out your tail at once, I shall make you! (Takes his towel, and with it ties Kidahachi's hands behind his back, and then drives him before him.) KIDAHACHI.--Please untie me--please untie me first! [By this time they have almost reached Akasaka, and Iyaji, seeing a dog, calls the animal, and drags Kidahachi close to it; for a dog is believed to be able to detect a fox through any disguise. But the dog takes no notice of Kidahachi. Iyaji therefore unties him, and apologises; and they both laugh at their previous fears.] Sec. 13 But there are some very pleasing forms of the Fox-God. For example, there stands in a very obscure street of Matsue--one of those streets no stranger is likely to enter unless he loses his way--a temple called Jigyoba-no-Inari, [16] and also Kodomo-no-Inari, or 'the Children's Inari.' It is very small, but very famous; and it has been recently presented with a pair of new stone foxes, very large, which have gilded teeth and a peculiarly playful expression of countenance. These sit one on each side of the gate: the Male grinning with open jaws, the Female demure, with mouth closed. [17] In the court you will find many ancient little foxes with noses, heads, or tails broken, two great Karashishi before which straw sandals (waraji) have been suspended as votive offerings by somebody with sore feet who has prayed to the Karashishi-Sama that they will heal his affliction, and a shrine of Kojin, occupied by the corpses of many children's dolls. [18] The grated doors of the shrine of Jigyoba-no-Inari, like those of the shrine of Yaegaki, are white with the multitude of little papers tied to them, which papers signify prayers. But the prayers are special and curious. To right and to left of the doors, and also above them, odd little votive pictures are pasted upon the walls, mostly representing children in bath-tubs, or children getting their heads shaved. There are also one or two representing children at play. Now the interpretation of these signs and wonders is as follows: Doubtless you know that Japanese children, as well as Japanese adults, must take a hot bath every day; also that it is the custom to shave the heads of very small boys and girls. But in spite of hereditary patience and strong ancestral tendency to follow ancient custom, young children find both the razor and the hot bath difficult to endure, with their delicate skins. For the Japanese hot bath is very hot (not less than 110 degs F., as a general rule), and even the adult foreigner must learn slowly to bear it, and to appreciate its hygienic value. Also, the Japanese razor is a much less perfect instrument than ours, and is used without any lather, and is apt to hurt a little unless used by the most skilful hands. And finally, Japanese parents are not tyrannical with their children: they pet and coax, very rarely compel or terrify. So that it is quite a dilemma for them when the baby revolts against the bath or mutinies against the razor. The parents of the child who refuses to be shaved or bathed have recourse to Jigyoba-no-Inati. The god is besought to send one of his retainers to amuse the child, and reconcile it to the new order of things, and render it both docile and happy. Also if a child is naughty, or falls sick, this Inari is appealed to. If the prayer be granted, some small present is made to the temple--sometimes a votive picture, such as those pasted by the door, representing the successful result of the petition. To judge by the number of such pictures, and by the prosperity of the temple, the Kodomo-no-Inani would seem to deserve his popularity. Even during the few minutes I passed in his court I saw three young mothers, with infants at their backs, come to the shrine and pray and make offerings. I noticed that one of the children--remarkably pretty--had never been shaved at all. This was evidently a very obstinate case. While returning from my visit to the Jigyoba Inani, my Japanese servant, who had guided me there, told me this story: The son of his next-door neighbour, a boy of seven, went out to play one morning, and disappeared for two days. The parents were not at first uneasy, supposing that the child had gone to the house of a relative, where he was accustomed to pass a day or two from time to time. But on the evening of the second day it was learned that the child had not been at the house in question. Search was at once made; but neither search nor inquiry availed. Late at night, however, a knock was heard at the door of the boy's dwelling, and the mother, hurrying out, found her truant fast asleep on the ground. She could not discover who had knocked. The boy, upon being awakened, laughed, and said that on the morning of his disappearance he had met a lad of about his own age, with very pretty eyes, who had coaxed him away to the woods, where they had played together all day and night and the next day at very curious funny games. But at last he got sleepy, and his comrade took him home. He was not hungry. The comrade promised 'to come to-morrow.' But the mysterious comrade never came; and no boy of the description given lived in the neighbourhood. The inference was that the comrade was a fox who wanted to have a little fun. The subject of the fun mourned long in vain for his merry companion. Sec. 14 Some thirty years ago there lived in Matsue an ex-wrestler named Tobikawa, who was a relentless enemy of foxes and used to hunt and kill them. He was popularly believed to enjoy immunity from bewitchment because of his immense strength; but there were some old folks who predicted that he would not die a natural death. This prediction was fulfilled: Tobikawa died in a very curious manner. He was excessively fond of practical jokes. One day he disguised himself as a Tengu, or sacred goblin, with wings and claws and long nose, and ascended a lofty tree in a sacred grove near Rakusan, whither, after a little while, the innocent peasants thronged to worship him with offerings. While diverting himself with this spectacle, and trying to play his part by springing nimbly from one branch to another, he missed his footing and broke his neck in the fall. Sec. 15 But these strange beliefs are swiftly passing away. Year by year more shrines of Inari crumble down, never to be rebuilt. Year by year the statuaries make fewer images of foxes. Year by year fewer victims of fox-possession are taken to the hospitals to be treated according to the best scientific methods by Japanese physicians who speak German. The cause is not to be found in the decadence of the old faiths: a superstition outlives a religion. Much less is it to be sought for in the efforts of proselytising missionaries from the West--most of whom profess an earnest belief in devils. It is purely educational. The omnipotent enemy of superstition is the public school, where the teaching of modern science is unclogged by sectarianism or prejudice; where the children of the poorest may learn the wisdom of the Occident; where there is not a boy or a girl of fourteen ignorant of the great names of Tyndall, of Darwin, of Huxley, of Herbert Spencer. The little hands that break the Fox-god's nose in mischievous play can also write essays upon the evolution of plants and about the geology of Izumo. There is no place for ghostly foxes in the beautiful nature-world revealed by new studies to the new generation The omnipotent exorciser and reformer is the Kodomo. NOTES Note for preface 1 In striking contrast to this indifference is the strong, rational, far-seeing conservatism of Viscount Torio--a noble exception. Notes for Chapter One 1 I do not think this explanation is correct; but it is interesting, as the first which I obtained upon the subject. Properly speaking, Buddhist worshippers should not clap their hands, but only rub them softly together. Shinto worshippers always clap their hands four times. 2 Various writers, following the opinion of the Japanologue Satow, have stated that the torii was originally a bird-perch for fowls offered up to the gods at Shinto shrines--'not as food, but to give warning of daybreak.' The etymology of the word is said to be 'bird-rest' by some authorities; but Aston, not less of an authority, derives it from words which would give simply the meaning of a gateway. See Chamberlain's Things Japanese, pp. 429, 430. 3 Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain has held the extraordinary position of Professor of Japanese in the Imperial University of Japan--no small honour to English philology! 4 These Ni-O, however, the first I saw in Japan, were very clumsy figures. There are magnificent Ni-O to be seen in some of the great temple gateways in Tokyo, Kyoto, and elsewhere. The grandest of all are those in the Ni-O Mon, or 'Two Kings' Gate,' of the huge Todaiji temple at Nara. They are eight hundred years old. It is impossible not to admire the conception of stormy dignity and hurricane-force embodied in those colossal figures. Prayers are addressed to the Ni-O, especially by pilgrims. Most of their statues are disfigured by little pellets of white paper, which people chew into a pulp and then spit at them. There is a curious superstition that if the pellet sticks to the statue the prayer is heard; if, on the other hand, it falls to the ground, the prayer will not be answered. Note for Chapter Two 1 Dainagon, the title of a high officer in the ancient Imperial Court. Notes for Chapter Three 1 Derived from the Sanscrit stupa. 2 'The real origin of the custom of piling stones before the images of Jizo and other divinities is not now known to the people. The custom is founded upon a passage in the famous Sutra, "The Lotus of the Good Law." 'Even the little hoys who, in playing, erected here and there heaps of sand, with the intention of dedicating them as Stupas to the Ginas,-they have all of them reached enlightenment.'--Saddharma Pundarika, c. II. v. 81 (Kern's translation), 'Sacred Books of the East,' vol. xxi. 3 The original Jizo has been identified by Orientalists with the Sanscrit Kshitegarbha; as Professor Chamberlain observes, the resemblance in sound between the names Jizo and Jesus 'is quite fortuitous.' But in Japan Jizo has become totally transformed: he may justly be called the most Japanese of all Japanese divinities. According to the curious old Buddhist book, Sai no Kawara Kuchi zu sams no den, the whole Sai-no-Kawara legend originated in Japan, and was first written by the priest Kuya Shonin, in the sixth year of the period called Ten-Kei, in the reign of the Emperor Shuyaku, who died in the year 946. To Kuya was revealed, in the village of Sai-in, near Kyoto, during a night passed by the dry bed of the neighbouring river, Sai-no-Kawa (said to be the modern Serikawa), the condition of child-souls in the Meido. (Such is the legend in the book; but Professor Chamberlain has shown that the name Sai-no-Kawara, as now written, signifies 'The Dry Bed of the River of Souls,' and modern Japanese faith places that river in the Meido.) Whatever be the true history of the myth, it is certainly Japanese; and the conception of Jizo as the lover and playfellow of dead children belongs to Japan. There are many other popular forms of Jizo, one of the most common being that Koyasu-Jizo to whom pregnant women pray. There are but few roads in Japan upon which statues of Jizo may not be seen; for he is also the patron of pilgrims. 4 Except those who have never married. 5 In Sanscrit, 'Yama-Raja.' But the Indian conception has been totally transformed by Japanese Buddhism. 6 Funeral customs, as well as the beliefs connected with them, vary considerably in different parts of Japan. Those of the eastern provinces differ from those of the western and southern. The old practice of placing articles of value in the coffin--such as the metal mirror formerly buried with a woman, or the sword buried with a man of the Samurai caste--has become almost obsolete. But the custom of putting money in the coffin still prevails: in Izumo the amount is always six rin, and these are called Rokudo-kane, or 'The Money for the Six Roads.' 7 Literally 'Western Capital,'--modern name of Kyoto, ancient residence of the emperors. The name 'Tokyo,' on the other hand, signifies 'Eastern Capital.' 8 These first ten lines of the original will illustrate the measure of the wasan: Kore wa konoyo no koto narazu, Shide no yamaji no suso no naru, Sai-no-Kawara no monogatari Kiku ni tsuketemo aware nari Futatsu-ya, mitsu-ya, yotsu, itsutsu, To nimo taranu midorigo ga Sai-no-Kawara ni atsumari te, Chichi koishi! haha koishi! Koishi! koishi! to naku koe wa Konoyo no koe towa ko to kawari. Notes for Chapter Four 1 Yane, 'roof'; shobu, 'sweet-flag' (Acorus calamus). 2 At the time this paper was written, nearly three years ago, I had not seen the mighty bells at Kyoto and at Nara. The largest bell in Japan is suspended in the grounds of the grand Jodo temple of Chion-in, at Kyoto. Visitors are not allowed to sound it. It was cast in 1633. It weighs seventy-four tons, and requires, they say, twenty-five men to ring it properly. Next in size ranks the bell of the Daibutsu temple in Kyoto, which visitors are allowed to ring on payment of a small sum. It was cast in 1615, and weighs sixty-three tons. The wonderful bell of Todaiji at Nara, although ranking only third, is perhaps the most interesting of all. It is thirteen feet six inches high, and nine feet in diameter; and its inferiority to the Kyoto bells is not in visible dimensions so much as in weight and thickness. It weighs thirty-seven tons. It was cast in 733, and is therefore one thousand one hundred and sixty years old. Visitors pay one cent to sound it once. 3 In Sanscrit, Avalokitesvara. The Japanese Kwannon, or Kwanze-on, is identical in origin with the Chinese virgin-goddess Kwanyin adopted by Buddhism as an incarnation of the Indian Avalokitesvara. (See Eitel's Handbook of Chinese Buddhism.) But the Japanese Kwan-non has lost all Chinese characteristics--has become artistically an idealisation of all that is sweet and beautiful in the woman of Japan. 4 Let the reader consult Mitford's admirable Tales of Old Japan for the full meaning of the term 'Ronin.' 5 There is a delicious Japanese proverb, the full humour of which is only to be appreciated by one familiar with the artistic representations of the divinities referred to: Karutoki no Jizo-gao, Nasutoki no Emma-gao. 'Borrowing-time, the face of Jizo; Repaying-time, the face of Emma.' 6 This old legend has peculiar interest as an example of the efforts made by Buddhism to absorb the Shinto divinities, as it had already absorbed those of India and of China. These efforts were, to a great extent, successful prior to the disestablishment of Buddhism and the revival of Shinto as the State religion. But in Izumo, and other parts of western Japan, Shinto has always remained dominant, and has even appropriated and amalgamated much belonging to Buddhism. 7 In Sanscrit 'Hariti'--Karitei-Bo is the Japanese name for one form of Kishibojin. Notes for Chapter Five 1 It is related in the same book that Ananda having asked the Buddha how came Mokenren's mother to suffer in the Gakido, the Teacher replied that in a previous incarnation she had refused, through cupidity, to feed certain visiting priests. 2 A deity of good fortune Notes for Chapter Six 1 The period in which only deities existed. 2 Hyakusho, a peasant, husbandman. The two Chinese characters forming the word signify respectively, 'a hundred' (hyaku), and 'family name' (sei). One might be tempted to infer that the appellation is almost equivalent to our phrase, 'their name is legion.' And a Japanese friend assures me that the inference would not be far wrong. Anciently the peasants had no family name; each was known by his personal appellation, coupled with the name of his lord as possessor or ruler. Thus a hundred peasants on one estate would all be known by the name of their master. 3 This custom of praying for the souls of animals is by no means general. But I have seen in the western provinces several burials of domestic animals at which such prayers were said. After the earth was filled in, some incense-rods were lighted above the grave in each instance, and the prayers were repeated in a whisper. A friend in the capital sends me the following curious information: 'At the Eko-in temple in Tokyo prayers are offered up every morning for the souls of certain animals whose ihai [mortuary tablets] are preserved in the building. A fee of thirty sen will procure burial in the temple-ground and a short service for any small domestic pet.' Doubtless similar temples exist elsewhere. Certainly no one capable of affection for our dumb friends and servants can mock these gentle customs. 4 Why six Jizo instead of five or three or any other number, the reader may ask. I myself asked the question many times before receiving any satisfactory reply. Perhaps the following legend affords the most satisfactory explanation: According to the Book Taijo-Hoshi-mingyo-nenbutsu-den, Jizo-Bosatsu was a woman ten thousand ko (kalpas) before this era, and became filled with desire to convert all living beings of the Six Worlds and the Four Births. And by virtue of the Supernatural Powers she multiplied herself and simultaneously appeared in all the Rokussho or Six States of Sentient Existence at once, namely in the Jigoku, Gaki, Chikusho, Shura, Ningen, Tenjo, and converted the dwellers thereof. (A friend insists that in order to have done this Jizo must first have become a man.) Among the many names of Jizo, such as 'The Never Slumbering,' 'The Dragon-Praiser,' 'The Shining King,' 'Diamond-of-Pity,' I find the significant appellation of 'The Countless Bodied.' 5 Since this sketch was written, I have seen the Bon-odori in many different parts of Japan; but I have never witnessed exactly the same kind of dance. Indeed, I would judge from my experiences in Izumo, in Oki, in Tottori, in Hoki, in Bingo, and elsewhere, that the Bonodori is not danced in the same way in any two provinces. Not only do the motions and gestures vary according to locality, but also the airs of the songs sung--and this even when the words are the same. In some places the measure is slow and solemn; in others it is rapid and merry, and characterised by a queer jerky swing, impossible to describe. But everywhere both the motion and the melody are curious and pleasing enough to fascinate the spectator for hours. Certainly these primitive dances are of far greater interest than the performances of geisha. Although Buddhism may have utilised them and influenced them, they are beyond doubt incomparably older than Buddhism. Notes for Chapter Seven 1 Thick solid sliding shutters of unpainted wood, which in Japanese houses serve both as shutters and doors. 2 Tanabiku. 3 Ama-terasu-oho-mi-Kami literally signifies 'the Heaven-Shining Great-August-Divinity.' (See Professor Chamberlain's translation of the Kojiki.) 4 'The gods who do harm are to be appeased, so that they may not punish those who have offended them.' Such are the words of the great Shinto teacher, Hirata, as translated by Mr. Satow in his article, 'The Revival of Pure Shintau.' 5 Machi, a stiff piece of pasteboard or other material sewn into the waist of the hakama at the back, so as to keep the folds of the garment perpendicular and neat-looking. 6 Kush-no-ki-Matsuhira-Inari-Daimyojin. 7 From an English composition by one of my Japanese pupils. 8 Rin, one tenth of one cent. A small round copper coin with a square hole in the middle. 9 An inn where soba is sold. 10 According to the mythology of the Kojiki the Moon-Deity is a male divinity. But the common people know nothing of the Kojiki, written in an archaic Japanese which only the learned can read; and they address the moon as O-Tsuki-San, or 'Lady Moon,' just as the old Greek idyllists did. Notes for Chapter Eight 1 The most ancient book extant in the archaic tongue of Japan. It is the most sacred scripture of Shinto. It has been admirably translated, with copious notes and commentaries, by Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of Tokyo. 2 The genealogy of the family is published in a curious little book with which I was presented at Kitzuki. Senke Takanori is the eighty-first Pontiff Governor (formerly called Kokuzo) of Kitzuki. His lineage is traced back through sixty-five generations of Kokuzo and sixteen generations of earthly deities to Ama-terasu and her brother Susanoo-no-mikoto. 3 In Sanscrit pretas. The gaki are the famished ghosts of that Circle of Torment in hell whereof the penance is hunger; and the mouths of some are 'smaller than the points of needles.' 4 Mionoseki. 5 Now solidly united with the mainland. Many extraordinary changes, of rare interest to the physiographer and geologist, have actually taken place along the coast of Izumo and in the neighbourhood of the great lake. Even now, each year some change occurs. I have seen several very strange ones. 6 The Hakuja, or White Serpent, is also the servant of Benten, or Ben-zai-ten, Goddess of Love, of Beauty, of Eloquence, and of the Sea. 'The Hakuja has the face of an ancient man, with white eyebrows and wears upon its head a crown.' Both goddess and serpent can be identified with ancient Indian mythological beings, and Buddhism first introduced both into Japan. Among the people, especially perhaps in Izumo, certain divinities of Buddhism are often identified, or rather confused, with certain Kami, in popular worship and parlance. Since this sketch was written, I have had opportunity of seeing a Ryu-ja within a few hours after its capture. It was between two and three feet long, and about one inch in diameter at its thickest girth The upper part of the body was a very dark brown, and the belly yellowish white; toward the tail there were some beautiful yellowish mottlings. The body was not cylindrical, but curiously four-sided--like those elaborately woven whip-lashes which have four edges. The tail was flat and triangular, like that of certain fish. A Japanese teacher, Mr. Watanabe, of the Normal School of Matsue, identified the little creature as a hydrophid of the species called Pelamis bicalor. It is so seldom seen, however, that I think the foregoing superficial description of it may not be without interest to some readers. 7 Ippyo, one hyo; 2 1/2 hyo make one koku = 5.13 bushels. The word hyo means also the bag made to contain one hyo. 8 Either at Kitzuki or at Sada it is possible sometimes to buy a serpent. On many a 'household-god-shelf' in Matsue the little serpent may be seen. I saw one that had become brittle and black with age, but was excellently preserved by some process of which I did not learn the nature. It had been admirably posed in a tiny wire cage, made to fit exactly into a small shrine of white wood, and must have been, when alive, about two feet four inches in length. A little lamp was lighted daily before it, and some Shinto formula recited by the poor family to whom it belonged. 9 Translated by Professor Chamberlain the 'Deity Master-of-the-Great-Land'-one of the most ancient divinities of Japan, but in popular worship confounded with Daikoku, God of Wealth. His son, Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, is similarly confounded with Ebisu, or Yebisu, the patron of honest labour. The origin of the Shinto custom of clapping the hands in prayer is said by some Japanese writers to have been a sign given by Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami. Both deities are represented by Japanese art in a variety of ways, Some of the twin images of them sold at Kitzuki are extremely pretty as well as curious. 10 Very large donations are made to this temple by wealthy men. The wooden tablets without the Haiden, on which are recorded the number of gifts and the names of the donors, mention several recent presents of 1000 yen, or dollars; and donations of 500 yen are not uncommon. The gift of a high civil official is rarely less than 50 yen. 11 Taku is the Japanese name for the paper mulberry. 12 See the curious legend in Professor Chamberlain's translation of the Kojiki. 13 From a remote period there have been two Kokuzo in theory, although but one incumbent. Two branches of the same family claim ancestral right to the office,--the rival houses of Senke and Kitajima. The government has decided always in favour of the former; but the head of the Kitajima family has usually been appointed Vice-Kokuzo. A Kitajima to-day holds the lesser office. The term Kokuzo is not, correctly speaking, a spiritual, but rather a temporal title. The Kokuzo has always been the emperor's deputy to Kitzuki,--the person appointed to worship the deity in the emperor's stead; but the real spiritual title of such a deputy is that still borne by the present Guji,--'Mitsuye-Shiro.' 14 Haliotis tuberculata, or 'sea-ear.' The curious shell is pierced with a row of holes, which vary in number with the age and size of the animal it shields. 15 Literally, 'ten hiro,' or Japanese fathoms. 16 The fire-drill used at the Shinto temples of Ise is far more complicated in construction, and certainly represents a much more advanced stage of mechanical knowledge than the Kitzuki fire-drill indicates. 17 During a subsequent visit to Kitzuki I learned that the koto-ita is used only as a sort of primitive 'tuning' instrument: it gives the right tone for the true chant which I did not hear during my first visit. The true chant, an ancient Shinto hymn, is always preceded by the performance above described. 18 The tempest of the Kokuzo. 19 That is, according to Motoori, the commentator. Or more briefly: 'No or yes?' This is, according to Professor Chamberlain, a mere fanciful etymology; but it is accepted by Shinto faith, and for that reason only is here given. 20 The title of Kokuzo indeed, still exists, but it is now merely honorary, having no official duties connected with it. It is actually borne by Baron Senke, the father of Senke Takanori, residing in the capital. The active religious duties of the Mitsuye-shiro now devolve upon the Guji. 21 As late as 1890 I was told by a foreign resident, who had travelled much in the interior of the country, that in certain districts many old people may be met with who still believe that to see the face of the emperor is 'to become a Buddha'; that is, to die. 22 Hideyoshi, as is well known, was not of princely extraction 23 The Kojiki dates back, as a Written work, only to A.D. 722. But its legends and records are known to have existed in the form of oral literature from a much more ancient time. 24 In certain provinces of Japan Buddhism practically absorbed Shinto in other centuries, but in Izumo Shinto absorbed Buddhism; and now that Shinto is supported by the State there is a visible tendency to eliminate from its cult certain elements of Buddhist origin. Notes for Chapter Nine 1 Such are the names given to the water-vessels or cisterns at which Shinto worshippers must wash their hands and rinse their mouths ere praying to the Kami. A mitarashi or o-chozubachi is placed before every Shinto temple. The pilgrim to Shin-Kukedo-San should perform this ceremonial ablution at the little rock-spring above described, before entering the sacred cave. Here even the gods of the cave are said to wash after having passed through the seawater. 2 'August Fire-Lady'; or, 'the August Sun-Lady,' Amaterasu-oho-mi-Kami. Notes for Chapter Ten 1 Mionoseki 2 Zashiki, the best and largest room of a Japanese dwelling--the guest-room of a private house, or the banquet-room of a public inn. Notes for Chapter Eleven 1 Fourteenth of August. 2 In the pretty little seaside hotel Inaba-ya, where I lived during my stay in Kitzuki, the kind old hostess begged her guests with almost tearful earnestness not to leave the house during the Minige. 3 There are ten rin to one sen, and ten mon to one rin, on one hundred to one sen. The majority of the cheap toys sold at the matsuri cost from two to nine rin. The rin is a circular copper coin with a square hole in the middle for stringing purposes. 4 Why the monkey is so respectfully mentioned in polite speech, I do not exactly know; but I think that the symbolical relation of the monkey, both to Buddhism and to Shinto, may perhaps account for the use of the prefix 'O' (honourable) before its name. 5 As many fine dolls really are. The superior class of O-Hina-San, such as figure in the beautiful displays of the O-Hina-no-Matsuri at rich homes, are heirlooms. Dolls are not given to children to break; and Japanese children seldom break them. I saw at a Doll's Festival in the house of the Governor of Izumo, dolls one hundred years old--charming figurines in ancient court costume. 6 Not to be confounded with Koshin, the God of Roads. 7 Celtis Wilidenowiana. Sometimes, but rarely, a pine or other tree is substituted for the enoki. 8 'Literally, 'The Dance of the Fruitful Year.' 9 First,--unto the Taisha-Sama of Izunio; Second,--to Irokami-Sama of Niigata; Third,--unto Kompira-Sama of Sanuki; Fourth,--unto Zenkoji-Sama of Shinano; Fifth,--to O-Yakushi-San of Ichibata; Sixth,--to O-Jizo-Sama of Rokkakudo; Seventh,--to O-Ebisu-Sama of Nana-ura; Eighth,--unto Hachiman-Sama of Yawata; Ninth,--unto everyholy shrine of Koya; Tenth,--to the Ujigami-Sama of our village.' Japanese readers will appreciate the ingenious manner in which the numeral at the beginning of each phrase is repeated in the name of the sacred place sung of. Notes for Chapter Twelve 1 This deity is seldom called by his full name, which has been shortened by common usage from Susano-o-no-mikoto. 2 A kichinyado is an inn at which the traveller is charged only the price of the wood used for fuel in cooking his rice. 3 The thick fine straw mats, fitted upon the floor of every Japanese room, are always six feet long by three feet broad. The largest room in the ordinary middle-class house is a room of eight mats. A room of one hundred mats is something worth seeing. 4 The kubi-oke was a lacquered tray with a high rim and a high cover. The name signifies 'head-box.' It was the ancient custom to place the head of a decapitated person upon a kubi-oke before conveying the ghastly trophy into the palace of the prince desirous of seeing it. Notes for Chapter Thirteen 1 Yama-no-mono ('mountain-folk,'--so called from their settlement on the hills above Tokoji),--a pariah-class whose special calling is the washing of the dead and the making of graves. 2 Joro: a courtesan. 3 Illicium religiosum 4 Literally: 'without shadow' or 'shadowless.' 5 Umi-yama-no-on. 6 Kusaba-no-kage 7 Or 'him.' This is a free rendering. The word 'nushi' simply refers to the owner of the house. Notes for Chapter Fourteen 1 "Eight clouds arise. The eightfold [or, manifold] fence of Idzumo makes an eightfold [or, manifold] fence for the spouses to retire within. Oh! that eightfold fence!" This is said to be the oldest song in the Japanese language. It has been differently translated by the great scholars and commentators. The above version and text are from Professor B. H. Chamberlain's translation of the Kojiki (pp.60-64). 2 Professor Chamberlain disputes this etymology for excellent reasons. But in Izumo itself the etymology is still accepted, and will be accepted, doubtless, until the results of foreign scholarship in the study of the archaic texts is more generally known. 3 Planeca Japonica. 4 So absolutely has Shinto in Izumo monopolised the Karashishi, or stone lions, of Buddhist origin, that it is rare in the province to find a pair before any Buddhist temple. There is even a Shinto myth about their introduction into Japan from India, by the Fox-God! 5 Such offerings are called Gwan-hodoki. Gwan wo hodoki, 'to make a vow.' 6 A pilgrim whose prayer has been heard usually plants a single nobori as a token. Sometimes you may see nobori of five colours (goshiki),--black, yellow, red, blue, and white--of which one hundred or one thousand have been planted by one person. But this is done only in pursuance of some very special vow. 7 'On being asked if there were any other love charm, the Newt replied, making a ring with two of his toes--"Only this." The sign signifies, "Money."' 8 There are no less than eleven principal kinds of Japanese names. The jitsumyo, or 'true name,' corresponds to our Christian name. On this intricate and interesting topic the reader should consult Professor B. H. Chamberlain's excellent little book, Things Japanese, pp. 250-5. 9 'That I may be wedded to Takaki-Toki, I humbly pray.--A youth of eighteen.' 10 The gengebana (also called renge-so, and in Izumo miakobana) is an herb planted only for fertilizing purposes. Its flowers are extremely small, but so numerous that in their blossoming season miles of fields are coloured by them a beautiful lilaceous blue. A gentleman who wished to marry a joro despite the advice of his friends, was gently chided by them with the above little verse, which, freely translated, signifies: 'Take it not into thy hand: the flowers of the gengebans are fair to view only when left all together in the field.' Notes for Chapter Fifteen 1 Toyo-uke-bime-no-Kami, or Uka-no-mi-tana (who has also eight other names), is a female divinity, according to the Kojiki and its commentators. Moreover, the greatest of all Shinto scholars, Hirata, as cited by Satow, says there is really no such god as Inari-San at all--that the very name is an error. But the common people have created the God Inari: therefore he must be presumed to exist--if only for folklorists; and I speak of him as a male deity because I see him so represented in pictures and carvings. As to his mythological existence, his great and wealthy temple at Kyoto is impressive testimony. 2 The white fox is a favourite subject with Japanese artists. Some very beautiful kakemono representing white foxes were on display at the Tokyo exhibition of 1890. Phosphorescent foxes often appear in the old coloured prints, now so rare and precious, made by artists whose names have become world-famous. Occasionally foxes are represented wandering about at night, with lambent tongues of dim fire--kitsune-bi--above their heads. The end of the fox's tail, both in sculpture and drawing, is ordinarily decorated with the symbolic jewel (tama) of old Buddhist art. I have in my possession one kakemono representing a white fox with a luminous jewel in its tail. I purchased it at the Matsue temple of Inari--'O-Shiroyama-no-Inari-Sama.' The art of the kakemono is clumsy; but the conception possesses curious interest. 3 The Japanese candle has a large hollow paper wick. It is usually placed upon an iron point which enters into the orifice of the wick at the flat end. 4 See Professor Chamberlain's Things Japanese, under the title 'Demoniacal Possession.' 5 Translated by Walter Dening. 6 The word shizoku is simply the Chinese for samurai. But the term now means little more than 'gentleman' in England. 7 The fox-messenger travels unseen. But if caught in a trap, or injured, his magic fails him, and he becomes visible. 8 The Will-o'-the-Wisp is called Kitsune-bi, or 'fox-fire.' 9 'Aburage' is a name given to fried bean-curds or tofu. 10 Azukimeshi is a preparation of red beans boiled with rice. 11 The Hoin or Yamabushi was a Buddhist exorciser, usually a priest. Strictly speaking, the Hoin was a Yamabushi of higher rank. The Yamabushi used to practise divination as well as exorcism. They were forbidden to exercise these professions by the present government; and most of the little temples formerly occupied by them have disappeared or fallen into ruin. But among the peasantry Buddhist exorcisers are still called to attend cases of fox-possession, and while acting as exorcisers are still spoken of as Yamabushi. 12 A most curious paper on the subject of Ten-gan, or Infinite Vision--being the translation of a Buddhist sermon by the priest Sata Kaiseki--appeared in vol. vii. of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, from the pen of Mr. J. M. James. It contains an interesting consideration of the supernatural powers of the Fox. 13 All the portable lanterns used to light the way upon dark nights bear a mon or crest of the owner. 14 Cakes made of rice flour and often sweetened with sugar. 15 It is believed that foxes amuse themselves by causing people to eat horse-dung in the belief that they are eating mochi, or to enter a cesspool in the belief they are taking a bath. 16 'In Jigyobamachi, a name signifying 'earthwork-street.' It stands upon land reclaimed from swamp. 17 This seems to be the immemorial artistic law for the demeanour of all symbolic guardians of holy places, such as the Karashishi, and the Ascending and Descending Dragons carved upon panels, or pillars. At Kumano temple even the Suijin, or warrior-guardians, who frown behind the gratings of the chambers of the great gateway, are thus represented--one with mouth open, the other with closed lips. On inquiring about the origin of this distinction between the two symbolic figures, I was told by a young Buddhist scholar that the male figure in such representations is supposed to be pronouncing the sound 'A,' and the figure with closed lips the sound of nasal 'N'--corresponding to the Alpha and Omega of the Greek alphabet, and also emblematic of the Beginning and the End. In the Lotos of the Good Law, Buddha so reveals himself, as the cosmic Alpha and Omega, and the Father of the World,--like Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. 18 There is one exception to the general custom of giving the dolls of dead children, or the wrecks of dolls, to Kojin. Those images of the God of Calligraphy and Scholarship which are always presented as gifts to boys on the Boys' Festival are given, when broken, to Tenjin himself, not to Kojin; at least such is the custom in Matsue. 
33345	----	LAFCADIO HEARN The Hearn crest is "on a mount vert a heron arg.," and the motto "Ardua petit ardea." [Illustration: Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.] LAFCADIO HEARN BY NINA H. KENNARD _CONTAINING SOME LETTERS FROM LAFCADIO HEARN TO HIS HALF-SISTER, MRS. ATKINSON_ [Illustration] NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY MCMXII Copyright, 1912, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY REMEMBRANCE No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the thread,--softer than moonshine, thinner than fragrance, stronger than death,--the Gleipnir-chain of the Greater Memory. PREFACE When Death has set his seal on an eminent man's career, there is a not unnatural curiosity to know something of his life, as revealed by himself, particularly in letters to intimate friends. "All biography ought, as much as possible, to be autobiography," says Stevenson, and of all autobiographical material, letters are the most satisfactory. Generally written on the impulse of the moment, with no idea of subsequent publication, they come, as it were, like butter fresh from the churning with the impress of the mind of the writer stamped distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's written to Flaubert, or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend Stilling, is worth pages of embellished reminiscences. The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting, giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and passionately enthusiastic nature. During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to Chamberlain were written, he initiated a correspondence with his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His erratic nature, tamed and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo, turned with yearning towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years, and these Atkinson letters, though not boasting the high intellectual level of those to Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate playfulness, and in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under a new and delightful aspect. There has been a certain amount of friction with his American editress, owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use these letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to criticisms and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual outspoken fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original form, to allow them to pass into the hands of any one but a person intimately connected with the Hearn family; but I can assure Mrs. Wetmore and Captain Mitchell McDonald--those kind friends who have done so much for the sake of Hearn's children and widow--that Mrs. Koizumi, financially, suffers nothing from the fact of the letters not having crossed the Atlantic. Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to make extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests' House, Ferbane, for having put me in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to give me much information concerning his college career. I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan, to Mr. W. B. Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the period of his engagement as sub-editor to the _Kobe Chronicle and Japan Mail_. But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs. Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French West Indies"; and, above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's "Letters," for without quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn. What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere." How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and interest--the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold undisputed sway in the Far East. _Southmead_, _Farnham Royal_, 1911. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I EARLY YEARS 1 II BOYHOOD 23 III TRAMORE 33 IV USHAW 40 V LONDON 52 VI CINCINNATI 65 VII VAGABONDAGE 81 VIII MEMPHIS 88 IX NEW ORLEANS 93 X WIDER HORIZON 102 XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 111 XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS 124 XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE 137 XIV WEST INDIES 148 XV JAPAN 160 XVI MATSUE 172 XVII MARRIAGE 179 XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI 187 XIX KUMAMOTO 199 XX OUT OF THE EAST 231 XXI KOBE 238 XXII TOKYO 260 XXIII USHIGOME 274 XXIV NISHI OKUBO 286 XXV HIS DEATH 299 XXVI HIS FUNERAL 310 XXVII VISIT TO JAPAN 313 XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO 328 CONCLUSION 339 INDEX 351 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE LAFCADIO HEARN AND HIS WIFE. _Frontispiece_ MAJOR CHARLES BUSH HEARN (HEARN'S FATHER). 16 MRS. ATKINSON (HEARN'S HALF-SISTER). 204 KAZUO (HEARN'S SON) AND HIS NURSE. 220 KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN). 228 DOROTHY ATKINSON. 232 KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN). 314 CARLETON ATKINSON. 318 LAFCADIO HEARN CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS "Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more, indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates--imaging sky, and land, and life--filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings--and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it--sun, moon, and stars--earth, sky, and sea--and mind and man, and space and time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker shapes for ever." On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio, Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura." The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and remarkable figures of the end of the last century. Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn. On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock--mixture of Saxon and Celt--which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's grandfather--as has been stated--came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace, and about the same time--as recognition for services done, we conclude--became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of Westmeath. A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County Waterford--has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev. Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship with the County Westmeath portion of the family. As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records certainly of several Daniel Hearns--it is the Christian name that furnishes the clue--occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire and Somersetshire. In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally "cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the Herons--pronounced Hearn--to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights." Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'--heron with wings down--for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries, are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the various modifications of the word--namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern, Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic languages it is _irren_, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. _Hirn_, the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin _errare_ and Frankish _errant_, with the Celtic _err_ names are related, though the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or gipsies, is referred to. I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible sign of Romany descent. Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element--quite distinct from the Japanese type--is so strong as to have impressed itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may, on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India. On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek; Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand, maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands. The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian, half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes, migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original Venetian Maltese. "We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite addition--the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us, stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested themselves--the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited from his Anglo-Saxon forbears. From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music. Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew--"Veritable blunderers," as Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world." Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother. I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the 'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular directions--guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a resemblance in his children by two different mothers--and I want so much to find out if the resemblance is also psychological." Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849 infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor, additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands. Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore, necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep; the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands. But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways. Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use. Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress. A lock of hair was enclosed:-- "Dearest and nearest to my heart, Thou art fairer than the silver moon, And I trust to see thee soon." There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with the following:-- "Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love And evermore will beat for thee!!" "Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath. Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo, but communication between the islands was frequent. As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland, of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount of friction. Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island, excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends." Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond. Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world--the world that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty--impressed itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court--his mother, presumably--chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and temples of the ancient Leucadia.... Awakening, he heard, in the night, the moaning of the real sea--the muttering of the Tide of the Returning Ghosts. Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta. How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had left with his regiment, it is impossible to say. Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old. He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard. Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"--indeed, all his belongings--were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task entrusted to him. Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript; the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a text from the Gospels and Epistles. Because of the political and religious animus existing between Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England. All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation, thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate opinions. On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7 o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady! Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear, beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us." Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs. Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later, in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to perfectly harmless actions and statements. Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son, having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major portion of the capital of Ireland. The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory. She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe castigation. When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them. In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever. When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another time, another heaven. Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers, after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated, with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as his own. "My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark, with large black eyes--very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap it. I slapped it--simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences." * * * * * The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane--"Sally Brenane," Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin Brenane--a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means--and had adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak, bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband. In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands, something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes, accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them. Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman, when she went for her daily drive. * * * * * In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies. Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton." The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of storm! Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace and charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free again, and was living as a widow in Dublin. What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary. "October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay. An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now, whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person," Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea. Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred feet under the dinner-table. [Illustration: Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).] It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew, or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these years--the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his mother's brain. In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety, strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says, "remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of brotherhood, I was totally indifferent--especially for the reason that he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again." The following reminiscence requires little comment:-- "I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way. Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady came to meet us. She seemed to me tall--but a child cannot judge stature well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after." The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time in Dublin. Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny, odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long, lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent, myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from him. "Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells of--the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down easily. 'Ah!' she said:--'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But _how_ I would love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day--great huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels. "At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now. I rather think I should like to see her." Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life. In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma, the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever person, beloved by her children and all her family connections, especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old."[1] [1] "Out of the East," Gay & Hancock. "The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister, when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him again. "I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him by some tale told her about his life in Paris." * * * * * The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the tablets of her memory. After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford. Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith. Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his grand-aunt. Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard in Paris. Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she wished me to, and I was lazy." Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of Indian fever, on board the English steamship _Mula_ at Suez, thus ending a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years. With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end. We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame, remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness--that tenderness generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the arena of life. CHAPTER II BOYHOOD "You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with which we look at a thing--half-angered by inability to analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think the feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says, 'the doors have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt in looking at that tree, was it only your pleasure, no,--many who would have loved you, were looking through you and remembering happier things. The different ways in which different places and things thus make appeal would be partly explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest. But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then how much dead love lives again, how many ecstasies of the childhoods of a hundred years must revive!" Most of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs. Brenane seems to have been passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper Leeson Street; at Tramore, a seaside place on the coast of Waterford in Ireland; at Linkfield Place, Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry Molyneux, a Roman Catholic friend of Mrs. Brenane's--destined to play a considerable part in the boy's life--and in visiting about among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose name was legion. Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house, Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now. Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous idea--common to most of Hearn's biographers--has originated from Hearn himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales, but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere. Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's "Wanderings in Wales." Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan,"[2] one of Hearn's last books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his memory, and calls them "Welsh hills." [2] The publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China, when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend." The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes, under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong. Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib, his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth-- "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..." The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose to his eyes. In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been eight or nine years old--I might have been twelve. And that's all." It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday. Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered, spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience of the artistic productions of the Far East. One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels. By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was, moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so as a child; I was a perfect imp." Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief--traps arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened, the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono' (flatterer) and run away and hide myself." He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days after, she would discover it half-rotten. Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a lap-dog." But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore, and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys, and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy, of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs. Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling, whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled, for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion over the Celtic mind. Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled "Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy. He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings, ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not "ghosts." The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain, brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before the accident at Ushaw. The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from eyestrain. After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre de la Pitié et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant incidents made too important. "Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in me--thus producing obvious incongruities." "My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish mind by a certain cousin Jane--apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell fire if he did not believe in God. When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later, dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were apparently uninfluenced by her religious views. In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane, Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of those who wanted to come and go daily to London. Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street. When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt--we see his name assigned by the Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866--the house at Redhill was given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment. Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance. Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction--but was not sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an annuity of (I think, but am not sure) £500. 'Henry,' who had 'made himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own, as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor, but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'--at fourteen. I used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a year or two.... "Well,--there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under pressure of work, I have to say good-bye. "Lovingly ever, "LAFCADIO HEARN." In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if accurately known, give revelation about some other matters." CHAPTER III TRAMORE "If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers.... When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'? "So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its own thick breath.'" Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's. There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness, something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse, raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos, sometimes of inspiration. Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes unconsciously, memories of these childish days. At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams.... Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world, the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries, the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral. The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"[3] shows his inspiration at its best. Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the _Commercial_, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of last century. [3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin. "Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with sudden light. _Chita_, at the Viosca Chénière, conquering her terror of the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the dawn--like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; _Chita_ learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which, the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds, darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own childish existence at Tramore. For him, as for _Chita_, there was no factitious life those days, no obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without. When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay. Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered for his habit of "drawing the long bow." Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was not distinguished by accuracy of statement. The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world. While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul entrenched itself. Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it, recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came." It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as having been found amongst his papers after his death. His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly, stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however, exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear. Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediæval creed seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate. The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow; the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places, but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar.... After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees, in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain. A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the "Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city of artistic appreciation and accomplishment. CHAPTER IV USHAW "Really there is nothing quite so holy as a College friendship. Two lads, absolutely innocent of everything in the world or in life, living in ideals of duty and dreams of future miracles, and telling each other all their troubles, and bracing each other up. I had such a friend once. We were both about fifteen when separated. Our friendship began with a fight, of which I got the worst; then my friend became for me a sort of ideal which still lives. I should be almost afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other so): but your letter brought his voice and face back--just as if his ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder." St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, is situated on a slope of the Yorkshire Hills, near Durham. In the estimation of English Roman Catholics, it stands next to Stonyhurst as an educational establishment. Since Patrick Lafcadio Hearn's days it has counted amongst its pupils Francis Thomson, the poet, and Cardinal Wiseman, the archbishop, both of whom ever retained an affectionate and respectful memory of their Alma Mater. Lafcadio Hearn was sent there from Redhill in Surrey, arriving on September 9th, 1863, at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Brenane is not likely to have been a determining influence in sending him to college. For all her narrow-minded piety, the old lady was warm-hearted and intensely attached to Lafcadio, and must have known how unfitted he was for collegiate life in consequence of constitutional delicacy and defective eyesight. We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his religious education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early impressions. That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says: "You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic." Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the "mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This disposes of one of the many Hearn myths. That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject" was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching. All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst those whom the French term _deséquilibrés_, one of those ill-poised and erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to madness. Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism was artistic and æsthetic. Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof. "I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!" That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist? If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his prototype, Flaubert, there was a _fond d'ecclésiastique_ in Hearn's nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry, and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line? It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger, better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry, French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition for three years of his residence at Ushaw. He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance on many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible dream of modern æsthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.' "Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas, and the Sagas, and the Chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of the Vikings and Berserks, he had at his finger ends, because they were mighty and awesomely grand." Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from Kobe, in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me incapacitated to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of having dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge of some one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything I learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..." In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D----, one of those in his class at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you much about him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember him as a boy about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming with delight at some of his many mischievous plots with which he disturbed the College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or three classes, or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But he was always considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and the terror of his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I fancy very popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody, but he loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or of glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,'[4] who was one of his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many whippings, wrote poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in fact, quite irresponsible." [4] I give this name as it is written in Canon D----'s letter. Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of Ushaw College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:-- "He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc. "As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who were considered very good English writers--for boys. In other subjects, he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose he exerted himself except in English. "I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to say and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from the Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and brightness, disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He was so very curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that you felt he might do anything in different surroundings." Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat the same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati, Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it. His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very close to his eyes. He had a great taste for the strange and weird, and had a certain humour of a grim character. There was always something mysterious about him, a mystery which he delighted in increasing rather than dissipating. The confession which he is supposed to have made to Father William Wrennal that he hoped the devil would come to him in the form of a beautiful woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the desert, was worthy of his fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic mischief and humour. Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel. His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects, and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque. Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces, and glinting on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts shrieking in the gale--these were favourite topics of conversation, and in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich. "I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in, I think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'[5] This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a correct copy of it:-- [5] "High Figures" is the name of a class or "School" (as we call "classes" at Ushaw), _e.g._ Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or class for two years, _e.g._ High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to be moved up into the next class, Grammar. Each class has its own library, so that a boy in the class of High Figures would not be allowed to intrude into the Library of the school or class above him, Grammar. "'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door, Massive and quaint, of the days of yore; When the spectral forms of the mighty dead Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread; When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak Shrieks forth his note so wild, And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak In the moonlight soft and mild, When the dead in the lonely vaults below Rise up in grim array And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow, Weird forms, unknown in day; When the dismal death-bells clang so near, Sounding o'er world and lea, And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear Like the moan of the sobbing sea.' "He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd. His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when the passing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell summoned us again to study. "A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio said his address was longer--'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, Space, God.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest. "You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland or Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during the vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I believe I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having told me anything of his relations with his family, or of his childhood." It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a heading to this chapter. At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of Hearn's subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to slip from his hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched out at school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in Jesuitical schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in Dublin in the hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation. Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton, has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the Japanese army. There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he imagined, to the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests, and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos. Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in appearance, especially to women, always pursued him. Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power, Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power. Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist, declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind. "I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he says, in his essay on "Dust." The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power. It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw. Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees. Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as time went on. Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable any longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded her that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and declared her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a Christian household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that she, who only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned a home of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail himself of Molyneux's hospitality. At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane, had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady. The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore. Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited it would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont to say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself to things of the imagination and spirit." Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live upon, might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating vague philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of being driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and children? CHAPTER V LONDON "In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no escape, save by an iron ladder. "As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the climber."[6] [6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr. Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open, or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and excitable imagination. The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law. It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne and chicken mayonnaise on board. Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance. Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping, was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work. As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to submit to discipline or restraint of any kind. Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home, surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was forced to become a servant. This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr. Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses. With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going. At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up. He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self, lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power. Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then, as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight and acute dyspepsia. Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel. Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections. After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic material? Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling, as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance, that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. Analysing the feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising; for our best work is often out of the unconscious." Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which was possible to a man of his temperament. "All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all, his own genius. "Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making." Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings, strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum, where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain? Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good and true.'" We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the white-winged ships, "swift Hermæ of traffic--ghosts of the infinite ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day destined to become the interpreter. We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were the sheets--destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical stuff--that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain. "One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two little words--'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain--pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and dead suns. "For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7] [7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock. It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the future. Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers, called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The _Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans, and _kakemonos_ embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon marbles." Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text, seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy." Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter," indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters contributed to the _Commercial_ from New Orleans. There is a certain pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and character of _Midwinter_ made to his imagination. "What had I known of strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and cheated and starved." Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain endeavoured to penetrate. Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven," alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who had 'run away from a Monastery _in Wales_,' and who still had part of his monk's garb for clothing." In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow, told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France, and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or destroyed. Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman Catholic institution of the _Petits Précepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen. Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle Richard, who was living there at the time. Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor, disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore, not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila. It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris, where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to clutch the Unattainable." A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work. It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin," while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_, and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, François Millet, in poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing "The Sowers" and "The Angelus." Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's. Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers. However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity. It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit, which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors. It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands, Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"--"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt. In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law. It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him. CHAPTER VI CINCINNATI "... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply telling her, 'I don't know.'"[8] [8] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later, Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr. Watkin's frugal meals." In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in the year 1859. "Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?" "To write, sir." "Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first, try your hand at writing later on." Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to, but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy, Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant, regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's weird tales. The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy, and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says, hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality, and conceived an immediate affection for the boy. Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati. Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself in considerable difficulties. Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food, he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a beauty and charm that never were hers--and under the title of "My First Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers. After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot." "My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson, when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle. "I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen from the house." This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses, unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen. His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft, delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was, yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did not. "I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was touchy--went off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends refused to do anything further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of doors. At last I became a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires, shovelled coals, etc., in exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on the floor of the smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half years, finding time to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap Weekly Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for them. I tried other occupations also--canvassing, show-card writing, etc. These brought enough to buy smoking tobacco and second-hand clothes--nothing more." It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop, with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law. In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"[9] Dr. George Milbury Gould alludes to this gentleman in the following terms:-- [9] Messrs. Fisher Unwin. "There is still living, an Irishman, to whom Lafcadio was sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was placed. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870." "He was not sure," says Gould in his account of an interview with Mr. Cullinane, "whether Mrs. Brenane was really Hearn's grand-aunt; the fact is, he declared that he knew nothing, and no one knew anything true of Hearn's life. Asked why the lad was shipped to him, he replied, 'I do not know--I do not even know whether he was related to my brother-in-law, Molyneux, or not.'" From these statements Gould infers that the boy couldn't stop in any school to which he was sent, that he was apparently an unwelcome charge upon his father's Irish relations. Every one, indeed, who had anything to do with him made haste to rid themselves of the obligation. The friendship with Mr. Watkin, the old English printer, was destined to last for the term of Hearn's life. Many of Hearn's friends in America have insinuated that Mr. Watkin exaggerated the strength of the tie that bound him to Lafcadio Hearn; but Hearn's letters to his sister bear out all the statements made in the introduction to the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." Even when Hearn succeeded in obtaining occupation elsewhere, he would return to Mr. Watkin's office during leisure hours, either for a talk with his friend, or, if Mr. Watkin was out, for a desultory reading of the books in the "library," the appellation by which the two or three shelves containing Mr. Watkin's heterogeneous collection was dignified. He was of no use in Mr. Watkin's business owing to defective eyesight, but when he returned after his day's work elsewhere, literary, political and religious subjects were discussed and quarrelled over. As was now and afterwards his custom with his friends, in spite of daily intercourse, Hearn kept up a frequent correspondence with Mr. Watkin. This correspondence has been edited and published by Mr. Milton Bronner under the title of "Letters from the Raven." Edgar Allan Poe had died in 1849, but the influence of his weird and strange genius was still pre-eminent in America. Early in their acquaintance Hearn established the habit of addressing Mr. Watkin as "Old Man" or "Dad," while on the other hand the boy, in consequence of his sallow complexion, black hair, and admiration for Poe's works, was known as the "Raven." During the long years of their correspondence, a drawing of a raven was generally placed in lieu of signature when Lafcadio wrote to Mr. Watkin. Many of these pen-and-ink sketches interspersed with other illustrations here and there through the letters show considerable talent for drawing, of a fantastic sort, that might have been developed, had Hearn's eyesight permitted, and had he not nourished other ambitions. Some of the letters are simply short statements left on the table for Mr. Watkin's perusal when he returned home, or a few lines of nonsense scribbled on a bit of paper and pinned on a door of the office. Often when Hearn was offended by some observation, or a reprimand administered by the older man, he would "run away in a huff." Mr. Watkin, who was genuinely attached to the erratic little genius and understood how to deal with him, would simply follow him, tell him not to be a fool, and bring him back again. In the fourth autobiographical fragment, found amongst Hearn's papers after his death, is one entitled "Intuition." He there alludes to Watkin as "the one countryman he knew in Cincinnati--a man who had preceded him into exile by nearly forty years." In a glass case at the entrance to a photographer's shop, Hearn had come across the photograph of a face, the first sight of which had left him breathless with wonder and delight.... The gaze of the large dark eyes, the aquiline curve of the nose, the mouth firm but fine--made him think of a falcon, in spite of the delicacy of the face.... He stood looking at it, and the more he looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed to grow like a fascination. But who was she? He dared not ask the owner of the gallery. To his old friend Watkin, therefore, he went and at once proposed a visit to the photographer's. The picture was as much a puzzle to him as to Hearn. For long years the incident of the photograph passed from Hearn's memory until, in a Southern city hundreds of miles away, he suddenly perceived, in a glass case in a druggist's shop, the same photograph. "Please tell me whose face that is," he asked. "Is it possible you do not know?" responded the druggist. "Surely you are joking?" Hearn answered in the negative. Then the man told him--it was that of the great tragedienne, Rachel. * * * * * Cincinnati is separated from Kentucky by the Ohio. It is there but a narrow river, and the Cincinnati folk were wont to migrate into Kentucky when there were lectures on spiritualism, revivalist meetings, or political haranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to make the journey when the day's work was done. Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of thought. We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle" as well as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its astral visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects through space. These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later, Hearn was on the staff of the _Enquirer_ as night reporter, his "Dad" often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as the water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi valley. At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the _Enquirer_ staff visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's Home" (he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati where business people of small means spend their declining years. An account of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The writer described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many pigeon-holes, holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels of Tual"--the letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman tottered when the reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings, and as he balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told, in a voice heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and how their friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition with the years. "I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloomy views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny reminded me of Poe at his best--or worst, as you might call it; only, in my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to my place when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a raven varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour he was in when he sketched it." Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can hardly be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of his statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to see him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be quite accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having spent nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures after his arrival, of his having worked as type-setter and proof-reader for the Robert Clarke Co., before seeking employment at Mr. Watkin's office. It was while he was sleeping on the bed of paper shavings behind Mr. Watkin's shop that he acted as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, librarian in the public library at Cincinnati. He mentions Thomas Vickers at various times in his letters to Krehbiel, and refers to rare books on music and copies of classical works to be found at the library. During all this period, wandering from place to place, endeavouring to find employment of any kind, the boy's underlying ambition was to obtain a position on the staff of one of the large daily newspapers, and thus work his way to a competency that would enable him to devote himself to literary work of his own. "I believe he would have signed his soul away to the devil," one of his colleagues says, "to get on terms of recognition with either Colonel John Cockerill, then managing editor of the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or Mr. Henderson, the city editor of the _Commercial_." Though Hearn may not have signed his soul to the devil, he certainly sold his genius to ignoble uses when he wrote his well-known description of the tan-yard murder. His ambition however was gratified. A reporter who could thus cater to the public greed for horrors was an asset to the Cincinnati press. We have an account, given by John Cockerill, twenty years later, of Hearn's first visit to the _Enquirer_:-- "One day there came to the office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms. "When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable. "Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written.... "From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances." A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the city from that exalted position. Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.' Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose." Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them and to his fellow-reporters. After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning, under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire. Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art, he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position, the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist of Hearn's quality. Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales, included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed." As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the matter of social morality. When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp" was refused admittance to the pages of a San Francisco magazine as likely to shock the sentiments of its readers and injure the circulation of the periodical in consequence of the morals of the mother of the _Luck_, we are not surprised that Hearn's attempt to introduce the American public to the masterpieces of the French Impressionist School was foredoomed to failure. There is a certain naïve, determined defiance of convention in his insistence on gaining admiration both from his friends and the public for productions that were really quite unsuited to general circulation at that time in America. We find him, for instance, recommending the perusal of "Mdlle. de Maupin" to a clergyman of the Established Church and sending a copy of Gautier's poems to Miss Bisland in New Orleans. "I shall stick," he says, "to my pedestal of faith in literary possibilities like an Egyptian Colossus with a broken nose, seated solemnly in the gloom of my own originality, seeking no reward save the satisfaction of creating something beautiful; but this is worth working for." It is a noteworthy fact and one that may be mentioned here that, in spite of his extraordinary mastery of the subtleties of the French language, he always spoke French with an atrociously bad accent. "He had a very bad ear," his friend, Henry Krehbiel, tells us in his article on "Hearn and Folk Music," "organically incapable of humming the simplest tune; he could not even sing the scale, a thing that most people do naturally." From these Cincinnati days dates Hearn's hatred of the drudgery of journalism, "a really nefarious trade," he declared later; "it dwarfs, stifles and emasculates thought and style.... The journalist of to-day is obliged to hold himself in readiness to serve any cause.... If he can enrich himself quickly and acquire comparative independence, then, indeed, he is able to utter his heart's sentiments and indulge his tastes...." Amongst his colleagues on the staff of the _Enquirer_ Hearn was not popular. He was looked upon as what Eton boys call a "sap"; his fussiness about punctuation and style, soon earned for him the sobriquet of "Old Semi-Colon." This meticulous precision on the subject of punctuation and the value of words remained a passion with him all his life. He used to declare he felt about it as a painter would feel about the painting of his picture. He told his friend, Tunison, that the word "gray" if spelt "grey" gave him quite a different colour sensation. We remember his delightful outburst in a letter to Chamberlain, that has been so often quoted. "For me words have colour, form, character: they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations;--they have moods, humours, eccentricities:--they have tints, tones, personalities," etc., etc. Though Hearn did not get on with others of the newspaper staff, he formed ties of intimacy with several choice spirits then moving in the best literary circles of Cincinnati and now well known in the literary life of the United States. Henry Krehbiel, recognised in England and America as an eminent music lecturer and critic, was one of his most intimate friends. Joseph Tunison was another; he afterwards became editor of the _Dayton Journal_, and, as well as Krehbiel, wrote sympathetically of the little Irishman after his death, expressing indignation at the scurrilous attacks made upon his reputation by several papers in the United States. "He was a wonderfully attractive personality, full of quaint learning, and a certain unworldly wisdom. He had a fashion of dropping his friends one by one; or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing; whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit it would be hard to say. But he never spoke ill of them afterwards. It was not his way to tell much about himself; and what he did say was let out as if by accident in the course of conversation on other topics.... It was impossible to be long in his company without learning that his early years had been years of bitterness. His reminiscences of childhood included not only his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, but also a beautiful blonde lady, who had somehow turned his happiness to misery." CHAPTER VII VAGABONDAGE "Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black skin that remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should it not be beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is, and has been so acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced slave-owning races. Either Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps, told the world that after long living in Africa, the sight of white faces produced something like fear (and the evil spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the fairer, the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in the North, of its kind. But it is not, surely, comparable with the wonderful beauty of colour in other races."[10] [10] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. As to Hearn's more intimate life at this time there are many contradictory accounts. Published facts and the notoriety of legal proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and generally manage to work their way through any deposit of inaccurate scandal or imaginative rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set forth; otherwise how emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by discipline and self-control out of the depths into which at this time he fell? The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman, "Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries, which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of his unbalanced mental equipment. On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing reporter's work for the _Enquirer_ he fell under the "Shadow of the Ethiopian." In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and struggle. "He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs. Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat extremes of hate and love--a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature. Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been better for those dependent on us." The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged. Hearn, then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to return from work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the morning. She was a handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863 President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself. In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they talked much of her early days and years of slavery. His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no one so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible position. After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books. The _Enquirer_ had articles running through several issues in 1906 on the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after his death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws of Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto, or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole." It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his work called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it would have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of French writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so great an influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for alien races and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness, primitive impulses, as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and admiration of strange people, were a vital part of the impressionist creed, constituted, indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations of their unwholesome opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared his preference for the women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's earlier novels were but the histories of love affairs with women of "dusky races," either Eastern or Polynesian. Hearn, as we have said before, was an exemplification of the theory of heredity. The fancy for mulattos, Creoles and orientals, which he displayed all his life, is most likely to be accounted for as an inheritance from his Arabian and oriental ancestors on his mother's side. He but took up the dropped threads of his barbaric ancestry. All his life he preferred to mix in the outer confines of society; the "levee" at Cincinnati; the lower Creoles and mixed races at New Orleans; fishermen, gardeners, peasants, were chosen by preference as companions in Japan. He railed against civilisation. "The so-called improvements in civilisation have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see, hear, or find anything out. You are improving yourself out of the natural world. I want to get back amongst the monkeys and the parrots, under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an eternally lilac and luke-warm sea--where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an exertion.... Civilisation is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery! Surely a palm two hundred feet high is a finer thing in the natural order than seventy times seven New Yorks."[11] [11] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Hearn was a born rebel, and every incident of his life hitherto had goaded him into further rebellion against all constituted authority. That a race should be trampled upon by one regarding itself as superior was a state of things that he could not contemplate without a protest, and by his action he protested in the most emphatic manner possible. He never took into consideration whether it was wise to do so or not. Later, when the turbulent spirit of youth had settled down to accept the discipline of social laws and conventions, he took a very different view of the racial question in the United States and confessed the want of comprehension he had displayed on the subject. Writing years afterwards to a pupil in Japan, he alludes to the unfortunate incident in Cincinnati. He resolved to take the part of some people who were looked down upon in the place where he lived. He thought that those who looked down upon them were morally wrong, so he went over to their side. Then the rest of the people stopped speaking to him, and he hated them. But he was then too young to understand. The trouble was really caused by moral questions far larger than those he had been arguing about. Hearn was certainly correct in thinking that, from the point of view of the people amongst whom he was living, an attempt to legalise a union with a coloured woman was an unpardonable lapse from social law. Not only then, but for years afterwards, public opinion was strongly influenced against him in consequence of this lamentable incident. Even at the time of his death, in 1904, a perfect host of statements and distorted legends exaggerating all his lapses from conventional standards were raked up. Amongst other accusations, they declared that when in New Orleans he was the favoured admirer of Marie Levaux, known as "The Voodoo Queen." Page Baker, the editor of the _Times Democrat_ immediately came forward to defend Hearn from the charge. Referring to the Voodoo Queen, the article says: "All this wonderful tale is based upon the fact that Hearn, like every other newspaper man in New Orleans who thought there might be a story in it, entered into communication with a negro woman, who called herself 'Marie Levaux,' and pretended, falsely as was afterward shown, to know something of the mysteries of Voodooism. "Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on investigating for himself what he wrote about; but what the _Sun_ states is not only untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern city like New Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If Hearn had been the man the _Sun_ says he was, he could not have held the position he did a week, much less the long years he remained in this city.... He certainly was not conventional in the order of his life any more than he was in the product of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge upon him." In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the _Enquirer_, and in the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the _Commercial_, but he had too seriously wounded the susceptibilities of society in Cincinnati to make existence any longer comfortable, or, indeed, possible. The uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit his delicate constitution. He longed to get away. Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South, his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a November morning, were oddly connected with _Jean ah-Poquelin_. Even before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond the wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar sheds, to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion. A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes of the statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any difference of opinion with the editor of the _Commercial_. In fact, money for the journey was given to him as well as a roving commission for letters from Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the newspaper. CHAPTER VIII MEMPHIS "So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the perfume of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed--vivifying, illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion--the sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple. You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ ..."[12] [12] Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin. It was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio Hearn, with forty dollars in his pocket and a head full of dreams, started for Memphis on his way to New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr. Edward Henderson, editors of the _Commercial_, and his old friend, Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami depot to bid him God speed. Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced, and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication in the northern city he had left was Henry Watkin. Hieroglyphs of ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis, that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions. On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel. I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this time to the _Commercial_. These letters, his first professional work, except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St. Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit, giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which, combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day. A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the identification in the files of the _Commercial_ of these "Midwinter" letters. He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came, the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists lingering like shades upon its banks. "Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus." Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough, rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical pioneer--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation." Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader, were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union." To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the _Thompson Dean_ there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following him in the dark. It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself alone in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary hours of the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again, only by years--until the times and places of old friendships were forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams. At last the New Orleans steamer, the _Thompson Dean_, arrived, and Hearn floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and also, inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the flood-tide of his genius. A letter contributed to the _Commercial_, describing the "Fair Paradise of the South," the great sugar country, in which he now found himself, shows how he was gaining in the manipulation of his material, also gaining in the power of appreciating the splendour of the vision, the inmost ultimate secret Nature ever reveals to those who can comprehend and decipher it. As the little half-blind genius sat on the cotton bales on the deck of the _Thompson Dean_ those autumn days, peering forth one moment, the next with nose close to the paper, his pen scratching rapidly, describing the marvellous pictures, setting down the impressions that slipped by on either hand, all the joy of an imprisoned tumultuous soul set free, mentally and morally free, must have come to him. It breathes in every line, in every paragraph of his work. And not only was this passionate joy his, but also the exhilarating assurance of knowing that by self-denial, industry and the determination to succeed he had achieved and perfected the power to describe and expound the marvellous pageant to others. From the horizon widening in front of him, through the "Great South Gate," from "The Gulf" and the Tropics, from Martinique and Florida came the health-giving breeze, carrying on its wings courage, regeneration, and the promise of future recognition and fame. Many were his backslidings, even to the extent of meditating suicide during the first years of his sojourn in New Orleans, but never did he fall so morally low as at Cincinnati. That life of sordidness and ignominy was left behind, the unclean spirit exorcised and cast forth! He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight of his soul. Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the page athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the _Commercial_; some magic, bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor, inducing him to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his "Ozias Midwinter" correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the ordinary reading public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper. CHAPTER IX NEW ORLEANS "The infinite gulf of blue above seems a shoreless sea, whose foam is stars, a myriad million lights are throbbing and flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with perfume prevails over the land,--made only more impressive by the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy voices of business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton presses closed, and the city is half empty. So that the time is really inspiring. But I must wait to record the inspiration in some more energetic climate." It is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin that we are able to follow his more intimate feelings and mode of life at this period of his career. He was at first extravagantly enthusiastic about the quaint beauty and novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was to be found in this half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her pitiful decay, it still was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view of New Orleans was soon dissipated by pressing financial anxiety. He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds, as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper correspondence. Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to the fire, smoking his pipe of "_terre Gambièse_," conjuring up fancies of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while a "voice from the far tropics called to him across the darkness." It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate, it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for mastering the ignoble necessity for making expenditure tally with revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in the matter of ways and means. Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_ hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business affairs from sending a reply for some weeks. His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time, surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched close by. "I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American city appals me--because I remember." The _Hermes_ of �schylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in any other city in the world. From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric façades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves, dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron, framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels, American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings. We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria and the Gulf. He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined, refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to allow them to be sent away to the cities up North. We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some of his oranges, a dozen at six cents. From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the ancient régime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory from the carven stone. Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground, with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque, through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed." The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their country that had sold them for expediency. With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of those who had once been opulent--the princely misery that never doffed its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on bread and orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the _mont de piété_) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the pretty misery, young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too jocosely to have its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers, and crying for hunger after they were gone. Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue. During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various intervals contributed letters to the _Commercial_. Now that his genius has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value; but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting. The American public wanted a clear and dispassionate view of political affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect trade in the state of Ohio. We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following, and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:-- "I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?" In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head above water until regular work came his way. Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments. Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which, instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr. Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a broken capital of the Parthenon." About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city, desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a severe attack of "dengue" fever. "I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson. It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river, its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles, pillars of verandahs, lamps over government letter-boxes, glimmered the white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after sunset. After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected. "I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor failed," he tells his sister. In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences, he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair, between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the infinite world. CHAPTER X WIDER HORIZONS "There are no more mysteries--except what are called hearts, those points at which individuals rarely touch each other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out of soul-sight."[13] [13] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular literary work. Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection, and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him the book was dedicated. * * * * * After the yellow fever had passed away "there were plenty of vacancies waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his sister.... A daily newspaper called the _Item_ was at that time issued in New Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its production, "items" taken from European and American sources filling most of its columns. Hearn described it as a poor little sheet going no farther north than St. Louis. He was offered the assistant-editorship; the leisure that he found for literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing with strange characters, invaluable as literary material--Creoles, Spaniards, Mexicans--all that curious, heterogeneous society peculiar to New Orleans. If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and outcasts from the world of so-called respectability. At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same roof as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious shrine. This was quite sufficient to associate his name with hers, and many were the unfounded rumours--Nemesis of the unfortunate episode with Althea Foley at Cincinnati--which floated northwards regarding the manner of his life. Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry of ancient India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and emotion, the illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the _Item_ by weird and mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds, considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own genius. The routine of his life at this time is given in letters written to his "old Dad" and his friend, Krehbiel. The same ascetic scorn for material comfort, heritage of his oriental ancestry, seems to have distinguished him at this period in New Orleans, as later in Japan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the office, "concocting devilment" for the _Item_, his Spanish lessons with José de Jesus y Preciado, the "peripatetic blasphemy," as he named him afterwards, dinner at a Chinese restaurant for an infinitesimal sum, an hour or two spent at second-hand book-stalls, and home to bed. There is, I am told, an individual, Armand Hawkins by name, owner of an ancient book-store at New Orleans, still alive, who remembers the curious little genius, with his prominent eyes, wonderful knowledge on all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects recounted in a soft, musical voice, who used to come almost daily to visit his book-store. He it was who enabled Hearn to get together the library about which there has been so much discussion since his death. Next to his love of buying old books, Hearn's great indulgence seems to have been smoking, not cigars, but pipes of every make and description. The glimpses we get of him from his own letters and from reminiscences collected from various people in New Orleans all give the same impression. A Bohemian love of vagabondage, picking up impressions here and there, some of which were set down in pencil, some in ink; as far as his eyesight would permit, many were the sketches made at this time. None of them have been preserved, except the very clever Mephistophelian one sent to Mr. Watkin and reproduced in the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." "He was a gifted creature," says a lady who knew him at this time. "He came fluttering in and out of our house like a shy moth, and was adored by my children." He had no ambitions, no loves, no anxieties, sometimes a vague unrest without a motive, sometimes a feeling as if his heart were winged and trying to soar; sometimes a half-crazy passion for a great night with wine and women and music; but the wandering passion was strongest of all, and he felt no inclination to avail himself of the only anchor which keeps the ship of a man's life in port.... Nights were so liquid with tropic moonlight, days so splendid with green and gold, summer so languid with perfume and warmth, that he hardly knew whether he was dreaming or awake. In 1881, Hearn succeeded in becoming a member of the staff of the leading New Orleans paper, the _Times Democrat_, "the largest paper," he tells his sister, "in the Southern States." He now seemed to have entered on a halcyon period of life--congenial society, romantic and interesting surroundings. Penetrated with enthusiasm for the modern French literary school as he was, he here met intellects and temperaments akin to his own. Now he was enabled to get his translations from Gautier and Baudelaire printed, and read for the first time by an appreciative public. "Everybody was kind," he tells his sister; "I became well and strong, lived steadily, spent my salary on books. I was thus able to make up for my deficiencies of education.... I had only a few hours of work each day;--plenty of time to study. I wrote novels and other books which literary circles approved of." With Page Baker, the owner and editor-in-chief of the _Times Democrat_, he formed a salutary and enduring friendship. The very difference in character between the two seems to have made the bond all the more enduring. Page Baker was a man of great business capacity, and at the same time keen discrimination in literary affairs. From the first he conceived the highest opinion of Hearn's literary ability. However fantastic or out-of-the-way his contributions to the columns of the _Times Democrat_, they were always inserted without elision. Years afterwards, writing to him from Japan, Hearn declares, in answer to a panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his Japanese books, that the most delightful criticisms he ever had were Page Baker's own readings aloud of his vagaries in the "_T. D._" office, after the proofs came down, just fresh from the composition room, with the wet, sharp, inky smell still on the paper. Baker, apparently, in 1893 sent him substantial help, and Hearn writes thanking him from the bottom of his much-scarified heart. Often amidst the cramped, austere conditions of his existence in Japan, he recalled these days of communion with congenial spirits at New Orleans, and work with his colleagues at the _Times Democrat_ office. "Ghosts! After getting your letter last night I dreamed. Do you remember that splendid Creole who used to be your city editor--John----?--is it not a sin that I have forgotten his name? He sat in a big chair in the old office, and told me wonderful things, which I could not recall on waking." In a letter dated July 7, 1882, Hearn tells Mr. Watkin that he had entered into an arrangement with Worthington, the publisher, for the issuing of his translation of Gautier's stories made at Cincinnati. It was to cost him one hundred and fifty dollars, but there was an understanding that this money was to be repaid by royalties on the sale of the book and any extra profits. He announced his intention of going North in a few months by way of Cincinnati, as he wished to see Worthington about his new publication. Though he was making, he said, the respectable wage of thirty dollars a week for five hours' work a day, he felt enervated by the climate, incapable of any long stretch of work, and thought change to a northern climate for a bit might stimulate his intellectual powers. He then touched on the changes that passing years had wrought in his outlook on life. "Less despondent, but less hopeful; wiser a little and more silent; less nervous, but less merry; ... not strictly economical, but coming to it steadily." His horizons were widening, the accomplishment of a fixed purpose in life was really the only pleasurable experience, and the grasp of a friendly hand the only real satisfaction of an existence that wisdom declared a delusion and a snare. Hearn at times indulged in exaggerated fits of economy, the one thought that animated him being the idea of freeing himself from the yoke of dependence on the whims of employers--from the harness of journalism. He made up his mind to keep house for himself, so hired a room in the northern end of the French quarter, and purchased a complete set of cooking utensils and kitchen ware. He succeeded in reducing his expenses to two dollars a week, and kept them at that (exclusive of rent), although his salary rose to thirty dollars a week. Having saved a respectable sum, he formed the fantastical idea of trying to keep a restaurant, run on the lines of the cheap Spanish and Chinese restaurants he had been wont to frequent. "Business--ye Antiquities"; hard, practical business! he told Krehbiel; honourable, respectable business, but devoid of dreamful illusions. "Alas, this is no world for dreaming." The venture ended as might have been expected. Hearn had not inherited the commercial instincts of his ancestors who sold oil and wine in the Ionian Islands; his partner robbed him of all the money he had invested, and decamped, leaving him saddled with the restaurant and a considerable number of debts. A swindling building society seems to have absorbed the rest of his savings. After these two catastrophes the little man became almost comically terrified at financial enterprise of any kind, even the investment of money in dividend-paying concerns. When Captain Mitchell McDonald later, in Japan, endeavoured to induce him to put his money into various lucrative concerns, Hearn declared that he would prefer to lose everything he owned than submit to the worry of investing it. The mere idea of business was "a horror, a nightmare, a torture unspeakable." Though apparently only journalising and translating, Hearn was piling up experiences and sensations, not making use of them except in letters, but laying down the concrete and setting the foundation for his work in the West Indies and Japan. "The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a friendly, distant party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away." Emerson did not take into account those apparently infertile periods in an artist's life, when the days come and go, but though they pass silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their passage unproductive. How invaluable, for instance, was Hearn's study of Creole proverbs for his "Two Years in the French West Indies." How invaluable for his interpretation of the Orient were the studies he undertook for "Strange Leaves from Strange Literature," and his six small adaptations entitled "Chinese Ghosts." After several refusals "Stray Leaves" was accepted for publication by Osgood. He thus announced the fact to his friend Krehbiel:-- "DEAR K. (Private), "'Stray Leaves,' etc., have been accepted by James R. Osgood and Co. Congratulate your little Dreamer of Monstrous Dreams, "Aschadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah, "Bismillah, "Allah-hu-akbar." The book was dedicated to "Page M. Baker, Editor of the New Orleans _Times Democrat_." This series of small sketches is typical of the clarity of language and purity of thought that invariably distinguish Hearn's work; but it lacks the realism, the keenness of _choses vues_, so characteristic of his Japanese sketches. There is none of the haunting, moving tragedy and ghostliness, the spiritual imagination and introspection of "Kokoro" or the "Exotics." Though polished and scholarly, showing refinement in the use of words, the interest is remote and visionary, permeated here and there also with a certain amount of Celtic sentimentality, a "Tommy Moore" flavour, somewhat too saccharine in quality. The one, for instance, called "Boutimar" treats of a very hackneyed subject, the offering of the water of youth, and life without end, to Solomon, and the sage's refusal, because of the remembrance suggested by Boutimar that he would outlive children, friends and all whom he loved; therefore "Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond dew of the heart, which is tears." "Chinese Ghosts," though distinguished also by that _soigneux_ flavour that gives a slightly artificial impression, holds far more the distinctive flavour of Hearn's genius. His own soul is written into the legend of "Pu the potter." "Convinced that a soul cannot be divided, Pu entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for the soul of his Vase." By the publication of the "Letters from the Raven" we are enabled to push those to Krehbiel, published by Miss Bisland, into place, and assign fairly accurate dates to each of them. He tells Mr. Watkin that he was six months before finding a fixed residence. In August, 1878, he writes inviting him to come in the autumn to pay him a visit, and telling him of delightful rooms with five large windows opening on piazzas, shaded by banana-trees. This apparently is the house in St. Louis Street, which he describes to Krehbiel. Miss Bisland places it almost at the beginning of the series, but it must have been written at a considerably later period. How picturesque and vivid is his description! With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway, with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a hoary dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball," with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and rising to the ceiling. Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw, but an immaterial and spiritual world as well. CHAPTER XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS "Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem strange in words, appears very strange upon paper." Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed, for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles, his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity. To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work. Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion, especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument; these he would leave later on Gould's study table. To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour. Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature, inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed amongst an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought; his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of spirit--perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding him--a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of remarkable picturesqueness and reality. The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the world. Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore, been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories, incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all, in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are addressed. It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever cometh.'" He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles, publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist, he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable." Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a particle of literary jealousy in his composition. To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical. You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think." Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others would reach the same standard. In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College. He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose. In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make his a trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though you were passing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape. You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical passage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude, others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries, freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen. Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty, all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14] [14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson, Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at Kumamoto entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century," because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" reminded him of Miss Bisland. He pronounced Matthew Arnold to be "one of the colossal humbugs of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and an unutterably dreary essayist," because at the moment he was animated by one of his intense enthusiasms for _Edwin_ Arnold, whose acquaintance Hearn had made during one of Arnold's visits to Japan. "Far the nobler man and writer, permeated with the beauties of strong faiths and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in some happier era, may bless mankind with the universal religion in perfect harmony with the truths of science, and the better nature of humanity." But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique or partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpassed, here and there expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when passing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are shimmering, a mass of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the dullest subjects--writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the subject of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain force, he suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and Shintoism. "There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and race feeling. I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a Polish brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells the story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still under the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least murmur,--'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands fell, but the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At last, old Steinmetz gave a signal--_the_ signal. The bugles rang out with the force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air forbidden ever to be sung or heard at other times--the national air (you know it)--'_No! Poland is not dead_!' And with that crash of brass all that lives of the brigade was hurled at the French batteries. Mechanical power, if absolutely irresistible, might fling back such a charge, but no human power. For old Steinmetz had made the mightiest appeal to those 'Polish brutes' that man, God, or devil could make, the appeal to the ghost of the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a thousand years." Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas, connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely recounted:-- "'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous, audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in my heart still." Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance. Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysanthême," Hearn retained the same admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaître or Anatole France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die, one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read 'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..." Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement, repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his soft musical voice. A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement. Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the Japanese kimono. At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he was a much more responsible and important person than the little "brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office, turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes, the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always photographed in profile looking down. In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice; seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much, and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected, companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly, he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion, tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious. Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting." Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy, diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in the streets of Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step, singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional headgear for the enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel shirt, that he habitually wore. Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do. "Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts! Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves." In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have nothing that was not of the best make and quality. In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd, nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you came in contact with him. CHAPTER XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS "The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses and change them several times a day; and the multitude of dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to the multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and people doubted their own senses when they saw these things ... and the men who most admired her could not presume to fall in love with her because that would have been absurd. She had altogether too many souls." The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he had hitherto known entered his life, an influence destined to last for close on a quarter of a century, from these New Orleans days until the month of September, 1904, when he died. In all the annals of literary friendships between men and women, it is difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory than this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange little Irish genius. Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more tender, none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and friendship, as told in his letters. The affection between Jean Jacques Ampère and Madame Récamier is the one that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is reversed. Madame Récamier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity, shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him in the tussle of life. Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his side. "There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore, "whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement." Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed conviction that her love--as love is understood in common parlance--could never be his. And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not; she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a neophyte, also worshipped. * * * * * Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner, ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of journalistic work in New Orleans. Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the _Times Democrat_. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed of what were known as "Hearn's admirers." His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them all--love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of green hashisch. One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse-- "My heart would hear her and beat Had I lain for a century dead;-- Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red." The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the _Times Democrat_. There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years, wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic" was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitchell McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to the expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story in which I first used it--years and years ago. Don't return the thing--it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush." Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French Impressionist school. The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems. A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love, yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she, unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away forever. Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron. Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence, dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself in the mediocrity to which she belonged. Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness, and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought, _une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could give the same sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a particular variety of savage, that he could not understand--and was afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since then I have become grey and the father of three boys." For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems, he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres françaises' (as Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy...." Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her, mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom in the room--but in the future, which was black without stars!" In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the Tertiary epoch--three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most ancient branch of humanity." It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was written and contributed to _Harper's Magazine_ under the title of "Torn Letters." We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his genius and quickened his pen. I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front. In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the _Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters. She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books? "... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow, but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case, this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches, the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details, that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being fragmentary and unfinished. After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly, writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope. "It is a formality--and you are you; and you are not a formality--but a somewhat--and I am only I."[15] [15] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional life. During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies for his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years. The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a word:-- "Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed solid was breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very foolish--made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the Unknown for Art's sake,--or rather, you _must_ obey them. The Spahi's fascination by the invisible forces was purely physical. I think I am right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance compelling another change. "The carriage--no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I shan't put anybody's name to it."[16] [16] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia. On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to call at the office of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. On her arrival at eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss Bisland consented. After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she published her experiences in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. These contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period. Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return. He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never audible in dreams. In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in the _Tribune_ there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,--an absurd sense of absolute loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for you to win your race--so that every one may admire you still more, and your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your portrait--in spite of you--appear in some French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..." I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face. "It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you--all the Me's that were--keep asking the Me that is, for something always refused;--and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot see--you can only feel; and I can see,--and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,--and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come--and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ... what was it? "Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of it,--just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly exposed.... Will you ever be _like that always_ for any one being?--I hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the leaves." Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and she married Mr. Wetmore. Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between the time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the _jeune fille un peu farouche_, who in distant New Orleans days had understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's unsophisticated enthusiasm. She had written to him, and he gives her a whimsically pathetic answer, touching on memories, on thoughts, on aspirations, which had been a closed book for so long a period of time, and now, when re-opened, was seen to be printed as clearly on mind and heart as if he had parted with her but an hour before. About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September, 1904--the month in which he died--comes his last. He tells her that to see her handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was a great pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was undeserved. He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese Miscellany" which he had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its way, and perhaps you will later on find no reason to be sorry for your good opinions of the writer. I presume that you are far too clever to believe more than truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a few estimable people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...." He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing to her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear in book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects and flowers, and queer small things--and leave the subject of the destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof. "May all good things ever come to you, and abide." It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years, that he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any affection or sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may read," is this record of a devotion and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a century, lasting intact through fair years and foul, through absence, change of scene, even of nationality. "Fear not, I say again; believe it true That not as men mete shall I measure you...." Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for the estimation of human character and genius. CHAPTER XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE "For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man. Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that even now there does not remain one place on earth where life has not been freely given for love or duty?" Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of operations where effective work and fame awaited him. "Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin. "Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor I may do well in Japan." When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied from photographs, of the principal exhibits. On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense as did also the representations of the matchless mountain Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara. It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he ascended Fuji-no-yama. * * * * * A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last century. One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death. The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a sun." Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with the offending individual. "A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity--all sensed existences--are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...." This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had appeared before. It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature. Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately, moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it, "Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were eliminated. These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world. In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'" It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn, in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science. Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty." The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man. Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied. It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets. Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound interest!" There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him lying on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a pantheist. After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though he confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a Russian Mass would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Mass, interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II. In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy, contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise Shintoism and Buddhism with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer. Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement that "ancestor worship was the root of all religion." Cut off from communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, asserting that the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--was the beginning of the religious sentiment in man. It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead. From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found Spencer declaring that ancestor worship, the influence of spirits or ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same idea. "The real religion of Japan," he says in his essay on the ancient cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor worship.' Patriotism belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears the approval of ghostly witnesses." Mr. Robert Young, editor of the _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason, who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of Japanese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor worship. The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead." Nature worship, the worship of the sun, that gave its name to the ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the ancient Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their "ancestral spirits." In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most ancient Japanese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn in Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the scientific theory of evolution. "He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the æsthetic heart of Japan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound,--a compound so rare as to have introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before. More than any other living author he has added a new thrill to our intellectual experience." When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori, where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought--you will perchance be shown a wonderful fabric minutely intersected with delicate traceries on a dark-coloured texture. If you are accompanied by any one who is acquainted with ancient Japanese embroidery, they will show you that these traceries are fine Japanese ideographs; poems, proverbs, legends, embroidered by the laying on of thread by thread all over the tissue, producing a most harmonious and beautiful effect. Thus did Hearn, like these ancient artificers, weave ancient theories of pre-existence and Karma into spiritual fantasies and imaginations. Ever in consonance with wider interests his work opened up strange regions of dreamland, touched trains of thought that run far beyond the boundaries of men's ordinary mental horizon. In his sketch, for instance, called the "Mountain of Skulls,"[17] how weirdly does he make use of the idea of pre-existence. A young man and his guide are pictured climbing up a mountain, where was no beaten path, the way lying over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments. [17] "In Ghostly Japan," Little, Brown & Co. Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull crashings.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth that was not stone--and lifted it--and was startled by the cheekless gibe of death. In his inimitable way, Hearn tells how the dawn breaks, casting a light on the monstrous measureless height round them. "All of these skulls and dust of bones, my son, are your own!" says his guide. "Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires." The Buddhist idea of pre-existence has been believed in by orientals from time immemorial; in the Sacontala the Indian poet, Calidas, says: "Perhaps the sadness of men, in seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music, arises from some remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence." The idea has been re-echoed by many in our own time, but by none more exquisitely and fancifully than by Lafcadio Hearn. In one of his sketches, entitled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies, the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines. "The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,--that the mystery was of other existences than mine."[18] [18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co. Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution--created by experiences of vanished being more countless than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark the sadness only lingered--unutterable--profound. CHAPTER XIV WEST INDIES "Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes from the hills--all cool out of the sleep of the forest, ... and the wild high winds that run roughling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound. And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green drenched with silent pouring of creepers ... and the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea.... And the violet velvet distances of evening, and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning sunset,--when all the heavens seem filled with vapours of a molten sun!" In the early part of June, 1887, Hearn left New Orleans, and made his way to New York via Cincinnati. He went to see no one in the western city, where he had been so well known, but his old friend Mr. Watkin. Seated in the printing-office, then situated at 26, Longworth Street, they chatted together all day to the accompaniment of the ticking of the tall clock, loud and insistent, like the footstep of a man booted and spurred. We can imagine their discussions and arguments on the subject of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, Esoteric Buddhism, and "that which the Christian calls soul,--the Pantheist Nature,--the philosopher, the Unknowable." Hearn took his departure from Cincinnati late in the evening. A delightful trip, he wrote to Mr. Watkin, had brought him safe and sound to New York, where his dear friend, Krehbiel, was waiting to receive him and take him as a guest to his cosy home. "I cannot tell you," he adds, "how our little meeting delighted me, or how much I regretted to depart so soon.... I felt that I loved you more than I ever did before; feel also how much I owed you and will always owe you." Mr. Watkin, who died in the spring of 1911, aged eighty-six, spent the last years of his life in the "Old Men's Home" in Cincinnati. I received a letter from him a few months before his death relating to his friend Lafcadio Hearn. After this meeting in 1887, he was never fated to see his "Raven," but the old man kept religiously all the letters written to him by the odd little genius, who forty years before had so often sat with him in his printing-office, pouring forth his hopes and ambitions, his opinions and beliefs, his wild revolts and despairs. Loyally did the old printer add his voice to Krehbiel's and Tunison's in defence of his reputation after Hearn's death in 1904. The Krehbiels lived in a flat, 438, West Fifty-seventh Street, New York, and Lafcadio had arranged to stop with them there before he left New Orleans. Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the _Tribune_ necessitated his frequenting busy literary and social circles; it is easy to imagine how Hearn, just arrived from the easy-going, loafing life of New Orleans, must have suffered in such a _milieu_. Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds, "that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a horrible nightmare, that he had been a demophobe for years, hating crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help it;--just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,--to see no one except you and Joe." It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment and feeling must have arisen between them in that space of ten years, subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters transmitted across thousands of miles. Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn, Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion. Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths and Vandals--and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that claims art merit by a Gothic standard. From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on the other hand--no musician from a technical point of view--frankly declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's sonata or an opera by Wagner. Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "Hearn and Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions, by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The _glissando_ effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal splinterings.' They had for him a great charm." Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see her. "Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you--but since you live in Hell what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison. To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him, so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the _Barracouta_ for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared originally in _Harper's Monthly_. It was afterwards incorporated in his larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies." Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics, is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced enthusiasms. He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and, unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no snobs; everything primitive and morally pure. Confound fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms distilled _Elixir Vitæ_."[19] [19] Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin. There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friendship, the two comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion. During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on board the _Barracouta_, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird atmosphere, that make his Japanese books so arresting and original, is a delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep," written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:-- "Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people. On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than hear behind you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb oscillations of raiment,--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..." "Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated "A mon cher ami, "L�OPOLD ARNOUX "Notaire à Saint Pierre, Martinique. "Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des sympathies échangées, de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle à l'âme au doux Pays des Revenants." * * * * * Arnoux is mentioned subsequently in one or two of Hearn's letters. He alludes to suppers eaten with him at Grande Anse, in a little room opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of the sea, with the great voice thundering outside so that they could scarcely hear themselves speak, and the candle in the verrine fluttering like something afraid. In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly after the great eruption of Mt. Pelée that destroyed Saint Pierre, he alludes to Arnoux' garden, and speaks of a spray of arborescent fern that had been sent him. In the fragment, also, called "Vanished Light," he describes the amber shadows and courtyard filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. A little boy and girl run to meet him, and the father's voice, deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell, calls from an inner doorway, "Entrez donc, mon ami!" "But all this was--and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city; never again will its ways be trodden, never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams." Hearn definitely left Martinique in 1889, bound for America; having completed the task he had undertaken to do. Much as he loved the lazy, easy tropical life, "the perfumed peace of enormous azured noons, and the silent flickering of fire-flies through the lukewarm distance, the turquoise sky and the beautiful brown women," he began, before the end of his stay, to acknowledge that the resources of intellectual life were lacking; no libraries, no books in any language; a mind accustomed to discipline became, he said, like a garden long uncultivated, in which rare flowers returned to their primitive savage forms, smothered by rank, tough growths, which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. "Nature does not allow serious study or earnest work, and if you revolt against her, she leaves you helpless and tortured for months. One must not seek the Holy Ghost, the world is young here,--not old and wise and grey as in the North.... The material furnished by the tropics could only," he said, "be utilised in a Northern atmosphere...." The climate numbed mental life, and the inspiration he hoped for wouldn't come. During his stay in New York, while preparing "Youma" (a story written in the West Indies) for press and going over the proofs of "Chita" before its appearance in book form, he seems to have been in a pitiable state of destitution, obliged to make a translation of Anatole France's "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" to keep bread in his mouth. "So you read my translation of 'Sylvestre Bonnard?'" he says to his sister, writing from Japan. "I made it in two weeks, the Publishers paying me only $100. Of course the translation was too quickly done to be very good. I could not have written it all in the prescribed time, so a typewriter was hired for me. She was a pretty girl and I almost fell in love with her." In 1889, Hearn made that ill-advised visit to Philadelphia, to Dr. George Milbury Gould. He had only known this gentleman hitherto through an interchange of letters. Gould had written to him at New Orleans, expressing delight with some of Hearn's translations from the French, upon which Hearn, in his usual impulsive way rushed into a correspondence. This was in April, 1887. Gould had written several pamphlets on the subject of myopia and defective sight, these he sent to Hearn, and Hearn had responded, touching, as usual, on every sort of philosophical and literary subject. When he returned to the United States, after his two years in the French West Indies, he thought he would like to consult Gould on the subject of his eyesight. He therefore wrote, suggesting that if a quiet room could be found for him in Philadelphia he would try his luck there. Gould's account of his first appearance in his consulting-room is familiar to all who have read his book. "The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that he would certainly have run out of the house if by a tone of voice I had betrayed any curiosity or a doubt."[20] [20] "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin. Being extremely hard-up, Hearn was glad to accept an arrangement to stop in Gould's house for a while, sharing the family meals, but spending the greater part of the day at work on his proof-correcting in a room set apart for him. An incident, related by Gould, shows Hearn's extraordinary shyness and dislike to make the acquaintance of strangers. He was desirous of giving an idea of the music of Creole songs in his book on the West Indies, but, because of his ignorance of technical counterpoint, was unable to do so. Gould made an arrangement with a lady, an acquaintance, to repeat the airs on her piano as he whistled them. An appointment was made for a visit, but on their way to the house Hearn gradually became more and more silent, and his steps slower and slower. When at last he reached the doorstep and the bell had been rung, his courage failed, and before the servant appeared he had run, as if for life, and was half a square away. Gould claims to have made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character during the summer he stayed with him at Philadelphia. He declares that he first gave him a "soul," taught him the sense of duty, and made him appreciate the beauties of domestic life! A very beautiful story entitled "Karma," published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ after Hearn had left for Japan, certainly shows that a change of some sort was being wrought. "I never could find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood which, in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about sex, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect nature inspires a love that is fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive." Gould, also, much to the indignation of Hearn's friends, claims to have been the first person who definitely turned his thoughts to the Far East. Inasmuch as Hearn's mind had been impregnated with Japan from New Orleans days, this seems an unlikely statement; but of all unprofitable things in this world is the sifting of literary wrangles; Hearn's intimacy with George Milbury Gould has led to lawsuits, recriminations, and many distasteful and painful episodes between Gould and some of Hearn's friends. It is as well perhaps, therefore, to go into detail as little as possible. A passage occurs in one of Hearn's letters to Ellwood Hendrik which disposes of the matter. "Of course we shall never see each other again in this world, and what is the use of being unkind after all?... The effect is certainly to convince a man of forty-four that the less he has to do with his fellowmen the better, or, at least, that the less he has to do with the so-called 'cultured' the better...." From the city of doctors and Quakers, Hearn wrote several letters to Miss Bisland, at first entirely formal upon literary subjects. He couldn't say when he was going to New York, as he was tied up by business muddle, waiting for information, anxious beyond expression about an undecided plan, shivering with cold, and longing for the tropics. Lights are thrown upon his emotional and intellectual life in letters written in the autumn to Dr. Gould from New York. Japan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival Lowell, entitled "The Soul of the Far East," had just appeared. It apparently made a profound impression upon Hearn; every word he declared to be dynamic, as lucid and philosophical as Schopenhauer. All his former enthusiasm for Japan was aroused, he followed her progress with the deepest interest. The Japanese constitution had been promulgated in 1889, the first diet had met in Tokyo in 1890, the simultaneous reconstruction of her army, and creation of a navy, was gradually placing her in the van of far eastern nations; and, what was more important to commercial America, her trade had enormously developed under the new régime. Harpers, the publishers, came to the conclusion that it would be expedient to send one of their staff to Tokyo as regular correspondent; Hearn had succeeded in catching the attention of the public by his story of "Chita" and "A Midsummer Trip," that had both been published serially in their magazine. With his graphic and picturesque pen he would adequately, they thought, fill the post. In an interview with the managing director he was approached upon the subject, and, needless to say, eagerly accepted the offer. It was arranged, therefore, that, accompanied by Charles D. Weldon, one of Harpers' artists, he was to start in the beginning of the March of 1890 for the Far East. Little did Hearn realise that the strange land for which he was bound was to receive him forever, to make him one with its religion, its institutions, its nationality, and that, as he closed the door of the publisher's room that day, he was closing the door between himself and western civilisation forever. CHAPTER XV JAPAN "... Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk can give you all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream,--never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, into a world that is not and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century, over spaces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into a vanished age,--back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal! the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that all here is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence." Mrs. Wetmore is inaccurate in stating that Lafcadio Hearn started for Japan on May 8th, 1890. She must mean March, for he landed in Yokohama on Good Friday, April 13th, after a six weeks' journey. His paper, entitled "A Winter Journey to Japan," contributed to _Harper's_, describes a journey made in the depth of winter. He stepped from the railway depot, "not upon Canadian soil, but upon Canadian ice. Ice, many inches thick, sheeted the pavement, and lines of sleighs, instead of lines of hacks, waited before the station for passengers.... A pale-blue sky arched cloudlessly overhead; and grey Montreal lay angled very sharply in the keen air over the frozen miles of the St. Lawrence; sleighs were moving,--so far away that it looked like a crawling of beetles; and beyond the farther bank where ice-cakes made a high, white ridge, a line of purplish hills arose into the horizon...." Hearn's account of his journey through wastes of snow, up mountain sides, through long chasms, passing continually from sun to shadow, and from shadow to sun, the mountains interposing their white heads, and ever heaping themselves in a huge maze behind, are above the average of ordinary traveller's prose, but there is no page that can be called arresting or original. The impressions seem to be written to order, written, in fact, as subordinate to the artist's illustrations. So irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's illustrations become, that it is said to have been one of the reasons for the rupture of his contract with Harpers almost immediately after his arrival in Japan. The seventeen days that he passed on the northern Pacific, with their memories of heavy green seas and ghostly suns, the roaring of the rigging and spars against the gale, the steamer rocking like a cradle as she forced her way through the billowing waves, are well described. There is a weird touch, too, in his description of the Chinese steerage passengers, playing the game of "fan-tan" by the light of three candles at a low table covered with a bamboo mat. Deep in the hold below he imagines the sixty square boxes resembling tea-chests, covered with Chinese lettering, each containing the bones of a dead man, bones being sent back to melt into that Chinese soil from whence, by nature's vital chemistry, they were shapen ... and he imagines those labelled bones once crossing the same ocean on just such a ship, and smoking or dreaming their time away in just such berths, and playing the same strange play by such a yellow light, in even just such an atmosphere, heavy with vaporised opium. "Meanwhile, something has dropped out of the lives of some of us, as lives are reckoned by Occidental time,--a day. A day that will never come back again, unless we return by this same route,--over this same iron-grey waste, in the midst of which our lost day will wait for us,--perhaps in vain." Not from the stormy waters of the Pacific, however, not from gleaming Canadian pinnacles, or virgin forests, or dim cañons, was this child of the South and the Orient, this interpreter of mankind in all his exotic and strange manifestations to draw his inspiration, but from the valleys and hill-sides of that immemorial East that stretched in front of him, manured and fructified by untold centuries of thought and valour and belief. The spell fell on him from the moment that, through the transparent darkness of the cloudless April morning, he caught sight of the divine mountain. The first sight of Fuji, hanging above Yokohama Bay like a snowy ghost in the arch of the infinite day, is a sight never to be forgotten, a vision that, for the years Hearn was yet to traverse before the heavy, folded curtain fell on his stage of life, was destined to form the background of his poetic dreams and imaginings. Mr. Henry Watkin appears to have been the first person to whom Hearn wrote from Japan. So great was the charm of this new country that he seemed irresistibly called to impart some of the delight to those he had left behind in America. He told him that he passed much of his time in the temples, trying to see into the heart of the strange people surrounding him. He hoped to learn the language, he said, and become a part of the very soul of the people. He rhapsodised on the subject of the simple humanity of Japan and the Japanese.... He loved their gods, their customs, their dress, their bird-like, quavering songs, their houses, their superstitions, their faults. He was as sure as he was of death that their art was as far in advance of our art, as old Greek art was superior to that of the earliest art groupings. There was more art in a print by Hokusai, or those who came after him, than in a $100,000 painting. Occidentals were the barbarians. Most travellers when first visiting Japan see only its atmosphere of elfishness, of delicate fantasticality. The queer little streets, the quaint shops where people seem to be playing at buying and selling, the smiling, small people in "geta" and "kimono," the mouldering shrines with their odd images and gardens; but to Hearn a transfiguring light cast a ghostly radiance on ordinary sights and scenes, opening a world of suggestion, and inspiring him with an eloquent power of impressing upon others not only the visible picturesqueness and oddity of Japanese life, but that dim surmise of another and inscrutable humanity, that atmosphere of spirituality so inseparably a part of the religion Buddha preached to man. With almost sacramental solemnity, he gazed at the strange ideographs, wandered about the temple gardens, ascended the stairways leading to ancient shrines. What these experiences did for his genius is to be read in the first book inspired by the Orient while he was still under the glamour of enchantment. Amidst the turmoil, the rush, the struggle of our monster City of the West, if you open his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and read his description of his first visit to a Buddhist temple, you will find the silence of centuries descending upon your soul, the thrill of something above and beyond the commonplace of this everyday world. The bygone spirit of the race, with its hidden meanings and allegories, its myths and legends, the very essence of the heart of the people, that has lain sleeping in the temple gloom, will reveal itself; the faint odour of incense will float to your nostrils; the shuffling of pilgrim feet to your ear; you will see the priests sliding back screen after screen, pouring in light on the gilded bronzes and inscriptions; involuntarily you will look for the image of the Deity, of the presiding spirit between the altar groups of convoluted candelabra, and you will see "only a mirror! Symbolising what? Illusion? Or that the universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? Or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our hearts?" A storm soon passed across the heaven of his dreams. He suddenly terminated his contract with Harpers. "I am starved out," he wrote to Miss Bisland. "Do you think well enough of me to try to get me employment at a regular salary, somewhere in the United States?"... It is said that his reason for breaking with Harpers was a difference of opinion as to the relative position of himself and their artist, Mr. Charles D. Weldon. Hearn was expected to write up to the illustrations of the articles sent to the magazine, instead of the illustrations being done for Hearn's letterpress. Besides which, the fact transpired that the artist was receiving double Hearn's salary. The little Irishman was a mixture of exaggerated humility and sensitive pride on the score of his literary work; always in extremes in this, as in all else. He was also, as we have seen, extremely unbusinesslike; he never attempted to enter into an agreement of any kind. It seems difficult to accept his statement that his publishers, having made a success with "Chita" and "Youma" and "Two Years in the French West Indies," paid him only at the rate of five hundred dollars a year. No doubt Harpers might have been able to put a very different complexion on the matter. As a proof of the difficulty in conducting affairs with him, when he threw up his Japanese engagement he declined to accept royalties on books already in print. Harpers were obliged to make arrangements to transmit the money through a friend in Japan, and it was only after considerable persuasion and a lapse of several years that he was induced to accept it. So often in his career through life Hearn proved an exemplification of his own statement. Those who are checked by emotional feeling, where no check is placed on competition, must fail. Uncontrolled emotional feeling was the rock on which he split, at this and many other critical moments in his career. He had brought a letter of introduction, presumably from Harpers, the publishers, to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, professor, of English literature at the Tokyo University, the well-known author of "Things Japanese." On his arrival, Hearn thought of obtaining a position as teacher in a Japanese family, so as to master the spoken language. Simply to have a small room where he could write would satisfy him, he told Professor Chamberlain, and so long as he was boarded he would not ask for remuneration. He knew, also, that he could not carry out his fixed determination of writing a comprehensive book on Japan, without passing several years exclusively amongst the Japanese people. Chamberlain, however, saw at once that Hearn's capacities were far superior to those necessary for a private tutorship. Having been so long resident in Japan, and written so much upon the country, as well as occupying a professorship in Tokyo Imperial University, his influence in Japanese official life was considerable; he now bestirred himself, and succeeded in getting Hearn an appointment as English teacher in the Jinjo Chugakko, or ordinary middle school, at Matsue, in the province of Izumo, for the term of one year. A week or two later Hearn was able to announce to his dear sister, Elizabeth, that he was going to become a country schoolmaster in Japan. On several occasions Professor Chamberlain held out the kindly hand of comradeship to Lafcadio; to him Hearn owed his subsequent appointment at the Tokyo University. For five or six years the two men were bound together in a close communion of intellectual enthusiasms and mutual interests, as is easy to see by the wonderful correspondence recently published. To him and to Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, Lafcadio dedicated his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." TO THE FRIENDS WHOSE KINDNESS ALONE RENDERED POSSIBLE MY SOJOURN IN THE ORIENT PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N. AND BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOLOGY AND JAPANESE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES IN TOKEN OF AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE Then came a sudden break. After Hearn's death, Chamberlain, in discussing the subject, lamented "the severance of a connection with one so gifted." He made one or two attempts at renewal of intercourse, which were at first met with cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing him to desist from further endeavours. The key, perhaps, to Hearn's course of action, is to be found in some observations that he addresses to Professor Chamberlain just before the close of their friendship. They had been in correspondence on the subject of the connection of the tenets of Buddhism and scientific expositions of evolutionary science in England. "Dear Chamberlain: In writing to you, of course, I have not been writing a book, but simply setting down the thoughts and feelings of the moment as they come.... "I write a book exactly the same way; but all this has to be smoothed, ordinated, corrected, toned over twenty times before a page is ready.... I cannot help fearing that what you mean by 'justice and temperateness' means that you want me to write as if I were you, or at least to measure sentence or thought by your standard.... If I write well of a thing one day, and badly another, I expect my friend to discern that both impressions are true, and solve the contradiction--that is, if my letters are really wanted." The fact is that, if Hearn took up a philosophic or scientific opinion, he was determined to make all with whom he held converse share them, and if they did not do so at once, like the despotic oriental monarch, he would overturn the chessboard. "The rigid character of his philosophical opinions," says Chamberlain, "made him perforce despise as intellectual weaklings all those who did not share them, or shared them in a lukewarm manner, and his disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable." It was principally during the last fourteen years of his life that Hearn acquired the unenviable name of being ungrateful, inconstant, and capricious. To those friends made in his youthful days of struggle and adversity he remained constant, but with the exception of Mitchell McDonald, Nishida Sentaro, and Amenomori, it is the same story of perversity and estrangement. An unceremonious entry into his house, without deference to ancient Japanese etiquette, which enjoined the taking off of boots and the putting on of sandals, a sneer at Shinto ancestor worship, a difference of opinion on Herbert Spencer, and Hearn would disappear actually and metaphorically. This proves his want of heart, you say. But a careful study of Hearn's "Wesen" will show that his apparent inconstancy did not arise from a change of affection, but because his very affection for the people he had turned from made the taut strands of friendship more difficult to reunite, especially for a person of his shy temperament. Which of us has not recognised the greater difficulty of making up a "tiff" with a friend for whom one cares deeply than with a person to whom one is indifferent? The tougher the stuff the more ravelled the edges of the tear, and the more difficult to join together. At Kobe, an incident was related to us by Mr. Young, his chief on the _Kobe Chronicle_ and a person to whom Hearn owed much and was attached by many ties of gratitude and friendship. A guest at dinner ventured to dissent from Hearn's opinion that the reverential manner in which people prostrated themselves before the mikado was in no way connected with religious principles. Hearn shrugged his shoulders, rose, walked away from the table, and nothing would induce him to return. He did not, indeed, enter Mr. Young's house again for some days, though doing his work at the office for the newspaper as usual. When Hearn left Tokyo to take up his appointment at Matsue, he was accompanied by his friend Akira, a young student and priest, who spoke English and could, therefore, act as interpreter. At Kobe they left the railway and continued their journey in jinrikishas, a journey of four days with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan. "Out of the city and over the hills to Izumo, the Land of the Ancient Gods!" The incantation is spoken, we find ourselves in the region of Horai--the fairyland of Japan--with its arch of liquid blue sky, lukewarm, windless atmosphere, an atmosphere enormously old, but of ghostly generations of souls blended into one immense translucency, souls of people who thought in ways never resembling occidental ways. Writing later to Chamberlain, Hearn acknowledged that what delighted him those first days in Japan was the charm of nature in human nature, and in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness, politeness ... for in Japan even hate works with smiles and pretty words. For the first time Hearn was not merely describing a sensuous world of sights and sounds, but a world of soft domesticity, where thatched villages nestled in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above a congregation of thatched homesteads. Can anything be more delightful than his description of one of the village inns, with its high-peaked roof of thatch, and green-mossed eaves, like a coloured print out of Hiroshige's picture-books, with its polished stairway and balconies, reflecting like mirrored surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid down. The old gold-flowered lacquer ware, the diaphanous porcelain wine-cups, the teacup holders, which are curled lotus leaves of bronze; even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions; distant as it was from all art-centres, there was no object visible in the house which did not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty and form. "Indeed, wherever to-day in Japan one sees anything uninteresting in porcelain or metal, something commonplace and ugly, one may be almost sure that detestable something has been shaped under foreign influence. But here I am in Ancient Japan, probably no European eyes ever looked upon these things before." After he had submitted to being bathed by his landlord, as if he had been a little child, and eaten a repast of rice, eggs, vegetables and sweetmeats, he sat smoking his kiseru until the moon arose, peeping through the heart-shaped little window that looked out on the garden behind, throwing down queer shadows of tilted eaves, and horned gables, and delightful silhouettes. Suddenly a measured clapping of hands became audible, and the echoing of _geta_, and the tramping of wooden sandals filled the street. His companion, Akira, told him they were all going to see the dance of the Bon-odori at the temple, the dance of the Festival of the Dead, and that they had better go, too. This dance of the Festival of the Dead he describes in his usual graphic way: the ghostly weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet--above all, the flitting of the marvellous sleeves, apparitional, soundless, velvety as the flitting of great tropical bats. In the midst of the charmed circle there crept upon him a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted, until, recalled to reality by a song full of sweet, clear quavering, gushing from some girlish mouth, and fifty other voices joined in the chant. "Melodies of Europe," he ends, "awaken within us feelings we can utter, sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant, totally unlike anything in western melody, impossible even to write in those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue? "And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be something infinitely more old than I, something not of only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes,--all trillings of summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land." CHAPTER XVI MATSUE "Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive." The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue--birth-place of the rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion--was one of the happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career. His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"--then he howled and wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however, though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work, the one which is most read and by which he is best known. Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still an animating power. How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant vendors, the sellers of _daikon_ and other strange vegetables ... and the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires. Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the sun's yellow rim came into sight. From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples. One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls, that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant Land." Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family to which Hearn's future wife belonged. To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past--that religion that lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him, working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the very heart and soul of ancient Japan. If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy cycle of its eternal utterance. The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in which the real development of his genius lay; the loose, quivering needle of thought, that had moved hither and thither, was now set in one direction. The stage he was treading, though at first he did not realise it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a drama with eternal and immutable forces as scene-shifters and curtain-raisers. The qualities that had enabled Japan to conquer China, and had placed her practically in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to analyse and explain; to interpret the curious myths of this great people of little men, who, shut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of years, had, out of their own inner consciousness, built up a code of discipline and behaviour that, in its self-abnegation, its sense of cohesion, and fidelity to law, throws our much-vaunted western civilisation into the shade. Hearn brought to bear upon the interpretation a rare power of using words, sympathetic insight, an earnest and vivid imagination that enabled him to comprehend the strongly accentuated characteristics of a race living close to the origins of life; barbaric, yet highly refined; superstitious, yet capable of adapting themselves to modern thought; playful as children, yet astounding in their heroic gallantry and patriotism. His genius enabled him to catch a glimpse of the indisputable truth that legend and tradition are a science in themselves, that, however grotesque, however fantastic primeval myths and allegories may be, they are indicative of the gradual evolution of the heart and mind of generations as they arise and pass away. An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of superstition, as compared with the utility of religion. In consequence of his having elected to live the everyday life, and enter into the ordinary interests and occupations of this strange people, as no occidental ever had before, he was enabled to see that many Japanese superstitions had a sort of shorthand value in explaining eternal and valuable things. When it would have been useless to preach to people vaguely about morality or cleanliness or ordinary rules of health, a superstition, a belief that certain infringement of moral law will bring direct corporal punishment, that maligned spirits will visit a room that is left unswept, that the gods will chastise over-excess in eating or drinking, are related to the most inexorable and highest moral laws, and it is easy to understand how invaluable is the study of their superstitions in analysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the Japanese. "Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated Japanese think nothing," said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation. Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated Japanese must you go to understand the vitality of heart and intelligence which through centuries of the Elder Life has evolved so remarkable a nationality. To set forth the power that has moulded the character of this far eastern people, material must be culled from the unsophisticated hearts of the peasants and the common folk. "The people make the gods, and the gods the people make are the best." Hearn did not attempt, therefore, a mechanical repetition of social and religious tenets; but in the mythological beliefs, in the legendary lore that has slumbered for generations in simple minds he caught the suggestion of obedience and fidelity to authority, the strenuous industry and self-denial that endowed these quaint superstitions with a potency far beyond the religion and meaning, or the primitive idea that caused their inception. Merely accurate and erudite students would call the impressions that he collected here, in this unfamiliar Japan, trifling and fantastic, but he is able to prove that the details of ordinary intercourse, however trifling, the way in which men marry and bring up their children, the very manner in which they earn their daily bread, above all, the rules they impose, and the punishment and rewards they invoke to have them obeyed, reveal more of the manner by which the religion, the art, the heroism of this far eastern people have been developed, than hundreds of essays treating of dynasties, treaties and ceremonials. Aided by that very quality which some may look upon as a mental defect, Hearn's tendency to over-emphasise an impressive moment at the expense of accuracy stood him now in good stead. Physical myopia, he maintained, was an aid to artistic work from one aspect: "The keener the view, the less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like the eye of a hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of every leaf." So mental myopia united with the shaping power of imagination was more helpful in enabling him to catch a glimpse of the trend of thought and characteristics of the folk whose country he adopted than the piercing judgment that saw faults and intellectual short-comings. Many people, even the Japanese themselves, have said that Hearn's view in his first book of things in their country was too roseate. Others have declared that he must have been a hypocrite to write of Japan in so enthusiastic a strain when in private letters, such as those to Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik, he expresses so great a detestation for the people and their methods. Those who say so do not know the nature of the man whom they are discussing; compromise with those in office was entirely antagonistic to his mode of thought. His life was composed of passing illusions and disillusions. That he, with his artistic perception, should have been carried off his balance by the quaintness and mysticism that he encountered in the outlying portions of the country was but natural. Go into the highlands of Japan amongst the simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where the ancient gods are still believed to haunt the ancient shrines, where the glamour and the grace of bygone civilisation still lingers, you will yield to the same charm, and, as Hearn himself says, better the sympathetic than the critical attitude. Perhaps the man who comes to Japan full of hate for all things oriental may get nearer the truth at once, but he will make a kindred mistake to him who views it all, as I did at first, almost with the eyes of a lover. CHAPTER XVII MARRIAGE "'Marriage may be either a hindrance or help on the path,' the old priest said, 'according to conditions. All depends upon conditions. If the love of wife and child should cause a man to become too much attached to the temporary advantages of this unhappy world, then such love would be a hindrance. But, on the contrary, if the love of wife and child should enable a man to live more purely and more unselfishly than he could do in a state of celibacy, then marriage would be a very great help to him in the Perfect Way. Many are the dangers of marriage for the wise; but for those of little understanding, the dangers of celibacy are greater, and even the illusion of passion may sometimes lead noble natures to the higher knowledge.'" Hearn's marriage, as his widow told us, took place early in the year of 1891, "23rd of Meiji." That on either side it was one of passionate sentiment is doubtful. Marriages in Japan are generally arranged on the most businesslike footing. By the young Japanese man, it is looked upon as a natural duty that has duly to be performed for the perpetuation of his family. Passion is reserved for unions unsanctioned by social conventions. Dominated as he was by the idea that his physical deficiencies rendered a union with one of his own nationality out of the question, he yet knew that at his time of life he had to enter into more permanent conditions with the other sex than hitherto, or face a future devoid of settled purpose or stability. His state of health also demanded domestic comfort and feminine care. The only alternative that presented itself to a celibate life was to choose a wife from amongst the people with whom his lines were cast. From the first moment of his arrival, Hearn had been carried away by enthusiasm for the gentleness, the docility, of the women of Japan. He compares them, much to their advantage, with their American sisters. "In the eternal order of things, which is the highest being, the childish, confiding, sweet Japanese girl, or the occidental Circe women of artificial society, with their enormous power of evil and their limited capacity for good?" In his first letter to Miss Bisland, he writes: "This is a domesticated nature, which loves man and makes itself beautiful for him in a quiet grey and blue way like the Japanese women." It seems an unromantic statement to make with regard to an artist who has written such exquisite passages on the sentiment that binds a man to a woman, but Hearn, in spite of his intellectual idealism, had from certain points of view a very material outlook. All considerations--even those connected with the deepest emotions that stir the human heart--were secondary to the necessities of his genius and artistic life. His intimacy with Althea Foley in Cincinnati was prompted and fostered by gratitude for her care in preparing his meals, and nursing him when ill, thus saving him from the catastrophe of relinquishing his position on the staff of the _Enquirer_, which meant not only the loss of all means of subsistence, but also the possibility of prosecuting the ambition of his life--a literary career. Now, at Matsue, after a touch of somewhat severe illness obliging him to pass some weeks in bed, it became really a matter of life or death that he should give up living from hand to mouth in country inns. With the Japanese teacher of English at the Matsue College, an accomplished English scholar, Hearn had formed a close intimacy from the moment of his arrival, an intimacy, indeed, only broken by Nishida Sentaro's death in 1898. "His the kind eyes that saw so much for the stranger, his the kind lips that gave him so much wise advice, helping him through the difficulties that beset him, in consequence of his ignorance of the language." At the beginning of his first term Hearn found the necessity of remembering or pronouncing the names of the boys, even with the class-roll before him, almost an insurmountable difficulty. Nishida helped him; gave him all the necessary instructions about hours and text-books, placed his desk close to his, the better to prompt him in school hours, and introduced him to the directors and to the governor of the province. "Out of the East," the volume written later at Kumamoto, was dedicated to Nishida Sentaro, "In dear remembrance of Izumo days." "Hearn's faith in this good friend was something wonderful," his wife tells us. "When he heard of Nishida's illness, in 1897, he exclaimed: 'I would not mind losing everything that belongs to me if I could make him well.' He believed in him with such a faith only possible to a child." Nishida Sentaro was also one of the ancient lineage and caste, and an intimate friend of the Koizumi family. Matsue had been at one time almost exclusively occupied by the Samurai feudal lords. After throwing open her doors to the world, and admitting western civilisation, Japan found herself obliged to accept, amongst other democratic innovations, the sweeping away of the great feudal and military past, reducing families of rank to obscurity and poverty. Youths and maidens of illustrious extraction, who had only mastered the "arts of courtesy" and the "arts of war," found themselves obliged to adopt the humblest occupations to provide themselves and their families with the means of livelihood. Daughters of men once looked upon as aristocrats had to become indoor servants with people of a lower caste, or to undertake the austere drudgery of the rice-fields or the lotus-ponds. Their houses and lands were confiscated--their heirlooms, costly robes, crested lacquer ware, passed at starvation prices to those whom "misery makes rich." Amongst these aristocrats the Koizumis were numbered. Nishida Sentaro, knowing their miserable circumstances, and seeing how advisable it would be, if it were Hearn's intention to remain in Japan, to have a settled home of his own, formed the idea of bringing about a union between Setsu and the English teacher at the Matsue College. On his own initiative he undertook the task of approaching his foreign friend. Finding him favourably inclined, he suggested the marriage as a suitable one to Setsu's parents. It is supposed that marriage in Japan must be solemnised by a priest, but this is not so. A Japanese marriage is simply a legal pledge, and is not invested with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a Japanese woman can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nishida, when he undertook to act as intermediary, or _Nakodo_, as they call it in Japan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously, but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and then only by his nationalising himself a Japanese citizen. One of Hearn's saving qualities was compassion for the weak and suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted--as he was--behind the closely drawn veil of pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats drew between their poverty and public observation. What the Samurai maiden,--brought up in the seclusion of Matsue--may have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of forty-four (a patriarchal age in Japan), who was offered to her as a husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, Japanese fashion, and as the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection, indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the _Gakusha_ (learned person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all the American and English tourists at Tokyo. So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,--the complexion darker and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women--but comely, with the comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have been. Tender and true, as her _Yerbina_, or personal, name, "Setsu," signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of patience and self-restraint--a daughter of Japan--one of a type fast becoming extinct--who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to wound other hearts. She may not have been obliged to submit to the trials of most Japanese wives, the whims and tyranny, for instance, of her father- and mother-in-law, or the drudgery to provide for, or wait upon a numerous Japanese household; but from many indications we know that her life sometimes was not by any means a bed of roses. Humorous, and at the same time pathetic, are her reminiscences of these first days of marriage, as related in later life. "He was such an intense nature," she says, "and so completely absorbed in his work of writing that it made him appear strange and even outlandish in ordinary life. He even acknowledged himself that he must look like a madman." During the course of his life, when undergoing any severe mental or physical strain, Hearn was subject to periods of hysterical trance, during which he lost consciousness of surrounding objects. There is a host of superstitions amongst the Japanese connected with trances or fainting fits. Each human being is supposed to possess two souls. When a person faints they believe that one soul is withdrawn from the body, and goes on all sorts of unknown and mysterious errands, while the other remains with the envelope to which it belongs; but when this takes place a man goes mad; mad people are those who have lost one of their souls. On first seeing her husband in this condition, the little woman was so terrified that she hastened to Nishida Sentaro to seek advice. "He always acted for us as middle-man in those Matsue days, and I confess I was afraid my husband might have gone crazy. However, I found soon afterwards that it was only the time of enthusiasm in thought and writing; and I began to admire him more on that account." The calm and material comforts of domestic life gave Hearn, for a time, a more assured equilibrium, but these trances returned again with considerable frequency in later days. Amenomori, his secretary at Tokyo, tells a story of waking one night and seeing a light in Hearn's study. He was afraid Hearn might be ill, and cautiously opened the door and peeped in. There he saw the little genius, absorbed in his work, standing at his high desk, his nose almost touching the paper on which he wrote. Leaf after leaf was covered with his small, delicate handwriting. After a while, Amenomori goes on, he held up his head, "and what did I see? It was not the Hearn I was familiar with; his face was mysteriously white; his eyes gleamed. He appeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence." Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"[21] she says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently, was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at Kumamoto he told her that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there, she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark and the eerieness. [21] It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or write a word of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her by the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi. She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store, when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful. "I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an unmistakable streak of passion for gay things--however, his quiet conscience held him back from giving way to it." His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of etiquette--looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially for people in official positions--was a continued source of trouble to the little woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite garments," which were _de rigueur_ at any official ceremony. On one occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat. The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The "race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two. That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way--of course a man and a woman know each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand." CHAPTER XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI "The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them. And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable, so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for intellectual converse a man can't really have with women. Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many questions involved." As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them. On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yashiki_ were untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and care. The summer passed in this Japanese _Yashiki_ was as happy as any in Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free, clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully. Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said, twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds, this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of two. Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland. He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household. After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland. Hearn's description of the old _Yashiki_ garden is done with all the descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and _Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in perfect form. Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns, and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light. We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can catch the song of the caged _Uguisu_, an inmate of the establishment, presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of the Governor of Izumo. The _Uguisu_, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name. They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was equally wretched when he saw them withering. One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese, "Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a serious intention). When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident. He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable Japanese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of _semi_, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them hummed the changed Japan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-ships. Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce. The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time is an interesting psychological study. He had been wont to declare that his vocation was a monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as severe in its discipline as that of St. Francis of Assisi on the Umbrian hills. The code on which he moulded his life was formulated according to the teaching of the great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and effect progress, continual struggle against temptation is necessary. Appetites must be restrained. Indulgence means retrogression. It is not without a sense of amusement that we observe the complex personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel shirt, and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now clad in official robes, he passed out through a line of prostrate servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and submission by the daughter of a line of feudal nobles. He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the little lamps of the _kami_ before the shrine were left to burn until they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as to forget the hour. Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was very real indeed. The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty, and honour, and Hell fire staring you in the face, you would have gone after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in Japan." Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine," of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all, however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese--don't you think so? And the man was certainly a detestable fellow." Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper, he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." "Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later. Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild, wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone by. When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha. After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies, and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan, where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it, and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about. A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the old _Yashiki_, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed Japanese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of the interpreter, the superstitions and legends of the ancient Province of the Gods. She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring, "How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked fixedly in front of him. Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"[22] or "Dancing Girl," the finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written during the course of the summer passed in the old _Yashiki_. Its first inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891. "There was a story some time ago in the _Asahi-shimbun_[23] about a 'Shirabyoshi,' that brought tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully translated by a friend." [22] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [23] The _Asahi-shimbun_ was one of the principal Japanese illustrated daily papers, printed and published at Osaka. The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign languages--German, Swedish, French and Italian--a writer in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world. The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in England. The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature, in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she cherishes is for her. Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men. It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife, that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to ideal things, her pure and simple passion, he thrills us through with the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life. How different the manner in which he treats the scenes between the young man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the manner in which his French prototypes--in which Pierre Loti, for instance, whom Hearn declares to be one of the greatest living artists--would have treated it. Far ahead has he passed beyond them; the moral, the life of the soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line does he play on the lower emotions of his readers. A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to passing the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier was set before him, and a cotton _zabuton_ for him to kneel upon. He was struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and paper mosquito curtain." After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated _Butsudan_, he saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find out what I was doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she had fallen in love with one another, and how they had gone away and built the cottage in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to please him. One cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had lived alone with nothing to console her but the memory of her lover, laying daily before his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly dancing to please his spirit. After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try again to sleep. On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the path he had to follow, she watched him until he passed from sight, his heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left behind. Many years passed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous. One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master. When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a _Shirabyoshi_. With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night. "Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he said, as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years since we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your story." The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years, she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house, and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before the _Butsudan_. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and attitude of the dance that she might hang it up before the _Butsudan_. "I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!" He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master? She had nothing to offer but her _Shirabyoshi_ garments. He took them, saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to place her beyond the reach of want. No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him. Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor seemingly asleep. On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient _Butsudan_ with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning; in front of it stood the portrait he had painted. "The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier than he." CHAPTER XIX KUMAMOTO "Of course Urashima was bewildered by the gods. But who is not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the purpose of the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima Mio-jin.... "These are quite differently managed in the West. After disobeying Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become after death small gods in our own right. How can we pity the folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with visible gods? "Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular time of blue light and soft wind,--and always like an old reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the feeling of a season not to be also related to something real in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors." Only for a year did Hearn's sojourn in Fairyland last. The winter following his arrival was a very severe one. The northern coast of Japan lies open to the Arctic winds blowing over the snow-covered plains of Siberia. Heavy falls of snow left drifts five feet high round the _Yashiki_ on the hill. The large rooms, so delightful in the summer with their verandah opening on the garden, were cold as "cattle barns" in winter, with nothing but charcoal braziers to heat them. He dare not face another such experience, and asked, if possible, to be transferred to warmer quarters. Aided again by his friend, Professor Chamberlain, the authorities at Tokyo were induced to give him the professorship of English at the Imperial University at Kumamoto. Kumamoto is situated in Kyushu, facing Formosa and the Chinese coast; the climate, therefore, is much milder than that of Matsue. Here, however, began Hearn's first disillusionment; like Urashima Taro, having dwelt within the precincts of Fairyland he felt the shock of returning to Earth again. The city struck him as being ugly and commonplace, a half-Europeanised garrison town, resounding to the sounds of bugles and the drilling of soldiers, instead of pilgrim songs and temple bells. "But Lord! I must try to make money; for nothing is sure in Japan and I am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a trip, whether the Government employs me or not." He began to look back with regret to the days passed at Matsue. "You must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find out how unutterably different it is from other places,--for instance, this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist." All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father, wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a Buddhist student. This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is nothing in Japan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all up--the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to orientals, and an oriental he had now become. His people felt like fish out of water, everything surrounding them was so different from their primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next yard, "_mezurashii kedamono_," filled his little wife with an amused wonder. Some geese and a pig also filled her with surprise, such animals did not exist in the highlands of Japan. The Kumamoto Government College was one of the largest in Japan,--came next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still adhered to their Japanese dress, but most of them adopted the military uniform now, as a rule, worn in Japanese colleges. There were three classes, corresponding with three higher classes of the _Jinjo Chugakko_--and two higher classes. He did not now teach on Saturdays. There were no stoves--only _hibachi_. The library was small, and the English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum. Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college, except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning and evening, and in the intervals between classes sat in a corner to himself smoking his pipe. "You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF GODS! What would you do if you were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! Japan in Kyushu is like Europe--except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an _educated_ Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. My scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the college and return after class,--always alone, no mental company but books. But at home everything is sweet." In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence of matrimony, here at Kumamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own kindred," he says to his sister. His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his widow continued their journey to Ireland. At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr. Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called. Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to Japanese affairs. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's articles contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_, afterwards published under the title of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," had claimed public attention. Miss Lillah Hearn was the first member of the family to write to this half-brother, who was becoming so famous, but received no answer. Then Mrs. Brown, the other sister, approached him, silence greeted her efforts as well. On hearing of his marriage to a Japanese lady, Mrs. Atkinson, the youngest sister, wrote. Whether it was that she softened the exile's heart in his expatriation by that sympathy and innate tact which are two of her distinguished qualities, it is impossible to say, but her letter was answered. This strange relative of theirs who had gone to Japan, adopted Japanese dress and habits, and married a Japanese lady, had become somewhat of a legendary character to his quiet-going Irish kindred. The arrival of the first letter, therefore, was looked upon as quite an event and was passed from house to house, and hand to hand, becoming considerably mutilated in its journeyings to and fro. The first page is entirely gone, and the second page so erased and torn that it is only decipherable here and there. We are enabled to put an approximate date to it by his reference to Miss Bisland's marriage, of which he had heard towards the end of his stay at Matsue. "I have written other things, but am rather ashamed of them," he adds. "So Miss Bisland has married and become Mrs. Wetmore. She is as rich at least as she could wish to be, but I have not heard from her for more than a year. I suppose friendship ends with marriage. If my sister was not married, I think--I only think--I would feel more brotherly. "Well, I will say _au revoir_. Many thanks for the letter you wrote me. I would like Please give me you can. Don't think busy to write--much I teach for a week--English and Elementary Latin: the time I study and write for pleasure, not for profit. There isn't much profit in literature unless, as a novelist, one happens to please a popular taste,--which isn't good taste. Some exceptions there are, like Rudyard Kipling; but your brother has not his inborn genius for knowing, seizing and painting human nature. Love to you and yours--from "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_Tetorihomnatu_ 34, "_Kumamoto, Kyushu, "Japan._" Mrs. Atkinson replied immediately, thus beginning a series of delightful letters, which alas! relate, so many of them, to intimate family affairs that it is impossible to publish them in their original form. "My sweet little sister," he wrote in answer, "your letter was more than personally grateful: it had also an unexpected curious interest for me, as a revelation of things I did not know. I don't know anything of my relations--their names, places, occupations, or even number: therefore your letter interested me in a peculiar way, apart from its amiable charm. Before I talk any more, I thank you for the photographs. They have made me prouder than I ought to be. I did not know that I had such nice kindred and such a fairy niece. My wife stole your picture from me almost as soon as I had received it, to caress it, and pray to Buddha and all the ancient gods to love the original: she has framed it in a funny little Japanese frame, and suspended it in that sacred part of the house, called the Toko, a sort of alcove, in which only beautiful things are displayed. Formerly the gods were placed there (many hundred years ago); but now the gods have a separate shrine in the household, and the Toko is only the second Holy place...." [Illustration: Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn's Half-sister).] The next letter is dated June 27th, '92, 25th year of Meiji. "Dear sister, I love you a little bit more on hearing that you are little. The smaller you are the more I will be fond of you. As for marriage being a damper upon affection between kindred, it is true only of Occidental marriages. The Japanese wife is only the shadow of her husband, infinitely unselfish and naïve in all things.... "If you want me to see you soon, you must pray to the Occidental gods to make me suddenly rich. However, I doubt if they have half as much influence as the gods of Japan,--who are helping me to make a bank account as fast as honest work can produce such a result. I have no babies; and don't expect to have, and may be able to cross the seas one of these days to linger in your country a while. But really I don't know. I drift with the current of events. "As for my book on Japan,--my first book,--there is much to do yet,--it ought to be out in the Fall. It will be called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and will treat of strange things. "I would like to see you very much; for you are too tantalizing in your letters, and tell me nothing about your inner self. I want to find out what the angel shut up in your heart is like. No doubt very sweet, but I would like to pull it out, and stroke its wings, and make it chipper a little. As for the little ones, make them love me; for if they see me without previous discipline, they will be afraid of my ugly face when I come--I send you a photo of one-half of it, the other is not pleasant, I assure you: like the moon, I show only one side of myself. In Spanish countries they call me Leucadio--much easier for little folk to pronounce. By the way, you never gave me your address,--sign of impulsive haste, like my own. "With best love, "LAFCADIO HEARN." Then in January, 1903, he writes again, "Your kind sweet letter reached me at Christmas time, where there is no Christmas. Don't you know that you are very happy to be able to live in England? I am afraid you do not. Perhaps you could not know without having lived much elsewhere.... Your photo has come. The same eyes, the same chin, brow, nose: we are strangely alike--excepting that you are very comely, and I very much the reverse--partly by exaggeration of the traits which make your face beautiful, and partly because I am disfigured by the loss of an eye--punched out at school.... Won't you please give my kindest thanks to your husband for the pains he has taken to please me! I hope to meet him some day, and thank him in person, if I don't leave my bones in some quaint and curious Buddhist cemetery out here...." The wonderful series of letters to Professor Hall Chamberlain, recently published by Miss Bisland, are also written from Kumamoto and Kobe, and to a great extent run simultaneously with those to his sister. He had a habit of repeating himself; the same expressions, the same quotations, appear in both series, and sometimes are again repeated in his published essays. When struck by an idea or incident, it seems as if he must impart it as something noteworthy to every one with whom he was holding communion. He gives, for instance, the same account to his sister of the routine of his Japanese day as related to Professor Hall Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik. We can imagine his rigidly Protestant Irish relations amidst the conventional surroundings of an Irish country house, following minutely the services of the established church as preached to them by their local clergyman, utterly bewildered in reading the description of the outlandish cult to which he, their relation, subscribed in Japan. The awakening to the rising of the sun with the clapping of hands of servants in the garden, the prayers at the _Butsudan_, the putting out the food for the dead, all the strange, quaint customs that mark the passing of the day in the ancient Empire of Nippon. Not by thousands of miles only was he separated from his occidental relations, but by immemorial centuries of thought. On May 21st, 1893, there is another letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson, in which he first announces his expectation of becoming a father. It is so characteristic of Lafcadio to take it for granted that the child would be a boy, and already to make plans for his education abroad. "_Tsuboi, Nichihorabata_ 35, _Kumamoto, "Kyushu, Japan. May_ 21_st_, '93. "MY DEAR MINNIE: "(I think 'sister' is too formal, I shall call you by your pet name hereafter.) First let me thank you very, very much for the photographs. I was extremely pleased with that of your husband;--and thought at once, 'Ah! the lucky girl!' For your husband, my dear Sis, is no ordinary man. There are faces that seen for the first time leave an impression which gives the whole of the man, _ineffaceably_. And they are rare. I think I know your husband already, admire him and love him,--not simply for your sake, but for his own. He [is] all man,--and strong,--a good oak for your ivy. I don't mean physical strength, though he seems (from the photograph) to have an uncommon amount of it, but strength of character. You can feel pretty easy about the future of your little ones with such a father. (Don't read all this to him, though,--or he will think I am trying to flatter either him or you,--though, of course, you can tell him something of the impression his photo gives me, in a milder form.) And you don't know what the real impression is,--nor how it is enhanced by the fact that I have been for three years isolated from all English or European intercourse,--never see an English face, except that of some travelling missionary, which is apt to be ignoble. The Oriental face is somewhat inscrutable,--like the faces of the Buddhist gods. In youth it has quite a queer charm,--the charm of mysterious placidity, of smiling calm. (But among the modernised, college-bred Japanese this is lost.) What one never--or hardly ever--sees among these Orientals is a face showing strong character. The race is strangely impersonal. The women are divinely sweet in temper; the men are mysteries, and not altogether pleasant. I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me homesick for English life,--just one plunge into it again. "--Will I ever see you? Really I don't know. Some day I should like to visit England,--provided I could assure myself of sufficient literary work there to justify a stay of at least half-a-year, and the expense of the voyage. Eventually that might be possible. I would never go as a mere guest--not even a sister's; but I should like to be able to chat with the sister occasionally on leisure-evenings. I am quite a savage on the subject of independence, let me tell you; and would accept no kindnesses except those of your company at intervals. But all this is not of to-day. I cannot take my wife to Europe, it would be impossible to accustom her to Western life,--indeed it would be cruel even to try. But I may have to educate my child abroad,--which would be an all-powerful reason for the voyage. However, I would prefer an Italian, French, or Spanish school-life to an English one. "--Oh yes, about the book--'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan' is now in press. It will appear in two volumes, without illustrations. The publishers are Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston,--the best in America. Whether you like the book or no, I can't tell. I have an idea you do not care much about literary matters;--that you are too much wife and mother for that;--that your romances and poetry are in your own home. And such romance and poetry is the best of all. However, if you take some interest in trying to look at ME between the lines, you may have patience to read the work. Don't try to read it, if you don't like. "--But here is something you might do for me, as I am not asking for certain friendly offices. When the book is criticised, you might kindly send me a few of the best reviews. Miss Bisland, while in London, wrote me the reviews of some of my other books had been very kindly; but she never dreamed of supplementing this pleasant information by cutting out a few specimens for me.--By the way, she has married well, you know,--has become awfully rich and fashionable, and would not even condescend to look at me if she passed me in Broadway--I _suppose_. But she well deserved her good fortune; for she was certainly one of the most gifted girls I ever knew, and has succeeded in everything--against immense obstacles--with no help except that of her own will and genius. "--And now I must give you a lecture. I don't want more than one sister,--haven't room in my heart for more. All appear to be as charming as they are sweet looking. I am interested to hear how they succeed, etc., etc. But don't ask me to write to everybody, and don't show everybody my letters. I can't diffuse myself very far. You said you would be 'my favourite.' A nice way you go about it! Suppose I tell you that I am a very jealous, nasty brother; and that if I can't have one sister by herself I don't want any sister at all! Would that be very, very naughty? But it is true. And now you can be shocked just as much as you please. "--Yes, I have lost an eye, and look horrible. The operation in Dublin did not cause the disfigurement, but a blow, or rather the indirect results of a blow, received from a play-fellow. "--You ask me if I should like a photograph of father. I certainly should, if you can procure me one without trouble. I hope--much more than to see England,--to visit India, and try to find some tradition of him. I did not know positively, until last year, that father had been in the West Indies. When I went there, I had the queerest, ghostliest sensation of having seen it all before. I think I should experience even stranger sensations in India! The climate would be agreeable for me. Remember, I passed fourteen years of my life south of winter. The first snow I saw from 1876 to 1890 was on my way through Canada to Japan. Indeed, if ever I become quite independent, I want to return to the tropics. "Enough to tire your eyes,--isn't it?--for this time. "Ever affectionately, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "In the names of the eight hundred myriads of Gods,--do give me your address. The only way I have been able to write you is by finding the word _Portadown_ in _Whittaker's Almanac_. You are a careless, naughty 'Sis.' "I enclose my name and address in Japanese. "YAKUMO KOIZUMI, "_Tsuboi, "Nichihorabata 35, "Kumamoto, Kyushu_." All the women are making funny little Japanese baby-clothes, and all the Buddhist Divinities, who watch over little children, are being prayed to.... "Letters of congratulation," he said, "were coming from all directions, for the expectation of a child is always a subject of great gladness in Japan.... Behind all this there is a universe of new sensations, revelations of things in Buddhist faith which are very beautiful and touching. About the world an atmosphere of delicious, sacred naïveté,--difficult to describe because resembling nothing in the Western world...." Hearn's account of his home before the birth of his son throws most interesting lights on Japanese methods of thought and daily life. He refers to the pretty custom of a woman borrowing a baby when she is about to become a mother. It is thought an honour to lend it. And it is extraordinarily petted in its new home. The one his wife borrowed was only six months old, but expressed in a supreme degree all the Japanese virtues; docile to the degree of going to sleep when bidden, and of laughing when it awakened. The eerie wisdom of its face seemed to suggest a memory of all its former lives. The incident he relates also of a little Samurai boy whom he and his wife had adopted is interesting as showing the Spartan discipline exercised over Japanese children from earliest youth, enabling them in later life to display that iron self-control that has astonished the world; interesting, also, as showing how nothing escaped Hearn's quick observation and assiduous intellect. Hearn, at first, wanted to fondle the child, and make much of him, but he soon found that it was not in accordance with custom. He therefore ceased to take notice of him; and left him under the control of the women of the house. Their treatment of him Hearn thought peculiar; the little fellow was never praised and rarely scolded. One day he let a little cup fall and broke it. No notice was taken of the accident for fear of giving him pain. Suddenly, though the face remained quite smilingly placid as usual, he could not control his tears. As soon as they saw him cry, everybody laughed and said kind things to him, till he began to laugh, too. But what followed was more surprising. Apparently he had been distantly treated. One day he did not return from school until three hours after the usual time; suddenly the women began to cry--they were, indeed, more deeply affected than their treatment of the boy would have justified. The servants ran hither and thither in their anxiety to find him. It turned out that he had only been taken to a teacher's house for something relating to school matters. As soon as his voice was heard at the door, every one was quiet, cold, and distantly polite again. On September 17th he writes again to his sister, thanking her for a copy she had sent him of the _Saturday Review_. "You could send me nothing more pleasing, or more useful in a literary way. It is all the more welcome as I am really living in a hideous isolation, far away from books, and book-shops, and Europeans. When I can get--which I hope is the next year--into a more pleasant locality, I shall try to pick out some pretty Oriental tales to send to the little ones." He was not able, he goes on, to go far from Kumamoto, not liking to leave his little wife too long alone; so his vacation was rather monotonous. He travelled only as far as Nagasaki. It was quaint and pretty, but hotter than any West Indian port in the hot season. He was economising, he said, and had saved nearly three thousand five hundred dollars. Once he had provided for his wife, he hoped to be able to make a few long voyages to places east of Japan. "You are much to be envied," he goes on to his sister, "for your chances of travel. What a pity you are not able to devote yourself to writing and painting in a place like Algiers--full of romance and picturesqueness. If you go there, don't fail to see the old Arab part of the city--the Kasbah, I think they call it. How about the Continent? Have you tried Southern Italy? And don't you think that one gets all the benefit of travel only by keeping away from fashion-resorts and places consecrated by conventionalism? Nothing to me is more frightful than a fashionable seaside resort--such as those of the Atlantic Coast. My happiest sojourns of this sort have been in little fishing villages, and little queer old unknown towns, where there are no big vulgar hotels, and where one can dress and do exactly as one pleases. "What will you do with your little man when he grows up? Army, or Civil Service? Whatever you do, never let him go to America, and lose all his traditions. Australia would be far better. I expect he will be gloriously well able to take care of himself anywhere,--judging by his father, but I have come to the belief that one cannot too soon begin the cultivation of a single aim and single talent in life. This is the age of specialism. No man can any longer be successful in many things. Even the 'general practitioner' in medicine has almost become obsolete. "Nothing seems to me more important now for a little boy than the training of his linguistic faculties,--giving him every encouragement in learning languages by ear--(the only natural way); and your travelling sometimes with him will help you to notice how his faculties are in that direction. But perhaps it will be possible for him to pass all his life in England. (For me, England, Ireland and Scotland mean the same thing.) That would be pleasant indeed.... When I think of your little man with the black eyes, I hope that his life will always be in the circle of English traditions, wherever the English Flag flies, there remain. "I suppose you know that in this Orient the construction of the family is totally different to what it is in Europe.... We are too conceitedly apt to think that what is good for Englishmen is good for all nations,--our ethics, our religion, our costumes, etc. The plain facts of the case are that all Eastern races lose, instead of gaining, by contact with us. They imitate our vices instead of our virtues, and learn all our weaknesses without getting any of our strength. Already statistics show an enormous increase of crime in Japan as the result of 'Christian civilisation'; and the open ports show a demoralisation utterly unknown in the interior of the country, and unimaginable in the old feudal days before 1840 or 1850...." In the next letter he gives his sister a minute account of his Japanese manner of life on the floor without chairs or tables. It has been described so often by visitors to Japan, and by Hearn himself, that it is unnecessary to repeat it here. He ends his letter:-- "I am now so used to the Japanese way of living, that when I have to remain all day in Western clothes, I feel very unhappy; and I think I should not find European life pleasant in summer time. Some day, I will send you a photograph of my house. "I wish you much happiness and good health and pleasant days of travel, and thank you much for the paper. "This letter is rather rambling, but perhaps you will find something interesting in it. "Ever affectionately, "LAFCADIO." In September comes another letter to Mrs. Atkinson: "You actually talk about writing too often,--which is strange! There is only this difficulty about writing,--that we both know so little of each other that topics interesting to both can be only guessed at. That should be only a temporary drawback. "The more I see your face in photos, the more I feel drawn toward you. Lillah and the other sister represent different moods and tenses pictorially. You seem most near to me,--as I felt on first reading your letter. You have strength, too, where I have not. You are certainly very sensitive, but also self-repressed. I think you are not inclined to make mistakes. I think you can be quickly offended, and quick to forgive--if you understand the offence to be only a mistake. You would not forgive at all should you discern behind the fault a something much worse than mistake,--and in this you would be right. You are inclined to reserve, and not to bursts of joy;--you have escaped my extremes of depression and extremes of exultation. You see very quickly beyond the present relations of a fact--I think all this. But of course you have been shaped in certain things by social influences I have never had,--so that you must have perfect poise where I would flounder and stumble. "But imagining won't do always. I should like to know more of you than a photograph or a rare letter can tell. I don't know, remember, anything _at all_ about you. I do not know where you were born, where you were educated,--anything of your life; or what is much more, infinitely more important, I don't know your emotions and thoughts and feelings and experiences in the past. What you are now, I can guess. But what _were_ you,--long ago? What memories most haunt you of places and people you liked? If you could tell me some of these, how pleasantly we might compare notes. Mere facts tell little: the interest of personality lies most in the infinitely special way that facts affect the person. I am very curious about you,--but, don't take this too seriously; because though my wishes are strong, my disinclination to cause you pain is stronger; and you have told me that writing is sometimes fatiguing to you. It were so much better could we pass a day or two together. "You must not underrate yourself as you did in your last. Your few lines about the scenery,--short as they were,--convinced me that you could do something literary of a very nice sort had you the time and chance to give yourself to any such work. But I do not wish that you would--except to read the result; for literary labour is extremely severe work, even after the secret of method is reached. I am only beginning to learn; and to produce five pages means to write at least twenty-five. Enthusiasms and inspirations have least to do with the matter. The real work is condensing, compressing, choosing, changing, shifting words and phrases,--studying values of colour and sound and form in words; and when all is done, the result satisfies only for a time. What I wrote six years ago, I cannot bear the sight of to-day. If I had been a genius, I wonder whether I would feel the same. "Romances are not in novels, but in lives. Can you not tell me some of yours when you are feeling very, very well, and don't know what to do? What surprised me was your observation about 'sentimental' in your last letter,--and that upon such a worthy topic! What can you think of me? And here in this Orient, where the spirit of more ancient faiths enters into one's blood with the sense of the doctrine of filial piety, and the meaning of ancestor worship,--how very, very strange and cruel it seems to me that my little sister should be afraid of being thought _sentimental_ about the photograph of her father! What self-repression does all this mean, and what iron influences in Western life--English life that I have almost forgotten! However, character loses nothing: under the exterior ice, the Western could only gain warmth and depth if it be of the right sort. I hope, nevertheless, my little sister will be just as 'sentimental' as she possibly can when she writes to Japan,--and feel sure of more than sympathy and gratitude. Unless she means by 'sentimental' only something in regard to style of writing--in which case I assure her that she cannot err. If she is afraid of being thought really sentimental, I should be much more afraid of meeting her,--for I should wish to say sweet things and to hear them, too, should I deserve. "At all events remember that you have given me something very precious,--not only in itself,--but precious because precious to you. And it shall never be lost,--in spite of earthquakes and possible fires." (The something he alludes to as "very precious" was a photograph of their father, Charles Hearn, that Mrs. Atkinson had sent him.) "--I wish I could talk to you more about Father and India. I wish to ask a hundred thousand questions. But on paper it is difficult to express all one wishes to say. And letters of mere questions carry no joy with them, and no sympathy. So I shall not ask _now_ any more. And you must not tire your dear little aching head to write when you do not feel well. I shall write again soon. For a little while good-bye, with love and all sweet hope to you ever, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_Kumamoto, "Kyushu, Japan. "Jan_. 30, '94." On November 17th, 1893, at one o'clock in the morning, Hearn's eldest son, Leopold Kazuo Koizumi, was born. He declared that the strangest and strongest sensation of his life was hearing for the first time the cry of his own child. There was a strange feeling of being double; something more, also, impossible to analyse--the echo in a man's heart of all the sensations felt by all the fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the past. A few weeks later he writes to his sister, giving her news about his son. "The physician says that from the character of his bones he ought to become very tall. He is very dark. He has my nose and promises to have the Hearn eyebrows; but he has the Oriental eye. Whether he will be handsome or ugly, I can't tell: his little face changes every day;--he has already looked like five different people. When first born, I thought him the prettiest creature I ever saw. But that did not last. I am so inexperienced in the matter of children that I cannot trust myself to make any predictions. Of course I find the whole world changed about me.... "My wife," he goes on, "is quite well. Happily the old military caste to which she belongs is a strong one, but how sacred and terrible a thing is maternity. When it was all over I felt very humble and grateful to the Unknowable Power which had treated us so kindly. The possibility of men being cruel to the women who bear their children seemed at the moment to darken existence. "I have received your last beautiful photograph--or I should say two:--the vignette is, of course, the most lovable, but both are very, very nice. I gave the full-figure one to Setsu. She would like to have her boy grow up looking either like you or like Posey--but most like you. (Thanks also for the pretty photo of yourself and Posey: Posey is decidedly handsome.) But I fear my son can never be like either of you. He is altogether Oriental so far,--looks at me with the still calm Buddhist eyes of the Far East, and the soul of another race. Even his nose will never declare his Western blood; for the finest class of the Japanese offer many strongly aquiline faces. Setsu is a Samurai, and though her own features are the reverse of aquiline, there are aquiline faces among the kindred. "I am awfully anxious that the boy should get to be like you. I have had your most beautiful photograph copied by a clever photographer here and have sent the copies to friends, saying, 'this is my sister; and this is the boy. I want him to look like her.' You see I am proud of you,--not only as to the ghostly, but also as to the material part of you. Physiologically I am all Latin and Pagan,--even though my little boy's eyes are bright blue. "... It is really nonsense, sending such a thing as his photo at fifty-five days old, because the child changes so much every week. But you are my little sister. I have called him Leopold Kazuo Hearn--for European use and custom. Kazuo, in Japanese, signifies 'First of the Excellent.' I have not registered him under that name, however; because by the law, if I registered my wife or son in the Consulate, both become English citizens, and lose the right to hold any property, or do any business in Japan, or even to live in the interior without a passport. I have, therefore, stopped at the Japanese marriage ceremony, and a publication of the fact abroad. In the present order I dare not deprive my folks of their nationality." Then some time later he writes:-- "You ask for all kinds of news about Kajiwo. Well, he is now able to stand well, and is tremendously strong to all appearance. He tries to speak. 'Aba' is the first _word_ spoken by Japanese babes: it means 'good-bye.' Here is a curious example of the contrast between West and East,--the child comes into the world saying farewell. But this would be in accordance with Buddhist philosophy,--saying farewell to the previous life. "You are right about supposing that the birth of a son in Japan is an occasion of special rejoicing. All the baby clothes are ready long before birth--(except the ornamental ones)--as the _Kimono_ or little robe is the same shape for either sex (_of children_). But, when the child is born, if it be a girl, very beautiful clothes of bright colours, covered with wonderful pictures, are made for it. If it be a boy the colours are darker, and the designs different. My little fellow's silken Kimono is covered with pictures of tortoises, storks, pine, and other objects typical of long life, prosperity, steadfastness, etc. This subject is enormously elaborate and complicated,--so that I cannot tell you all about it in a letter. "After the child is born, all friends and relatives bring presents,--and everybody comes to see and congratulate the mother. You would think this were a trial. I was afraid it would tire Setsu. But she was walking about again on the seventh day after birth. The strength of the boy is hers,--not mine. "I was also worried about the physician. I wanted the chief surgeon of the garrison,--because I was afraid. He was a friend, and laughed at me. He said: 'If anything terrible should happen, call me, but otherwise don't worry about a doctor. The Japanese have managed these things in their own way for thousands of years without doctors: a woman or two will do.' So two women came, and all was well. I hated the old women first, but after their success, I became very fond of them, and hugged them in English style, which they could not understand." The kind dull veil that nature keeps stretched between mankind and the Unknown was drawn again. The world became to Hearn nearly the same as it had been before the birth of his child, and he could plan, he said, for the boy's future. He was afraid he might be near-sighted, and wondered if he would be intellectual. "He was so proud of him," his wife says, "that whenever a guest, a student, or a fellow-professor called, he would begin talking about him and his perfections without allowing his friend to get a word in. He perfectly frightened me with a hundred toys he brought home when he returned." After his son's birth, Hearn naturally became still more anxious to have Setsu registered legally as his wife, but he was always met by official excuses and delays. He was told that if he wished the boy to remain a Japanese citizen he must register him in the mother's name only. If he registered him in his own name his son became a foreigner. On the other hand, Hearn knew that if he nationalised himself his salary would be reduced to a Japanese level. [Illustration: Kazuo (Hearn's Son) and his Nurse.] "I don't quite see the morality of the reduction," he says, "for services should be paid according to the market value at least;--but there is no doubt it would be made. As for America, and my relatives in England, I am married: that has been duly announced. Perhaps I had better wait a few years and then become a citizen. Being a Japanese citizen would, of course, make no difference whatever as to my relations in any civilised countries abroad. It would only make some difference in an uncivilised country,--such as revolutionary South America, where English or French, or American protection is a good thing to have. But the long and the short of the matter is that I am anxious about Setsu's and the boy's interests: my own being concerned only at that point where their injury would be Setsu's injury." The only way out of the difficulty, he concluded, was to abandon his English nationality and adopt his wife's family name, Koizumi. As a prefix for his own personal use he selected the appellation of the Province of Izumo "Yakumo" ("Eight clouds," or the "Place of the Issuing of Clouds," the first word of the ancient, Japanese song "Ya-he-gaki"). On one of his letters he shows his sister how his name is written in Japanese. Mrs. Atkinson's youngest child, Dorothy, was born in March, 1894. There is an interval of exactly four months between her and her cousin Kazuo. It is in reference to this event that the following letter was written:-- "How sweet of you to get Mrs. or Miss Weatherall to write me the dear news! You will be well by the time this reaches you, so that I may venture to write more than congratulations. "I was quite anxious about you,--feeling as if you were the only real _fellow-soul_ in my world but one:--and birth is a thing so much more terrible than all else in the universe--more so than death itself--that the black border round the envelope made my heart cold for a moment. I had forgotten the why. Now I hope you will not have any more sons or daughters; you have three,--and I trust you will have no more pain or trouble. As for me, I am very resolved not to become a father again. "You will laugh at me, and perhaps think it very strange that when only thirty-five I began to feel a kind of envy of friends with children. I knew their troubles, anxieties, struggles; but I saw their sons grow up, beautiful and gifted men, and I used to whisper to myself,--'But I never shall have a child.' Then it used to seem to me that no man died so utterly as the man without children: for him I fancied (like some folk still really think in other lands) that death would be utter eternal blackness. When I did, however, hear the first cry of my boy--_my_ boy, dreamed about in forgotten years--I had for that instant the ghostly sensation of being _double_. Just then, and only then, I did not think,--but _felt_, 'I am TWO.' It was weird but gave me thoughts that changed all pre-existing thoughts. My boy's gaze still seems to me a queerly beautiful thing: I still feel I am looking at myself when he looks at me. Only the thought has become infinitely more complicated. For I think about all the dead who live in the little heart of him--races and memories diverse as East and West. But who made his eyes blue and his hair brown? And will he be like you? And will he ever see the little cousin who has just entered the world? The other day, for one moment, he looked just like your boy in the picture." Mrs. Atkinson about this time went through private trials upon which it is unnecessary to touch here. The following letter of consolation and encouragement was written to her by her half-brother:-- "Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One must pay a terrible price to see and to know. Still, the purchase is worth making. You know the Emerson lines:-- "Though thou love her as thyself, As a self of purer clay; Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know When half-Gods go, The Gods arrive!... "Reverse the condition: the moral is the same,--and it is eternal. By light alone one cannot see; there must be shadows in multitude to help. What we love is good, and exists, but often exists only in _us_,--then we become angry at others, not knowing the illusion was the work of the Gods. The Gods are always right. They make us sometimes imagine that something we love ever so much is in others, while it is only in our own hearts. The reason they do this to some, like you and me, is to teach us what terrible long, long mistakes we might have made without their help. Sometimes they really cause a great deal of more serious trouble, and we can't tell why. We must wait and believe and be quite sure the Gods are good. "What is not always good is the tender teaching we get at home. We are told of things so beautiful that we believe everybody must believe them,--truth, and love, and duty, and honour of soul, etc. We are even taught the enormous lie that the world is entirely regulated by these beliefs. I wonder if it would not be much better to teach children the adult truth:--'The world is thus and so:--those beliefs are ideal only which do not influence the intellectual life, nor the industrial life, nor the social life. The world is a carnival-ball; and you must wear a mask thereat,--and never, _never_ doff it;--except to the woman or the man you must love always. Learn to wear your mask with grace--only keep your heart fresh in spite of all bitter knowledge.' Wouldn't this be the best advice? As a mere commonplace fact,--the whole battle of life is fought in disguise by those who win. No man knows the heart of another man. No woman knows the heart of another woman. Only the woman can learn the man, and the man the woman;--and this only after years! What a great problem it is; and how utterly it is neglected in teaching the little human flowers that we set out in the world's cold without a thought! "You are more and more like me in every letter; but you are better far. I have not learned reserve with friends yet: I supply the lack by a retreating disposition,--a disinclination to make acquaintances. I love very quickly and strongly; but just as quickly dislike what I loved--if deceived, and the dislike does not die. My general experience has been that the loveable souls are but rarely lodged in the forms which most attract us: there _are_ such exceptions on the woman's side as my dear little Sis,--and there are exceptions on the male side of a particular order, and rare. But the rule remains. I wonder if all these jokes are not played on us by the Gods, who think,--'No!--you want the infinite! That can be reached later only,--after innumerable births. First learn, for a million years or so, just to love only _souls_. You _must_! for you will be punished if you try to obtain all perfections in one.' I think the Gods talk to us about that way; and when we leave the Spring season of life behind, we find the Gods were right after all. "--Still, the great puzzle is in all these things there are no general rules solid enough to trust in. I fancy the best teaching for a heart would be,--'Always caution,--but--believe the tendency of the world is to good.' And _largeness_ seems to be necessary,--never to suffer oneself to see only one charm; but to train oneself to study combinations and understand them. Any modern human nature is too complex to be otherwise judged. "Music,--yes! If I were near you I would be always teasing you to play:--and would bring you all kinds of queer exotic melodies to make variations on: strange melodies from Spanish America and the Creole Islands, and Japan, and China, and all sorts of strange places. We should try to do very curious things in the way of ballads and songs, and you would teach me all sorts of musical things I don't know. By the way, you will be shocked to learn, perhaps, that I have never been able to appreciate the superiority of the new German music: The Italian still seems to me the divine: but that may be because I have never had time to train myself to appreciate. "--You do not know how much I sympathise with all your anxieties and troubles, and how much I wish for your strength and happiness. Would I not like to be travelling with you to countries where you would find all the rest and light and warmth you could enjoy! Perhaps, some day that may be. Pray to the Gods for my good fortune; and we shall share the pleasure together if They listen. If They do not, we must wait as the Buddhists say until the future birth. Then I want to be a very rich man, or woman, and you a very dear little sister or brother;--and I want to have a steam yacht of 30,000 horse-power. "--Your sweetest little daughter, may you live to see her happiness in all things! I am glad I have no daughter. A boy can fight--must fight his way; but a daughter is the luxury of a rich man. Had I a daughter, she would be too dear; and I should feel inclined to say if dying:--'My child, I am unable to guard you longer, and the world is difficult: you would do better to come to Shadowland with me.' But your Marjory will be well guarded and petted, and have the world made sweet for her; and you will have no more grief. You have had all your disappointments and troubles in girlhood--childhood;--the future must be kind to you. As for me, I really think the Gods owe me some favours; they have ignored me so long that I am now all expectation." Then again:-- "MY VERY SWEET LITTLE SISTER, "Your dear letter came yesterday, and filled us all with gladness. You see I say US;--for my folks prayed very hard for you to the ancient Gods and to the Buddhas,--that I might not lose that little sister of mine.--And now to answer questions. "Indeed, Setsu got the photos, and wondered at them, for she had never seen a carriage before of that kind, or a room like your room; and very childishly asked me to make her a room like yours. To which I said:--'The cost of such a room would buy for you a whole street in your native city of Matsue; and besides, you would be very unhappy and uncomfortable in such a room.' And when I explained, she wondered still more. (A very large Japanese house could be bought with the grounds for about £30--I mean a big, big merchant's house--in Izumo.) Another wonder was the donkey in the other photo, for none had ever seen such an animal. "--As for your ever coming to Japan, my dear, if you do, you shall have a chair. But I fear--indeed I am almost certain--that the day is not very far away when I must leave Setsu and Kajiwo to the care of the ancient Gods, and go away and work bravely for them elsewhere, till Kajiwo is old enough to go abroad. The days of foreign influence and of foreign teaching in Japan are rapidly drawing to a close. Japan is learning to do well without us; and we have not been kind enough to her to win her love. We have persecuted her with hordes of fanatical missionaries, robbed her by unjust treaties, forced her to pay monstrous indemnities for trifling wrongs;--we have forced her to become strong, and she is going to do without us presently, the future is dark. Happily my folks will be provided for; and I expect to be able, if I must go, to return in a few years. It is barely possible that I might get into journalism in Japan,--but not at all sure. I suppose you know that is my living profession: I understand all kinds of newspaper work. But as I am no believer in conventions, I am not likely to get any of the big sinecures. To do that one must be a ladies' man, a member of some church, a social figure. I am no ladies' man: I am known to the world as an 'infidel,' and I hate society unutterably. Were I rich enough to live where I please, I should certainly (if unable to live in Japan) return to the tropics. Indeed, I have a faint hope of passing at least the winters of my old age near the Equator. Where the means are to come from I don't know; but I have a kind of faith in Goethe's saying, that whatever a man most desires in youth, he will have an excess of in his old age. Leisure to write books in a warm climate is all I ask. Pray to the Gods, if you believe in any Gods, to help the dream to be realised. "Kajiwo is my nightmare. I am tortured all day and all night by the problem of how to set him going in life before I become dust. Sometimes I think how bad it was of me to have had a child at all. Yet before that, I did not really know what life was; and I would not lose the knowledge for any terms of gifts of years. Besides, I am beginning to think I am really a tolerably good sort of fellow,--for if I had been really such a monster of depravity as the religious fanatics declared, how could I have got such a fine boy. There must be some good in me anyhow. Nobody shall make a 'Christian' of Kajiwo if I can help it--by 'Christian' I mean a believer in absurd and cruel dogmas. The world talks much about Christianity, but no one teaches it. "--So glad to hear you are able to go out a little again. Perhaps a long period of strong solid calm health is preparing for you. After the trials and worries of maternity such happy conditions often come as a reward. I hope to chat with you by a fire when we are both old, and Kaji has shot up into a man,--looking like his aunt a little--with a delicate aquiline face. But only the Eternities know what his face will be like. It is changeable as water now. I won't send another photo of him till he looks pretty again. "With best love, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_June_ 24, '94. "I must go off travelling in a couple of weeks. Perhaps there will be a little delay before my next letter reaches you." [Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).] In the next letter he touches upon these travels undertaken with his wife, mother-in-law, and Kaji (an abbreviation of Kazuo, or Kajiwo, as Hearn was in the habit of calling him at first). "How sweet of you," he says, "to send that charming photo of the children. It delighted us all. Setsu never saw a donkey--there are none in Japan; and all wondered at the strange animal. What I wondered at was to see what a perfect pretty little woman the charming Marjory is. As for the boy, he is certainly what every parent wants a boy to be as to good looks; but I also think he must have a very sweet temper. I trust that you won't allow the world to spoil it for him. They do spoil tempers at some of the great public schools. I cannot believe it is necessary to let young lads be subjected to the brutality of places like Eton and Harrow. It hardens them too much. The answer is that the great school turns out the conquerors of the world,--the subalterns of Kipling,--the Clives,--the daring admirals and great captains, etc. Perhaps in this militant age it is necessary. But I notice the great thinkers generally come from other places. However, this is the _practical_ age,--there is nothing for philosophers, poets, or painters to succeed in, unless they are independently situated. I shall try to make a good doctor out of Kaji, if I can. I could never afford to do more for him. And if possible I shall take him to Europe, and stay there with him for a couple of years. But that is a far-away matter." Characteristically with that apprehensive mind of his, his son's future, as Hearn himself confesses, became a perfect nightmare. "I must make an Englishman of him, I fear. His hair has turned bright brown. He is so strong that I expect him to become a very powerful man: he is very deep-chested and thick-built and so heavy now, that people think I am not telling the truth about his age. "Kajiwo's soul seems to be so English that I fancy his memory of former births would scarcely refer much to Japan. How about the real compound race-soul, though? One would have to recollect having been two at the same time. This seems to me a defect in the popular theory--still the Japanese hold, or used to hold, that the soul is itself a multiple--that each person has a _number of souls_. That would give an explanation. Scientifically it is true. We are all compounds of innumerable lives--each a sum in an infinite addition--the dead are not dead--they live in all of us and move us,--and stir faintly in every heart-beat. And there are ghostly interlinkings. Something of _you_ must be in _me_, and of both of us in Kajiwo. "--I wonder if this also be true of little Dorothy. It is a curious thing that you tell me about the change in colour of the eyes. I only saw that happen in hot climates. Creole children are not uncommonly born with gold hair and bright blue eyes. A few years later the skin, eyes, hair seem to have entirely changed,--the first to brown, the two last to coal-black. "--I am writing all this dreamy stuff just to amuse my sweet little sister,--because I can't be near to pet her and make her feel very happy. Well, a little Oriental theory may have some caressing charm for you. It is a very gentle faith--though also very deep; and you will find in my book how much it interests me. "Take very, very, _very_ good care of your precious little self,--and do not try to write till you feel immensely strong. Setsu sends sweet words and wishes. And I----! "With love, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_Kumamoto, June_ 2, '94." CHAPTER XX OUT OF THE EAST "So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced shadows were the sole product of Western civilisation, and bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows of machinery and chimneys and telegraph poles; and at the shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of houses twenty storeys high, and of hunger begging under them; and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty; and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and the shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for the purpose of an auto-da-fe. Whereat Japan became rather serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes. Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still cling to her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did before." After the lapse of a certain amount of time Hearn gradually became more reconciled to Kumamoto. The climate agreed with him, he put on flesh, all his Japanese clothes, he declared, even his _kimono_, had become too small. "I cannot say whether this be the climate, the diet, or what. Setsu says it is because I have a good wife: but she might be prejudiced, you know." It is more likely that his well-being at this time arose from his having given up the experiment of living exclusively on a Japanese regimen. After his bout of illness at Matsue, he found that he could not recuperate on the fare of the country, even when reinforced with eggs. Having lived for ten months thus, horribly ashamed as he was to confess his weakness, he found himself obliged to return to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and devoured enormous quantities of beef and fowl, and drank terrific quantities of beer. "The fault is neither mine nor that of the Japanese: it is the fault of my ancestors, the ferocious, wolfish hereditary instincts and tendencies of boreal mankind. The sins of the fathers, etc." Meantime, his knowledge of the strange people amongst whom his lot was cast was deepening and expanding. "Out of the East," the collection of essays--essence of experiences accumulated at this time, and the book, next perhaps to "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," by which he is best known--is typical of his genius at its best and at its worst. The first sketch, entitled, "The Dream of a Summer's Day," is simply a bundle of impressions of the journey to which he alludes when writing to his sister, made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea. This journey, through some of the most beautiful scenery of Japan, after the horrors of a foreign hotel at an open port, was one of those experiences that form an epoch in an artist's life, touching him with the magic wand of inspiration. All the delightful impressions made by the poetry and the elusive beauty of old Japan seem concentrated into six pages of poetic prose. To the world it is known as "The Dream of a Summer's Day."[24] To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote in the warm air. Like a bubbling spring the sense of beauty broke forth from the caverns of ancient memory, where, according to Lafcadio, it had lain imprisoned for years, to ripple and murmur sweet music in his ears. He went back to the days of his childhood, back to dreams lying in the past in what had become for him an alien land; the fragrance of a most dear memory swept over his senses. The gnat of the soul of him flitted out into the gleam of blue 'twixt sea and sun, back to the cedarn balcony pillars of the Japanese hotel, whence he could see the opening of the bay and the horizon, haunted by mountain shapes, faint as old memories, and then again to distant and almost forgotten memories of his youth by Lough Corrib, in the West of Ireland, the result being as beautiful a prose poem as Hearn ever wrote. [24] "Out of the East," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [Illustration: Dorothy Atkinson.] The last essay in the collection is called "Yuko," a reminiscence. There are many of Lafcadio Hearn's critics who say that, in consequence of his ignorance of the Japanese language, and the isolation in which he lived, he never could have known anything really of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the people to whom he professed to act as interpreter. Sometimes they maintain that his views are unfavourable to an exaggerated extent, at another too laudatory. His essay entitled "Yuko" might certainly be taken as an example of the manner in which he selected certain superficial manifestations as typical of the inner life of the Japanese--a people as reserved, as secretive, as difficult to follow in their emotional aspects as the hidden currents to which he compares them, quoting the words of Kipling's pilot: "And if any man comes to you, and says, 'I know the Javva currents,' don't you listen to him; for those currents is never yet known to mortal man!" Yuko was a servant-maid in a wealthy family at Kinegawa. She had read in the daily newspaper the account of the attempt on the life of the Czarevitch during his visit to Japan in 1891. Being an hysterical, excitable girl, she was apparently wound up to the pitch of temporary insanity. Leaving her employer's home, she made her way to Kyoto, and there, buying a razor, she cut her throat opposite the gate of the Mikado's palace. Hearn writes of the incident as if the girl were a Joan of Arc, obeying the dictates of the most fervent patriotism. He goes to the extent of describing the Mikado, "The Son of Heaven," hearing of the girl's death, and "augustly ceasing to mourn for the crime that had been committed because of the manifestations of the great love his people bore him." Afterwards, Hearn admitted that his enthusiasm was perhaps exaggerated, for revelations showed that Yuko, in a letter she had left, had spoken of "a family claim." Under the raw strong light of these commonplace revelations, he confessed that his little sketch seemed for the moment much too romantic, and yet the real poetry of the event remained unlessened--the pure ideal that impelled a girl to take her own life merely to give proof of the love and loyalty of a nation. No small, mean, dry facts could ever belittle that large fact. Let those, however, who say that Hearn did not understand the enigmatical people amongst whom his lines were cast, read his article on "Jiu-jitsu" in this same volume. It is headed by a quotation from the "Tao-Te-King." "Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong. So is it with all things.... Firmness and strength are the concomitants of death; softness and weakness are the concomitants of life. Hence he who relies upon his own strength shall not conquer." Preaching from this text, Hearn writes a masterly article, showing how Japan, though apparently adopting western inventions, preserves her own genius and mode of thought in all vital questions absolutely unchanged. The essay ends with a significant paragraph, showing how we occidentals, who have exterminated feebler races by merely over-living them, may be at last exterminated ourselves by races capable of under-living us, more self-denying, more fertile, and less expensive for nature to support. Inheriting, doubtless, our wisdom, adopting our more useful inventions, continuing the best of our industries--perhaps even perpetuating what is most worthy to endure in our sciences and our arts; pushing us out of the progress of the world, as the dinotherium, or the ichthyosaurus, were pushed out before us. Towards the end of his stay at Kumamoto, he wrote one of his delightful, whimsically affectionate letters to his old friend, Mr. Watkin, in answer apparently to one from him, recalling their talks and expeditions in the old days at Cincinnati, and expressing his gratitude for the infinite patience and wisdom shown in his treatment of his naughty, superhumanly foolish, detestable little friend. "Well, I wish I were near you to love you, and make up for all old troubles." He then tells his "dad" that he has been able to save between $3,500 and $4,000, that he has placed in custody in his wife's name. The reaction, he said, against foreign influence was very strong, and the future looked more gloomy every day. Eventually, he supposed, he must leave Japan and work elsewhere, and he ends, "When I first met you I was nineteen. I am now forty-four--well, I suppose I must have lots more trouble before I go to Nirvana." Towards the end of the Chinese-Japanese War Hearn was worried with anxiety on the subject of the noncontinuance of his appointment at the Kumamoto College. "Government Service," he writes to Amenomori, "is uncertain to the degree of terror,--a sword of Damocles; and Government doesn't employ men like you as teachers. If it did, and would give them what they should have, the position of a foreign teacher would be pleasant enough. He would be among thinkers and find some kindness,--instead of being made to feel that he is the servant of petty political clerks." He approached Page Baker, his old New Orleans friend, asking him if he could get him anything if he started in the spring for America. Something good enough to save money at, not only for himself, but something that would enable him to send money to Japan; he was not desirous of seeing Boston, New York or Philadelphia, but would rather be in Memphis, Charleston, or glorious Florida. Page Baker had apparently been sending him help, for on June 2nd Hearn writes acknowledging a draft for one hundred and sixty-three pounds, thanking him ten thousand times from the bottom of his much scarified heart. "I am now forty-four," he adds, "and as grey as a badger. Unless I can make enough to educate my boy well, I don't know what I'm worth,--but I feel that I shall have precious little time to do it in; add twenty to forty-four, and how much is left of a man?" In another letter he again alludes to the manner in which the government are cutting down the number of employés: "My contract runs only until March," he ends, "and my chances are 0." At last, after many hesitations, he definitely decided to leave government service, and in the autumn of 1894 accepted the offer of a position on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_ made by Mr. Robert Young, proprietor and editor of the newspaper. To his sister he wrote from the _Kobe Chronicle_ office, Kobe, Japan:-- "MY DEAR MINNIE, "I am too much in a whirl just now to write a good letter to you (whose was the little curl in your last?--you never told me). I am writing only to say that I have left the Government Service to edit a paper in one of the open ports. This is returning to my old profession, and is pleasant enough,--though not just now very lucrative. "Best love to you. Perhaps we shall meet in a few years. My boy is well, beginning to walk a little. My book was to be issued on the 29th Sept. "Ever affectionately, "LAFCADIO." CHAPTER XXI KOBE Last spring I journeyed to Japan with Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio Hearn's half-sister, and her daughter. Mrs. Atkinson was anxious to make the acquaintance of her Japanese half-sister-in-law to ascertain the circumstances surrounding the family, also if it were possible to carry out her half-brother's wishes with regard to educating his eldest son, Kazuo--his Benjamin--in England. The first place at which we landed was Kobe, situated on the eastern end of the Inland Sea, opposite Osaka, the Manchester of Japan. Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed to reside in the city under Japanese law. During the six weeks on board the P. & O. coming out, I had been reading Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji--gateway of the Inland Sea--it had blown a gale, and the Japanese steamer, the _Chikugo Maru_, to which we had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea, made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes, and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by symbolic _Torii_ leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing villages that seemed to have grown on the shore, their thatched roofs covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "_Yane-shobu_." At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in _geta_ and _kimono_, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,--a magic that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions, telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur. A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then paled to green. There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead. And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy peculiar to Japan, we dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the Ghost of Waters. We saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the water grasses that bend in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the falling dew was the spray from the herdsman's oar. And the heavens "seemed very near, and warm, and human; and the silence about us was filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning and for ever young, and for ever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the Gods." The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream. It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick erections, factory chimneys, and plate-glass shop-fronts; easy was it to understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country. Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short _kuruma_ journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again in the era of Kusimoki Marahige. Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea coast,--Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;--ancient Nippon keeps them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface of a mirror is changed by passing reflections, as says their interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn. Next to the hotel--as if to emphasise its nationality--was an ancient pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood; while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of tiles, a cedar world of _engawa_ and _shoji_, indescribable whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects that a strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you passed along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity--another race soul, charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated itself to your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the arrangement of flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns with marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery rhymes in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman with elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and rouged and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter, while behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes writing on long strips of paper from right to left. Enigmatical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross, red-faced women; no coarse, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling. Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to be found in European cities. The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season, about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen--about half a dollar in American money at the present rate of exchange." From the upper balcony of his house the Japanese street, with its rows of little shops, was visible to the bay; from thence he watched the cholera patients being taken away, and the bereaved, as soon as the law allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered abodes, while the ordinary life of the street went on day and night, as if nothing particular had happened. The itinerant vendors with their bamboo poles, and baskets or buckets, passed the empty houses, and uttered their accustomed cry; the blind shampooer blew his melancholy whistle; the private watchman made his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; and the children chased one another as usual with screams and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished, but the survivors continued their play as if nothing had happened, according to the wisdom of the ancient East. A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of 1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which the said Lafcadio never deserved, and never will deserve." Death had no terrors for Lafcadio Hearn, but the premonitions of physical shipwreck that beset him now depressed him heart and soul because of the work still left undone. He would like nothing so much, he said, as to get killed, if he had no one but himself in the world to take care of--which is just why he wouldn't get killed. He couldn't afford luxuries until his work was done. To his sister he writes:-- "I have been on my back in a dark room for a month with inflammation of the eyes, and cannot write much. Thanks for sweet letter. I received a _Daily News_ from you,--many, many thanks. Did not receive the other papers you spoke of--probably they were stolen in Kumamoto. I fear I cannot do much newspaper work for some time. The climate does not seem to suit my eyes,--a hot climate would be better. I may be able to make a trip next winter to some tropical place, if I make any money out of my books. My new book--"Out of the East"--will be published soon after this letter reaches you. "Future looks doubtful--don't feel very jolly about it. The mere question of living is the chief annoyance. I am offered some further work in Kobe, that would leave me leisure (they promise) for my own literary work, but I am not sure. However, the darkest hour is before the dawn, perhaps. "Kaji is well able to walk now, and talks a little. Every day his hair is growing brighter; a thorough English boy. "Excuse bad eyes. "Love to you, "LAFCADIO." Although more than twelve years had elapsed between our visit and the period when Hearn had resided in Kobe, nearly every one remembered the odd little journalist, who might be seen daily making his way, in his shy, near-sighted fashion, from his house in Kitinagasa Dori, to the office of the _Kobe Chronicle_. Dr. Papellier of Kobe, who attended Hearn in a professional capacity at this time, was full of reminiscences. Long before meeting him at Kobe Dr. Papellier had been a great admirer of his genius, had, indeed, when surgeon on board a German vessel, translated "Chita" for a Nuremburg paper. Being an oculist, one of his first injunctions, as soon as he examined Hearn's eyes, was cessation from all work and rest in a darkened room if he wished to escape total blindness. The right eye was myopic to an extent seldom seen, and at the moment was so severely inflamed by neuritis that the danger of an affection to the retina seemed imminent,--the left was entirely blind. For the purpose of keeping up his spirits, under this unwonted constraint, Dr. Papellier, in spite of his professional engagements, went out of his way to visit the little man frequently, and would stop hours chatting; showed him, indeed, a kindness and consideration that, we were told, were quite exceptional. Hearn, Dr. Papellier relates, was a good and fluent talker, content to keep the ball rolling himself, and preferred an attentive listener rather than a person who stated his own opinions. Their topics of conversations circled round the characteristics of the civilisation in which they were living. Hearn's emotional enthusiasm for the Japanese, the doctor said, had cooled; he had received several shocks in dealing with officials at Kumamoto, and said his illusions were vanishing, and he wanted to leave the country; France, China, or the South Sea Islands seemed each in turn to attract his wayward fancy. The account of Stevenson's life in Samoa had made a great impression on him. He declared that if he had not his Japanese family to look after he would pack up his books of reference and start at once for Samoa. "His wife, who understood no English at all, seldom appeared, a servant girl usually attending to his wants when I was present. "It struck me at the time that his knowledge of the Japanese vernacular was very poor for a man of his intelligence, who, for nearly four years, had lived almost entirely in the interior, surrounded by those who could only talk the language of the country. "It was plain that what he knew about Japan must have been gained through the medium of interpreters. I was still more surprised when I discovered how extremely near-sighted he was. His impressions of scenery or Japanese works of art could never have been obtained as ordinary people obtain them. The details had to be studied piece by piece with a small telescope, and then described as a whole." His mode of life, Dr. Papellier said, was almost penurious, although he must have been receiving a good salary from the _Kobe Chronicle_, and was making something by his books. At home he dressed invariably in Japanese style; his clothes being very clean and neat. The furniture of his small house was scanty. His food, which was partly Japanese and partly so-called "foreign," was prepared in a small restaurant somewhere in the town. In his position as medical attendant Papellier regarded it as his duty to remonstrate on this point, impressing upon him that he ought to remember the drain on his constitution of the amount of brain work that he was doing, both at the _Kobe Chronicle_ office and writing at home. There were reasons for this that Hearn would not care to tell Papellier. Mrs. Koizumi was in delicate health, expecting her second child, and Hearn doubtless, with that consideration that invariably distinguished him in his treatment of his wife, had his food brought from outside so as to save her the trouble and exertion of cooking it at home. Only in one way, Papellier said, did he allow himself any indulgence, and that was in the amount he smoked. Although he seldom took spirits, he smoked incessantly--not cigars, but a small Japanese pipe--a _kiseru_--which he handled in a skilful way, lighting one tiny tobacco pellet in the glowing ashes of the one just consumed. One of his hobbies was collecting pipes, the other was collecting books. He had already got together a valuable library at New Orleans, he did the same in Japan. He was able to exercise these hobbies inexpensively, but they needed knowledge, time and patience. At his death he possessed more than two hundred pipes, all shapes and sizes. Every one whom we met when we arrived at Kobe advised us to call on the editor of the _Kobe Chronicle_ if we wanted information on the subject of Lafcadio Hearn. We therefore made our way to the _Kobe Chronicle_ office as soon as we could. Mr. Young as well as Mrs. Young, whose acquaintance we made subsequently, were both full of reminiscences of the odd little genius. He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events, the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding--a plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as Hearn was in Kobe. "The Japanese," he was wont to say, "are a very clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding." Absence of mind, and inattention to events passing around him, was very noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the identity of the individual with whom he was conversing. Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in Japanese. At last one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not Japanese." "Oh, really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised the fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English. Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's opinions and conclusions, with regard to the Japanese and their religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary qualities. The flint-edged space of the newspaper column cramped and hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but writing for money an impossibility. Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became nobody again; and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a fool. So he had to sit and wait for the gods. His mind, however, ate itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional, romantic--and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result was an essay that the editor of the _Atlantic_ declared was a veritable illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even he himself. Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated considerably against his being an effective newspaper correspondent, were his personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must, above all things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did not possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!--why not collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the same doom." No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,--a wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in Japan. "For myself," he says in one of the _Kobe Chronicle_ leaders, "I could sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause. Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a destroyer,--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent the edge,--the _acies_,--to use the Roman word--of Occidental aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by the 'noble army.'" Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the life in Old Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every way, with only the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churches! and white shirts! and "_yofuku_"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan--the only civilised country that existed since Antiquity." "Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated, from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things, the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro' (Heart)." Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning--just as we say in English, "the heart of things." It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of Japan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist who told him before she came to Japan she had read Hearn's books and thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his descriptions!" The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's principal book on Japan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." The conditions and people that he describes are certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for instance, said that he once showed him a report in the _Kobe Chronicle_, describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in "Out of the East," which Papellier declared to be an entirely distorted account of the facts as they really occurred. It is the old story of imaginative genius and ordinary commonplace folk. In discussing the question, Hearn insisted that every artist should carry out the theory of selection. A photograph would give the unessential and the essential; an artist picks out important aspects; the portrait-painter's work, though manifestly less exact, is incomparably finer because of its spirituality; though less technically correct, it has acquired the imaginative sentiment of the mind of the artist. When depicting the Japanese he felt justified in emphasising certain excellent qualities, putting these forward and ignoring the rest; choosing the grander qualities, as portrait-painters do, and passing over the petty frailties, the mean characteristics that might impress the casual observer. Nothing is more lovely, for instance, than a Japanese village amongst the hills, when seen just after sunrise--through the mists of a spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the enchantment passes with the vapours: in the raw clear light he can find no palace of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks. He attained to a certainty and precision of form in these "Kokoro" essays that places them above any previous work. Now we can see the benefit of his concentration of mind, of his earnestness of purpose and monastic withdrawal from things of the world; no outside influences disturbed his communing with himself, and it is this communing that imparts a vague and visionary atmosphere, a ghostly thrill to every page of the volume. Yet here was he, in the forty-fifth year of his age, a master amongst masters, arguing with solemn earnestness upon the use or mis-use of the word "shall" and "will," begging Professor Hall Chamberlain for information and guidance. "You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine, but I must confess that your letter on 'shall' and 'will' is a sort of revelation in one sense--it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the sight and sound of the words 'will' and 'shall.' I confess also that I never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of 'will' as softer and gentler than 'shall.' The word 'shall' in the second person especially has for me a queer identification with English harshness and menace,--memories of school perhaps. I shall study the differences by your teaching and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything--the word nothing." The best essays in "Kokoro" were inspired, not by Kobe, but by Kyoto, one of the most beautiful cities in Japan, seat of the ancient government and stronghold of the ancient creeds. It lies only a short distance from Kobe, and many were the days and hours that Hearn spent dreaming in the charming old-fashioned hotel and picking up impressions amidst the Buddhist shrines and gardens of the surrounding country. "Notes from a Travelling Diary," "Pre-existence," and the charming sketch "Kimiko," written on the text "To wish to be forgotten by the beloved is a soul-task harder far than trying not to forget," all originated in Kyoto. In a letter to his sister dated March 11th, 1895, he alludes to his book "Kokoro." "My sweet little beautiful sister, since my book is being so long delayed I may anticipate matters by telling you something of the so-called Ancestor-Worship of which I spoke in my last letter. The subject is not in any popular work on Japan, and I think should interest you, if for no other reason than that you are yourself such a sweet little mother. "When a person dies in Japan, a little tablet is made which stands upon a pedestal, and is about a foot high. On this narrow tablet is inscribed either the real name of the dead, or the Buddhist name given to the soul. This is the Mortuary Tablet, or as you have sometimes seen it called in books, the Ancestral Tablet. "If children die they also have tablets in the home, but they are not prayed to,--but prayed _for_. Nightly the Mother talks to her dead child, advising, reminding, with words of caress,--just as if the little one were alive, and a tiny lamp is lighted to guide the little ghostly feet home. "Well, I do not want to write a dry essay for you, but in view of all the unkind things said about Japanese beliefs, I thought you might like to hear this, for I think you will feel there is something beautiful in the rule of reverence to the dead. "I hope, though I am not at all sure, that you will receive some fairy tales by this same mail,--as I have trusted the sending of them to a Yokohama friend. Here there are no book-houses at all--only shops for the sale of school texts. Should you get the stories, I want you to read the 'Matsuyama Mirror' first. There is a ghostly beauty that I think you will feel deeply. After all, the simplest stories are the best. "I wanted to say many more things; but the mail is about to leave, and I must stop to-day. "My little fellow is trying hard to talk and to walk. He is now very fair and strong. "Tell me, dear little beautiful sister, how you are always,--give me good news of yourself,--and love me a little bit. I will write soon again. "LAFCADIO HEARN." In November, 1895, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited him at Kobe, and then probably the possibility was discussed of Hearn's re-entering the government service as professor of English in the Imperial University at Tokyo. But as late as April, 1896, he still seemed uncertain that his engagement under government was assured. Professor Toyama wrote to him, saying that his becoming a Japanese citizen had raised a difficulty, which he hoped might be surmounted. Hearn replied, that he was not worried about the matter, and had never allowed himself to consider it very seriously--hinting, at the same time, that he would not accept a lower salary. If Matsue only had been a little warmer in the winter, he would rather be teaching there than in Tokyo, in any event he hoped some day to make a home there. About this time comes Hearn's last letter to his sister:-- "MY DEAR LITTLE SIS, "What you say about writing for English papers, etc., is interesting, but innocent. Men do not get opportunities to dispose of any MS. to advantage without one of two conditions. Either they must have struck a popular vein--become popular as writers; or they must have _social_ influence. I am not likely to become popular, and I have no social influence. No good post would be given me,--as I am not a man of conventions, and I am highly offensive to the Orthodoxies who have always tried to starve me to death--without success, happily, as yet. I am looking, however, for an English publisher, and hope some day to get a hearing in some London print. But for the time being, it is not what I wish that I can get, but what I can. Perhaps your eyes will open wide with surprise to hear that I shall get nothing, or almost nothing for my books. The contracts deprive me of all but a nominal percentage on the 2nd thousand. "Well, this is only a line to thank you for your sweet little letter. I have Marjory's too, and shall write her soon. Love, "LAFCADIO. "Excuse eyes. "P.S.--I reopened this letter to add a few lines on second thought. "You wrote in your last about Sir F. Ball. His expression of pleasure about my books may have been merely politeness to a pretty lady,--my sweet little sister. But it may have been genuine--probably was partly so. He could very easily say a good word for me to the Editors of the great Reviews,--the _Fortnightly_, _Nineteenth Century_, etc.--though I am not sure whether his influence would weigh with them very greatly. "At all events what I need is 'a friend at Court,'--and need badly. Perhaps, perhaps only, my little sis could help me in that direction. I think I might ask you,--when possible, to try. The help an earnest man wants isn't money: it is opportunity. "We have a cozy little home in Kobe, and Kobe is pretty, but I fear I shall have to leave it by the time this reaches you. Therefore perhaps it will be better to address me: 'c/o James E. Beale, _Japan Daily Mail_, Yokohama, Japan.' I shall soon send Kajiwo's last photo with some more fairy tales written by myself for your 'bairns.' "Love to you, "L. H." As Lafcadio Hearn's biographer, I almost shrink from saying that this was the last letter of the series written to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson. It somehow was so satisfactory to think of the exile having resumed intercourse with his own people, and with his native land; but with however deep a feeling of regret, the fact must be acknowledged that he suddenly put an end to the intercourse for some unaccountable reason. He not only never wrote again, but returned her envelope, empty of its contents, without a line of explanation. Mrs. Atkinson has puzzled over the enigma many times, but has never been able to fathom the reason for such an action on the part of her eccentric half-brother. There was nothing, she declares, in her letter to wound even his irritable nerves. At one time she thought it might have been in consequence of the attempts of various other members of the family to open a correspondence with him; he reiterated several times to Mrs. Atkinson the statement that "one sister was enough." I, on the other hand, think the key may with more probability be found in a passage from one of his letters written at this time, saying he had received letters from relatives in England that had made his thoughts not blue, but indigo blue. A longing had entered his heart that each year henceforward became stronger, to return to his native land, to hold communion with those of his own race; this nostalgia was rendered acute by his sister's letters, his literary work was interfered with and his nerves upset; he therefore made up his mind suddenly to stop the correspondence. The person who behaved thus was the same erratic creature, who, having previously made an appointment, on going to keep it, rang the bell and then, seized with nervous panic--ran away; or had fits of nervous depression lasting for days because a printer had put a few commas in the wrong place or misspelt some Japanese words. Hearn possessed supreme intellectual courage, would stick to his artistic "pedestal of faith" with a determination that was heroic, but where his nerves were concerned he was an arrant coward. If letters, or arguments with friends, flurried him, or awakened uncongenial thoughts or memories, he was capable of putting the letters away unread, and breaking off a friendship that had lasted for years. Thinking his silence might be caused by ill-health, Mrs. Atkinson wrote several times. The only answer she received was from Mr. James Beale of the _Japan Mail_:-- "Japan Mail _Office_, "_Yokohama_, "_July_ 9_th_, 1896. "Dear Madam, "I hasten to relieve your anxiety in regard to your brother's health. I have just returned from an expedition in the North, and previous to leaving about a month ago, was on the point of asking Hearn if he could accompany me, because it was a part of the country which he has never visited, but about that time I received a letter from him in which he stated that he was very busy (I believe he has another book on the stocks), and I did not mention the matter when I wrote. His letter was written in a very cheerful strain and indicated no illness or trouble with his eyes. In regard to the latter I have heard nothing since the spring of '95, when, through rest from study, they had recovered their normal condition. As Hearn once lived in a very isolated town on the West Coast I used to receive letters and other postal matter for him and do little commissions for him here, and I remember at times English letters passing through my hands. These were all carefully reposted to him as they came, and I should say that your letters had undoubtedly reached him. "No apology is necessary on your part, as I am pleased to afford you whatever consolation you may find in the knowledge of the fact that your brother is alive and well. I think I may venture to say that if he has neglected his friends it is due to being busy. "I send you his address below. "Yours faithfully, "JAS. ELLACOTT BEALE. "_No. 16, Zashiki, "Shichi-chome, Bangai, "Naka Zamate-dori, "Kobe, Japan._ "MRS. M. C. BUCKLEY-ATKINSON. "Since writing the foregoing I have learned that your brother has been appointed to a post in the University. The announcement will appear in to-morrow's _Mail_. "This appointment will necessitate Hearn's removal to the capital, and as the vacation expires on September 15, the address at Kobe I have given will not find him. As soon as his Tokyo address reaches me I will send it to you. "J. E. B." As a set-off to this unaccountable break in his correspondence with his sister, I would like to end this chapter with a touching and pathetic letter, addressed to Mrs. Watkin at Cincinnati, and another to his "Old Dad," friends of over twenty years' standing, but unfortunately am not able to do so. Hitherto Hearn's affection had been given to Mr. Watkin; of his female belongings he had seen but little. Now apparently, Mrs. and Miss Effie Watkin ventured to address the "great man," as their husband's and father's eccentric Bohemian little friend had become. To Mrs. Watkin he touches on the mysteries of spiritualism which were scarcely mysteries in the Far East; some day he hoped to drop in on all the circle he loved and talk ghostliness. Some hints of it appeared, he said, in a little book of his, "Out of the East." He imagined Mr. Watkin to be more like Homer than ever. He himself had become grey and wrinkled, fat, too, and disinclined for violent exercise. In other words, he was getting down the shady side of the hill, the horizon before him was already darkening, and the winds blowing out of it cold. He was not in the least concerned about the enigmas, he said, except that he wondered what his boy would do if he were to die. To his "Old Dad" he writes a whimsically affectionate letter, his old and dearest friend, he calls him. Practical, material people predicted that he was to end in gaol, or at the termination of a rope, but his "Old Dad" always predicted he would be able to do something. He was anxious for as much success as he could get for his son's sake. To have the future of others to care for certainly changed the face of life; he worked and hoped, the best and only thing to do. CHAPTER XXII TOKYO "... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always too much for my own peace of mind,--places, things, and persons,--and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil falls, himself in each and all." One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,--and he made many for the sake of his wife and family--was the giving up of his life in the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its _Yashikis_ and ancient shrines--to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the _Kobe Chronicle_, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle. His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind; she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples. Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing façade, a structure that would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or London. After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a "rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them. In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio. When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a _sake_-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great trees, dreaming out of space, out of time. The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university. One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!" Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly realistic--the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted American suburb--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor; then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess, was difficult. But Setsu was happy--like a bird making its nest, she was fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly weather it was. In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo, there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor, seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers. His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals, and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an impossible task. In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students. Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal, therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical explanation of technique and style. The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form, through every condition of society, and almost into every household. Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl." The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's. Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc. No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of gold--luckily for themselves. He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on you!" All the professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow--no overcoats allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far East--'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest. There is a reason for things--for anything except--a plug hat...." * * * * * As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn, representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about them." With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic. Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested, looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in Japan. He describes his landlord, the old _sake_-brewer, coming to definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,--you ought to have been a girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom." He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese. After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was dedicated:-- TOKYO "to my friend Amenomori Nobushige poet, scholar and patriot." We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality? Alas! I don't know...." Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese, however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own world, as far from this one as the star Rephan. Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle. In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she mentions McDonald of Yokohama--in brown boots and corduroys--as escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain. "After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio." Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in uniform,--a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up till midnight, talking about things. The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Antæus I feel always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality, not so much of a _literary_ man however." The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks, the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"--only real facts--not names or dates--real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy. He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in Japan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible--"especially hidden from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn." If he could get together a book of short stories--six would be enough--he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he could. Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past life--that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?" The communion between these two was more like that between some popular, athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an audacious proceeding that few ventured upon. Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street--the charming way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs. In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's visits. A rocking-chair,--rare piece of furniture in a Japanese establishment--a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder. McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald, therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of all sorts. "With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man! How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'" They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and "blue soul"--names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years. "What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,--with philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher (Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an indefinite way that some divine attribute was his. McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti. Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he wished him to write fiction--he wanted him to make some profit out of his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which alone can furnish the material. They can _divine_, but must have some chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social existence." Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to officialdom--but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy to college there must remain merely a possibility. The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession, and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them. He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at his hole, but he zigzagged away from them. He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him, who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her 'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'" The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them. But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work, believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly. Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come." Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald wrapped him up in his own to send him home--an incident which Hearn declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died. Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius, the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination. It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper again--treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his attacks of temper at Cincinnati. So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's, lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the sale of the copyright of his books in the United States. CHAPTER XXIII USHIGOME "Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all Dopplegangers?--and is not the invisible the only life we really enjoy?" In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue. To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things, sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that rustled through the bamboo-grove. Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else. This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's "Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised, also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but in England. The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that "he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada that could not sing." No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit of the public. Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors, and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University, at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything was favourable to absorption in his work. He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write." Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the drawer of his mind when he passed away. Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's common-sense. "I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light, things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned to prize some of them at their weight in gold." Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't you feel just a little bit ashamed?'" On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent." She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the Japanese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals. "He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he laughed the whole household laughed, too." His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would play "_onigokko_," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song, for instance-- "Yu-yake! Ko-yake! Ashita wa tenki ni nare." "Evening-burning! Little-burning! Weather, be fair to-morrow!" or the Song of "Urashima Taro." He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming, distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of storm and impending disaster which is wonderful. He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling, crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see. But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya, Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as they passed along. An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore, smoking his Japanese pipe. Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half of his stay at Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond: "Very well, if you can eat it, so can I." Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse, though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine, the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to recall." Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers, ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season. We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune, which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection with the incident. But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast, where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for sea-bathing, that he was in his element. The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than that of college professors. As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi, who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw sandals, gourds for holding _sake_, and bottles of lemonade, while surmounting all was the _kamidana_--the shelf of the gods--with its _Daruma_, or household divinity. Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the gale--floating in the mists--shuddering in the leaf--flickering in the light of waters--or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf, to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating round him. It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published after his appointment as professor of English at the university was "Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East." Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at Matsue, Kobe, Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary mill. Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on "Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: _and the outer-man is the ghost_." In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy. In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West. Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous, and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove that he is incapable of feeling them. All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and suggestive instead of detailed. "_Ittakkiri_" (entirely vanished, in the sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who, instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words. The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs, panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains and women's crêpe silk underwear, they are written by every one and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street," contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them are charming. "To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going; Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain. "Things never changed since the Time of the Gods: The flowing of water, the Way of Love." His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so, as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character. Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant Friendship." * * * * * The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define." The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the mighty day. The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour when thought itself must fade. * * * * * "Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated to Mrs. Alice von Behrens for auld lang syne. We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was one of his New York acquaintances. "Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the Japanese poem on the first page. To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he says, he has been and gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods. To save himself further trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased about terms--and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a man liberated from prison--smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring day. In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,--a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of Heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.... Thus and only thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes--the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory." "Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written, and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches, inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a pæan, as it were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems. "Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf. ... Ah! the autumn rains!" And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:-- "Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone to-day." CHAPTER XXIV NISHI OKUBO "From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold the selfsame Moon."--_Buddhist poem translated by_ Lafcadio Hearn. It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo. Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan. It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain Fujisaki--one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners' Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show of azaleas is held once a year. After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi for her occupation. Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a considerable circulation in England. There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my notions of things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald. On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,--assisted by his wife,--he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he suddenly heard an _uguisu_ (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made enough for you and the children." During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully. The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding. Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought," he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging, kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and pleased." "You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can, without reference to nationalities or schools." Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people. At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anæmia common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things," as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not." Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance. Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library, weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down, while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with uplifted hand and enigmatic smile. Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natalé_, the flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs, that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu. Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers' ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by any of our English essayists. Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life. In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully, almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject of human desire and attainment. "He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence--he asked me for the Moon. "Unwisely I protested:-- "'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.' "He answered:-- "'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.' "... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon. "This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom.... "Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways? "No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun, and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven." He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings, supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with the rapture of wind and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below. "In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three! I shall see the sun again! "Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,--doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and destruction hath no covering. "So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But-- "_Must I believe that I really exist?..._" Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without shore I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth.... "Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and multiplied. And the dimness flushed. "Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also mine!..." * * * * * All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night, the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere. "It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_ (vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog; but she was well protected by all that caligraphy. His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on "Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"? "The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing; wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy repairing their damaged habitations.... "... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy. They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to attempt an essay on Ants." After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants, and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants' talk, he would hear of something to his advantage-- "Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible and perceive things imperceptible." After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic law, he thus ends his essay:-- "Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned. "The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency' in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism." In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of "things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,--substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed." During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect musicians," a grass-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antennæ much longer than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished against the light. "He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!... "By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber ... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness, a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish resonance.... "Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it. They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant, never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,--telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely, nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,--especially Hana the housemaid! "Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing." During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight, every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title "Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension." Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be his. In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation." It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions. CHAPTER XXV HIS DEATH "... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating farther and farther one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colours, must melt forever into the colourless Void...." Ten years after his arrival in Japan the lode-star of Lafcadio Hearn's life and genius rose above the far eastern horizon, to cast her clear and serene radiance on the shadowed path that henceforth was but a descent towards the end. We conclude that "The Lady of a Myriad Souls" had written an appreciative letter on the subject of his work, and his, dated January, 1900, was in answer to hers. The thread was taken up where it had been dropped, the old affection and friendship reopened, unchanged, unimpaired. Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people, his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy--his Benjamin--in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight." "I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as the Japanese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of strong men, there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins." With intense longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western lands from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so isolated that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst Englishmen again ... with all their prejudices and conventions." The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but--such a stubborn thing is human nature--sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born, let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love, worship as they worship." At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was during the period of his enthusiasm for "things Japanese." When he came to issue with the officials at Kumamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an occidental--one of his own people. All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life he had passed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad, to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action in nationalising himself a Japanese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his son is a Japanese, born in Japan under Japanese conditions, and unless he throws off all family ties and responsibilities, which, being the eldest son, are--according to communal law in Japan--considerable, he must submit to this inexorable destiny. In his father's adopted country the military or naval profession is closed to him, however, in consequence of his defective eyesight, and both would have been closed to him also in England. Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son, made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same answer was given on every side. He is a Japanese, and must conform to the dictates of the Japanese authorities. They might permit him to go away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality. Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-class education at the Waseda University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested. In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had anticipated, he was forced out of the Imperial University, on the pretext that as a Japanese citizen he was not entitled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during thirteen years for Japan, and sacrificed everything for Japan, I have been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the country. For while the politico-religious combination that has engineered this matter remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any position in any educational establishment here for even six months." In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this juncture, it is well to remember that Japan was struggling for existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard, perhaps, but the Japanese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls? and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,--sturdy and not likely to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I must devote the rest of my life to looking after him." And she--his wise friend--knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself." "Very true," was Hearn's answer--and well did he know, for had not he, the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day? "No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid: the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,--and I flee, and bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might be, that a man should not be,--except as to bodily strength.... I taught him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil--what chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?" The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:-- "Sense with keenest edge unused, Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire; Lovely feet as yet unbruised, On the ways of dark desire; Sweetest hope that lookest smiling O'er the wilderness defiling! "Why such beauty, to be blighted, By the swarm of foul destruction? Why such innocence delighted, When sin stalks to thy seduction? All the litanies e'er chanted, Shall not keep thy faith undaunted. "I have pray'd the Sainted Morning To unclasp her hands to hold thee; From resignful Eve's adorning Stol'n a robe of peace to enfold thee; With all charms of man's contriving Arm'd thee for thy lonely striving. "Me too once unthinking Nature, --Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,-- Fashion'd so divine a creature, Yes, and like a beast forsook me. I forgave, but tell the measure, Of her crime in thee, my treasure." It seems as if he were haunted by memories of his own thwarted childhood and shipwrecked youth. If possible he wished to guard and protect his Benjamin from the pitfalls that had beset his path, knowing that the same dangers might prevail in Kazuo's case as in his own, and that there might be no one to protect and guard him. A charming piece of prose, from which I give a few extracts, was found amongst Hearn's papers after his death. The manuscript, lent to me by Mrs. Atkinson, lies by my hand as I write; it is entitled "Fear." "An old, old sea-wall, stretching between two boundless levels, green and blue. Everything is steeped in white sun; and I am standing on the wall. Along its broad and grass-grown top a boy is running towards me,--running in sandals of wood,--the sea-breeze blowing aside the long sleeves of his robe as he runs.... With what sudden incommunicable pang do I watch the gracious little figure leaping in the light.... A delicate boy, with the blended charm of two races.... And how softly vivid all things under this milky radiance,--the smiling child-face with lips apart,--the twinkle of the light quick feet,--the shadows of grasses and of little stones!... "But quickly as he runs, the child will come no nearer to me,--the slim brown hand will never cling to mine. For this light is the light of a Japanese sun that set long years ago.... Never, dearest!--never shall we meet,--not even when the stars are dead!" By the exercise of a considerable amount of diplomacy Mrs. Wetmore succeeded at this time in inducing Jacob Gould Schurmann, president of Cornell University, to enter into an arrangement with Hearn for a series of lectures on Japan. As of old, she believed him capable of conquering Fate, in spite of the despotism of fact as exemplified in the loss of eyesight and broken health; she felt sure he could interest an American audience by the material he had to offer, and the scholarly way in which he knew how to utilise it. His answer to the suggestion of the lectures is characteristic:-- "O fairy! what have you dared to say? I am quite sure that I do _not_ know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or politics, or history. (You did not say 'politics' or 'history,' however, and that seems to be what is wanted.) But perhaps you know _what_ I know better than I myself know,--or perhaps you can give me to eat a Fairy Apple of Knowledge. At present I have no acquaintance even with the Japanese language: I cannot read a Japanese newspaper: and I have learned only enough, even of the _kana_, to write a letter home. I cannot lie--to my Fairy; therefore it is essential that I make the following declaration:--" Then he repeats the statement made in the preface of "Japan, an Interpretation." For these lectures prepared with so much industry and care were destined ultimately to go to the making of that beautiful and lucid exposition of the history and thought of a great people. The world has to be grateful to President Schurmann for withdrawing from his contract, and cancelling the offer made to Hearn for the delivery of lectures at the university. The excuse that illness had broken out at Cornell was hardly a sufficient one. There is little doubt that unfavourable reports of Hearn's state of health, and doubts as to the possibility of his being able to lecture in public, had drifted to Cornell, and the president, acting for the best interests of his university, did not feel justified in abiding by his proposals. With that extraordinary mental elasticity that characterised him all his life, Hearn made the best of the situation, and set to work, polishing and repolishing his twenty-two lectures until they reached the high level of style that distinguishes "Japan, an Interpretation." His courage was the more extraordinary as, filled with the idea that he was at last going to America, he had gone into every detail of meeting his friend. "I would go straight to your Palace of Fairy before going elsewhere," he writes to Mrs. Wetmore, "only to see you again--even for a moment--and to hear you speak in some one of the myriad voices would be such a memory for me, and you would let me 'walk about gently touching things.'..." Then in another letter comes a sigh of regret, and as it were farewell. "But your gifts, O Faery Queen have faded away, even as in the Song ... and I am also fading away." After the failure of his projected visit to America, a suggestion was made by the University of London that he should give a series of lectures there. But here was the "Ah-ness" of things. Had Hearn's health permitted he would probably have been in England in 1905, where he would have been received with honour. The Japanese had fought Russia and beaten her. People became wildly enthusiastic about Japan: the libraries were besieged with inquiries for Hearn's books,--just at the eleventh hour, when he had become a name, he died! All his life his dream had been to be independent, to be able to travel. Referring to a gentleman who was in Japan, he once said, "I envy him his independence. Think of being able to live where one pleases, nobody's servant,--able to choose one's own studies and friends and books." The offer of an easy post was made to Hearn about this time as professor of English in the Waseda University founded by Count Okuma. He closed with it at once, thus putting an end to all negotiations with the University of London. His youngest child, Setsu-ko, was born this year, and all idea of leaving Japan was henceforth abandoned. In his last letter to Mrs. Wetmore, dated September, 1904--the month in which he died--he touches on the dedication he had made to her in his book, "A Japanese Miscellany." To the last the same sympathy and understanding reigned between them. Patiently she exhorted, comforted. Her wise counsel and advice soothed his torn nerves and aching heart to the end. So this affection, untouched by the moth and rust of worldly intercourse, went down with him "into the dust of death." Slowly but surely the years with their chequered story were drawing to an end. The sum of endeavour was complete, the secrets Death had in its keeping were there for the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit. Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same impression--a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine consideration for others, the thought of the future of his wife and children, triumphing over suffering and death. He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.' "'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said." While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her _tokonoma_ she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve hours were over! Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree in the garden,--not much to look at--but it was a blossom blooming out of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi. "I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful, but will soon die under the approaching cold.' "You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking that the _Kaerizaki_, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...." In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of September 26th, after supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate." CHAPTER XXVI HIS FUNERAL "If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong, as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal records in the Universal life,--every thought of good or ill or aspiration,--and the Buddhistic Karma would be a scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds would be forever acting invisibly on us." Perhaps of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than his funeral. It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions" in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space. Yet--Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his latter years--at his death his body was taken possession of by priests, who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over, and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple! A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held. It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a "ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under the relentless light of the afternoon sun. He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper _gohei_; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne, palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination of good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn. While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son, Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university professors, went to the right. Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo. After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse, touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife, when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven, in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the ceremony ended and the congregation left the church. Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of the day was at an end. CHAPTER X VISIT TO JAPAN "Every dwelling in which a thinker lives certainly acquires a sort of soul. There are Lares and Penates more subtle than those of the antique world; these make the peace and rest of a home." On the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening. Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law, announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the red tape--the bales of red tape--that surround social as well as official transactions in Japan. Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter. To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and, though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters; in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason also reminded us that Mrs. Koizumi did not understand a word of English; she must have recourse to an interpreter before communicating with her Irish sister-in-law, but, above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs. Atkinson had addressed her letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by which no properly constituted Japanese postman would find himself justified in recognising Hearn's widow. By nationalising himself a Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as his occidental inheritance went, had vanished forever. He and his wife were only known at Tokyo as Mr. and Mrs. Koizumi. Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her, and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs, and insisted on his visitors doing the same. The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is "another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese; it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything unexpected--all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately in a jinrikisha to see her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have fallen into one another's arms, and a close intimacy would have been begun. Not so in Japan. [Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).] "Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr. Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a letter will turn up." Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's advice. I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's interview with the old Buddhist priest. Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where, embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine. From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression, common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese picture-books--the sacred, the matchless mountain--Fuji-no-yama. There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned from out the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision of the old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three hundred volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the interpreter Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise between them, while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat, and the song of the _uguisu_ from the plum-tree grove, we heard the murmur of their voices. "That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been.... Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation have no existence." Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady, dressed in the national Japanese costume--a kimono of dark iron-grey silk--the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance. Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles. Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas, good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced, Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik, of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and elaborate coiffure--the usual erection worn by her country-women--she might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large English establishment. The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried, instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and from the Imperial University. After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision, leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the background. At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered his father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown hair and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a queer little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to learn by heart." Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese expression--a mask of reserve as it were--fell like a curtain over his face,--he was Japanese again. He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible; his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative understand what he wished to say. It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason, who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly possessed--that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had been so sensitive--a soft and musical voice. Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England, and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese woman to wear any article of jewellery. [Illustration: CARLETON ATKINSON.] Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable time--Japanese visits usually do--Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo. The Métropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room. Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the Spring Equinox (_Shunki Korei-sai_). There is an autumn and a spring equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren, into the streets. The ladies were in their best _kimonos_, their hair elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and woman. A pretty _musumé's_ ivory-coloured oval face against the cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically picturesque than a Tokyo street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry of rain when hundreds of these ineffective shelters with their quaint designs of chrysanthemums, cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly opened. Alas! in ten years' time, like many other quaint and beautiful Japanese productions, these oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away into the region of faintly-remembered things. The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of the men had a little too much _sake_ on board, their tipsiness was only betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes, indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of _sake_, smells of seaweed soup, smells of _daikon_ (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of sunshine. Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams, and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges, down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams, we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen. Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas, and still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed _kuruma_ men, did our journey last, through the quarter of the foreign legations, past government offices and military stations, beside the moat surrounding the mikado's palace, with its grass slopes and pine-clad fosse, down declivities and up others, through endless lanes, bordered by one-storeyed houses standing in shrubberies behind bamboo fences. At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose _kuruma_ led the way, halted before a small gateway, surmounted by a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we understood afterwards, with Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs. Passing through, we found ourselves opposite the entrance of a lightly-built two-story house, rather resembling a suburban bungalow in England. Directly we entered we were transported into a different era. Here no modern Japan was visible. On the threshold, waiting to receive us, was an "august residence maid," kneeling, palms extended on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head touching the matting, and wondered if it belonged to Hana, the unsympathetic Hana who had let the grass-lark die. Beside her was Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child, in a brilliantly-coloured _kimono_, while on the step above stood Professor Tanabe, who had been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an intimate friend of the Koizumi family, living near by, and acting occasionally as interpreter for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture--as an eastern philosopher, for instance--he would have made for Moroni or Velasquez, with the delicate grey and cream background of the Japanese _tatami_ and paper _shoji_. He had the clear olive complexion and intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of his own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a presence, and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was trying; for the little girl had raised her forehead from the matting, and, with hands on knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us sideways like a bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential liftings of the eyes and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals from a row that stood close by, helped us to take off our boots and put on the sandals. We then remarked that she was not at all unsympathetic-looking, but a nice, chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We hoped devoutly we had no holes in our stockings, and after a considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got through the ordeal in time to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who appeared beside Professor Tanabe on the step above us, softly inviting us to "honourably deign to enter her unworthy abode." The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the _engawa_ (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been Hearn's study. The _fusima_ or paper screens separating the two rooms were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase, but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the _Butsudan_, or family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner. Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped. At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an Interpretation," and so many other wonderful books, and I felt as I looked at that room of Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive than the quick. The walls--or rather the paper panels and wood laths that did duty for walls--were haunted with memories. I pictured the odd little figure--dressed in the _kimono_ given him by Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems--"Surely just the kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"--with the prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in the ancient, patient manner" on his _zabuton_--smoking his _kiseru_, or standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk. There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and clamour of the city outside--it gave an impression of restfulness, of calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels that, like the _fusima_, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room. I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had occupied the corner where now stands the _Butsudan_, contaminating that wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent, crystalline atmosphere" unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke. These hardy folk told us that they were always catching coughs and colds when they had the stove and glass windows, so they took both out, and put back the paper _shoji_ and the charcoal brazier. It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his study. The _andon_--tallow-candle--stuck in a paper shade--national means of lighting a room--had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber tube. Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single _kakemono_, or piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought and life--that Hearn blended so deftly in his work--joined hands. Round the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were placed, filled with books, English most of them--De Quincey, Herbert Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the _Butsudan_ rested volumes of Browning and Kipling. I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as hanging on the ceiling? It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay _godong_ given to the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all valuable and artistic objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from fire, earthquakes and floods. Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate grey ground. On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a _kakemono_ or scroll-picture representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese ideographs in the corner--by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present from Kazuo to his father. Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard, was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl. Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one. Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance of some sort. Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves uncomfortable in what seemed to me such an irritating and futile way. That any sane people should eat a succession of horrible concoctions made up of raw fish, lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted of Pears' soap, whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an afterthought, eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed on Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy. The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins it was an omen of death. I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him, could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch your legs and be comfortable." After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a mass of snowy white bloom. But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs. Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them. Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's life. Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies," daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough Corrib. "Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas, Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these, Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land-- Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!" CHAPTER XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO "Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands,--like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour you still can find Horai--but not elsewhere.... Remember that Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,--the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,--never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...." Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi--through the medium of Professor Tanabe--asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks and the lamp were lighted before the _Butsudan_ and a repast laid out in honour of the dead. That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted, and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to the Métropole Hotel. The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts. The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me, reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic meaning. A _Shirabyoshi_ lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there, seated on _zabutons_ in a little shop, as large--or rather as small--as life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little _musumés_, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising _otherness_ of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary land of Nippon. I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him. Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her "Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow and children. A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens, and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a _zabuton_ (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and left a will--Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his contemptible abode to smoke a pipe--further than that he knew nothing. The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku), where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any sort of favour by his colleagues. In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the northern coast. A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both. Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human life--infinite calm, infinite rest. "Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented, with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he had hitherto subscribed? It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its _shoji_ was comforting after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows, genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit, while on the upper step of the _genkan_ (entrance-room) with extended hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first, when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely." Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us, when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental widows when referring to the departed. The doors of the _Butsudan_ were set wide open, and on the _kamidan_, or shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third had been buried with the writer of _Japan_, beneath his tombstone in the Zoshigaya Cemetery. As we stood in the study opposite the _Butsudan_ the ghostly charm, the emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection, crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort. Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo, describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that hangs in the study. Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste, subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit. Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment--a donkey being an unknown animal in Japan--when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour. It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some sort--everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good or bad omen. Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys, were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese, declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially, indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and intelligent. What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_ and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese _kakemonos_ and ideographs. Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up. The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days "freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost." I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient, indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the _Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern education as a material weakness? "The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy." After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of "tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)--his Papa San's favourite cake, Kazuo told us--had been handed round and partaken of, jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery. As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove, stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies--along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots, enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab was the inscription-- "Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"--"Believing Man Similar to Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment." The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand, as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman, Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the moment, buried--an alien amongst aliens--in a Buddhist grave, under a Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own people. CONCLUSION LAFCADIO HEARN'S was a personality and genius which people will always judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi, or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages"; while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament. If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature, would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology" that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we patch up things." Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal, will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute. He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it. Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more, discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries: oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many a day by cultured readers and thinkers. Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so, and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own, and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another, he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform himself of details before discussing them. As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that "he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents inventions shall be killed!" Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a season. It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty, the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for a shadow and lost it." Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of such experience--from a literary point of view--is proved by the force of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness, breathes the very essence of Romanticism. Literary brother to Loti and Rénan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the memory of his Japanese home--the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might catch a butterfly. Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited, without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes, he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories. His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"... The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain healthy habit of thought and life. It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true, he had forfeited his birthright to produce a _Pêcheur d'Islande_; but on most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed. He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue," probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on Japan, afterwards published in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling. As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori, all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms, and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism. Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too pronounced to please the matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands would be needed to mould the figure--an unpractical and extravagant sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion; then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a susceptible people. As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American clothes--then and then only will they be able to understand what an artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view, over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed, if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in his expressions of literary and political opinion. In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him. An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is, indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach, by the Divine Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that the more appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct for art, the smaller will be his success with the general public. But never was his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of pecuniary gain. From the earliest years of his literary career, his delight in composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity, rather than delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in the working. According to him, nothing was less important than worldly prosperity, to write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most damnable, infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug. To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that matters, and "the only success in life." Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life. To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted. "One minute's work to thee denied Stands all Eternity's offence"-- he quotes from Kipling. This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never was at issue either with himself or destiny. Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease, Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one object, his thoughts fixed on one aim. In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy, when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ... her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad generations that have arisen and passed away. What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out. As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things, emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life, making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were beautiful to die for." INDEX AKIRA, 168, 170, 316. Alma Tadema, 57. Amenomori Nobushige, 168, 184, 235, 267. American criticism, an, 145. Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, 143, 144, 149. Ancestral tablet, the, 253. "Ants," essay on, 293. Arnold, Matthew, 59. Arnoux, Leopold, 154. Asama-Yama, 144. Atkinson, Mrs., 4, 13, 217, 301, 304, 313; letters to, 31-48, 56, 67, 68, 86, 100, 112, 204, 221, 252; visits Japan, 313 _et seq._ Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, 202. Atkinson, Carleton, 4, 49. Atkinson, Dorothy, 313, 317. Avatars, 4. BAKER, CONSTANCE, 334. Baker, Page M., 106, 109, 236, 242. Ball, Sir F., 255. Bangor, 26. Baudelaire, 63. Beale, Mr. James, 256, 257. Behrens, Mrs., 284. Berry, Rev. H. F., 43. Bisland, Miss Elizabeth, 110, 111, 125, 133, 151, 267; marriage of, 188, 203; letters to, 158, 180; joint-editor of _Cosmopolitan_, 130. Borrow, George, 274. Boston, 261. Brenane, Mrs. Justin, 2, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 30. Bridges, Robert, quoted, 303. British Museum, image of Buddha in, 57. Bronner, Milton, 61. Brown, Mr., 202. Brownings, the, 59, 324. Buddha of Enoshima, 331, 332. Buddhism, 42, 141, 144. Butcher, Miss, 16. CALIDAS, 146. Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 112, 165, 206; letters to, 116, 169, 177, 191. "Chinese Ghosts," 109. "Chita," 35, 36. Cholera at Kobe, 241. Cincinnati, 53, 65 _et seq._ Cincinnati Brotherhood, 114. Civilisation, attack on, 249. Cockerill, Colonel John, 74. Collins, Wilkie, 60. _Commercial, The_, Hearn joins, 86. "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn" (G. M. Gould), 69. Conventual Orders, 2. Corbishly, Monsignor, 41, 42, 44. Corfu, 6-9. Correagh, 2, 8. Crawford, Mrs., 18, 21. Crescent City, 94. Crosby, Lieutenant, 133. Cullinane, Mr. and Mrs., 53, 64. "DAD." _See_ Watkin. Dai Batsu of Enoshima, 331. Dai Batsu of Kamakura, 142. "Dancing Girl, The," 194. Darwin, Charles, 59, 60, 140. Daunt, Mr. Achilles, 46, 48, 52. Delaney, Catherine, 53, 58. Dengue fever, 100. De Quincey, 289. "Dragon Flies," 285. "Dream of a Summer's Day," 24. Dublin, 5, 10, _et seq._ Du Maurier, 63. "Dust," Hearn's essay on, 49. ELWOOD, FRANK, 25. Elwood, Mrs., 24. Elwood, Robert, 24, 25. Emerson, Miss Margaret, 311. _Enquirer, The_, Hearn on staff of, 74-79. "Eternal Feminine," article on, 281. "Exotics and Retrospectives," 282, 283, 294. "FANTASTICS," 126. "First Principles," Spencer's, 141. Flaubert, Gustave, 43. Foley, Althea, 81, 83, 180. Ford Castle, 3. Formosa, 200. Forrest, General, funeral of, 90. Foxwell, Professor, 120, 278. Franco-Prussian War, 62. Froude, James, 153. Fuji, first sight of, 162. Fuji-no-Yama, 144, 311. Fujisaki, Captain, 286. "GARDEN FOLK LORE," 189. Gautier, Theophile, 62. "Ghostly Japan," 283, 284. "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," 273, 280. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 163, 172, 268, 329. Gould, Dr. George Milbury, 69, 149, 158. Greek culture, 342. Gulf winds, 35. HALL, H. H., 282. Halstead, Mr., 88. Hamamura, cemetery of, 9. Hana, 297. _Harper's Weekly_, 137. Harrison, Frederic, 143. Hawkins, Armand, 104. Hearn, Lafcadio, birth, 1, 9; Hibernian ancestors, 2; English origin, 2; the interpreter of Buddhism, 4; maternal lineage, 4, 5; Hellenic associations of birthplace, 9; memories of Malta, 10; reminiscences of childhood, 17; separation of his parents, 20; adopted by Mrs. Brenane, 21; his defective eyesight, 29, 45, 48; relations with Mr. Molyneux, 30; views of ideal beauty, 36; at Tramore, 37; at school at Ushaw, 40; literary tastes at school, 43; unattractive appearance, 49; in London, 52 _et seq._; literary vocation, 55; Paris, 62; Cincinnati, 65; his shyness, 66; reaches the depths, 68; servant in boarding-house, 69; secretaryship, 74; on staff of _Enquirer_, 74; ascends Cincinnati church spire, 76; his translations, 76; and Althea Foley, 81; and Marie Levaux, 85; joins staff of _The Commercial_, 85; at Memphis, 88; destitution, 94; fever, 100; _Times Democrat_, 105; method of argument, 112; intellectual isolation, 112; intolerance of amateur art, 114; characteristics, 120; visits West Indies, 131; letters, 135; marriage, 134, 179-186; arrangement with Harpers, 137; political opinions, 142; visits Mr. Watkin, 148; the Krehbiels, 148, 149; musical sense, 151; arrives in Yokohama, 160; terminates contract with Harpers, 164; Professor Chamberlain, 165; philosophical opinions and character, 167; appointment in Matsue, 168; Japanese estimate of, 176; passion for work, 184; family, 200; naturalisation, 220; symptoms of physical failure, 242; devotion to family, 260; emotional trances, 288; love of animals, 292; death, 299, _et seq._; his religion, 310; funeral, 310; children, 336; personality, 339; biassed deductions, 341; literary judgments, 342; his romanticism, 343; quotations from, 346; his opinion of Japanese, 347; estimate of his work, 348, 349. Hearn, Charles Bush, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 22, 202. Hearn, Mrs. Charles, 4, 10, 12, 14, 21. Hearn, Mrs., 150; "Reminiscences" of, 276. Hearn, Rev. Daniel, 2, 16, 61, 202. Hearn, Leopold Kazuo, 219. Hearn, Rev. Thomas, 2. Hearn, Miss, 3. Hearn, Miss Lillah, 202, 203. Hearn, Richard, 10 _et seq._, 150. Hearn, Susan, 10 _et seq._ Hearn family in Waterford, 2. Henderson, Mr. Edmund, 74, 76. Hendrik, Ellwood, 125, 263; letters to, 154, 177, 261. Heron, Francis, 3. Heron, Sir Hugh de, 3. Hijo, 189. Hirn, Professor, letter to, 67. Holmes, Elizabeth, 5. Hugo, Victor, 62. Huxley, Professor, 60, 141. ICHIGAYA, 311. "Idolatry," 37. Imperial University, Japanese, 330. "In Ghostly Japan," 145. "Insect Studies," 293. "Intuition," 71. Ionian Islands, 5. Izumo, 262. JAPAN, discipline of official life in, 54; spirit of, 229; old Japan, 347. "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation," 297. Japanese character, analysis of, 176. Japanese constitution promulgated, 158. Japanese day, a, 206. Japanese funeral, a, 312. "Japanese Miscellany, A," 284. Japanese regimen, 231. Japanese school classes, 201. Japanese training of children, 211. Jefferies, Richard, 289. Jitom Kobduera Temple, 311. Jiu-jitsu, 201. Jizo-Do Temple, 315. KENTUCKY, 72. Keogh, Miss Agnes, 50. Kinegawa, 233. Kingsley, Charles, 277. Kinjuro, 189, 191. Kipling, Rudyard, 233, 271, 324, 345. Kitinagasa, Dori, 243. Kobduera, Temple of, 261. Kobe, 168, 193. _Kobe Chronicle_, 168, 248. Koizumi, Mrs. Setsu, 3, 27, 60, 286, 300, 308, 314 _et seq._, 334; "Reminiscences" of, 122; letter of, 309. Koizumi, Idaho, 325. Koizumi, Iwayo, 325. Koizumi, Kazuo, 4, 217, 277, 300, 312, 317 _et seq._, 337. Koizumi, Setsu-ko, 307, 321, 325, 335. "Kokoro," 65, 109, 249, 251, 266. Krehbiel, Henry, 5, 26, 74, 78, 79, 104, 112, 114, 152. Kumamoto, 13, 65, 193, 199. Kusa-Hibari (grass-lark), 295. Kusimoki marahige, 240. "Kwaidan," 24. Kyoto, 252. Kyushu, 200. "LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS" (Miss Bisland), 113, 124-136. Lamb, Charles, 289. Levaux, Marie, 85. "Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn" (Wetmore), 263. Literary College, Tokyo, 3. Loti, Pierre, 29, 84. Lough Corrib, 25, 233. Louisiana, 92. Lowell, Percival, 345. "Luck of Roaring Camp" (Bret Harte), 77. MALTA, 5, 10. Martinique, 155. Mason, Mr. W. B., 122, 143, 287, 313, 315. Matas, Dr. Rudolf, 102, 152. Matsue, 142, 168, 172-178. McDermott, Mr., 73. McDonald, Capt. Mitchell, 108, 126, 168, 267, 271, 276, 284, 287, 299, 324, 333. Memphis, 88-92. "Midwinter, Ozias," 60, 89, 98. Mifflin, Houghton & Co., 208. Millet, François, 62. Mionoseki, ironclads at, 341. Moje, 238. Molyneux, Henry, and Mrs., 2, 23, 28, 30, 50, 69. Montreal, 160. "Moon Desire," 290. Morris, William, 59. "Mountain of Skulls," 145. "My First Romance," 67. "My Guardian Angel," 29. Mythen, Kate, 28, 36. NAGASAKI, 212, 232. New Orleans, 60, 85, 93-101; yellow fever at, 100; Exposition at, 137. New York, 131. "Nightmare Touch," 28. Nishi Okubo, 261, 269, 286 _et seq._ Nishida Sentaro, 168, 181, 184, 265, 345. OKUMA, COUNT, 307. Osaka, 238. O Saki, 308. Otani, 323. Otokichi, 280, 308. "Out of the East," 232, 243, 315. PAPELLIER, DR., 243, 250, 270. Pater, Walter, 59, 349. Philadelphia, 131, 261. Pre-Raphaelites, aims of, 59. "Principles of Ethics" (Spencer), cited, 140. RACHEL, picture of, 71, 72. "Raven, The," 73. Redhill, 30, 45. "Romance of the Milky Way, A," 298. Rossetti, D. G., 59. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 340. Ruskin, 59, 288. SACKVILLE, LIONEL, DUKE OF DORSET, 2. "St. Ronite," 44. Santa Maura, 1, 9. Schurmann, J. G., 305, 306. Seaton, Viscount, 7. "Serenade, A," 146. Setsu-ko (Koizumi), 307, 321. "Shadowings," 284. Shinto worship, 41, 144, 168. "Shirabzoshi" or "Dancing Girl," 193. Shunki Korei-sai, 319. Spencer, Herbert, cited, 60, 139-143, 168, 324, 335. Steinmetz, General, 118. Stevenson, R. L., 28, 63, 289. "Stray Leaves," 109, 126. Suruga, 34. "Sylvestre Bonnard," 43. TAKATA, 25. Tanabe, Professor, 312, 321 _et seq._, 328. Tennyson, 59. Thomson, Francis, 40. "Toko, The," 204. Tokyo, 67, 260 _et seq._, 313. "Torn Letters," 129. Toyama, Professor, 254. Tramore, 2, 20, 28, 31, 33-39. Treves, Sir Frederick, 153. "Trilby," 63. Tunison, Mr. Joseph, 22, 45, 61, 79, 152. "Two Years in the French West Indies," 108, 152. Tyndall, 60. "UJO," 189. Ume, Professor, 330. Ushaw, 28, 29, 36, 40-51. Ushigome, 274-285. VICKERS, THOMAS, 74. "Voodoo Queen," 85. WASEDA UNIVERSITY, 301, 307. Waterford, 34. Watkin, Henry ("Dad"), 44, 65, 66, 70, 73, 90, 100, 112, 147, 162, 235, 258. Watkin, Miss Effie, 258. Weatherall, Mrs., quoted, 18, 19, 221. Weldon, Charles, 159. West Indies, Hearn in, 148 _et seq._ Westmeath, 2, 8. Wetmore, Mrs. (Miss Bisland q. v.), 273, 282, 299, 305, 307. Wexford, 36. Whistler, James, 59, 63. Wiseman, Cardinal, at Ushaw, 40. Worthington, Mr., 106. Wrennal, Father William, 46. YAIDZU, 34, 279, 290. "Yakumo," 221. Yashiki garden, 260. Yokohama, 270, 313. Yone Noguchi, 185, 263, 301, 318, 334. Young, Mr. Robert, 143, 247, 313. Young, Mrs., 246. "Yuko," 233. Yvetot, 61. ZOSHIGAYA, 278. Transcriber's Notes. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_. Passages in small caps are replaced by either Title case or ALL CAPS, depending on how the words were used. Inconsistent hyphenation preserved as in the original. The List of Illustrations was changed to match the captions of the illustrations. On page 51, the comma after "indirectly does me a right" was replaced with a period. On page 52, in the footnote "Lafacadio" was changed to "Lafcadio". On page 65, the [OE] ligature was replaced with "OE". On page 71, "acquiline" was changed to "aquiline". On page 82, "Marysville" was changed to "Maysville". On page 83, "indigant" was changed to "indignant". On page 118, the period inside the quote was changed to a comma. On page 120, "important person that" was changed to "important person than". On page 138, "Houkousai" was changed to "Hokusai". On page 145, "pyschological" was changed to "psychological". On page 163, "Hokousai" was changed to "Hokusai". On page 177, "adoped" was changed to "adopted". On page 202, "Lillian" was changed to "Lilliah". On page 203, the added spaces were in the original, to indicate missing words. Those missing spaces have been retained here. On page 210, "KOIZUME" was changed to "KOIZUMI". On page 245, "kizeru" was changed to "kiseru". On page 260, "bad" was changed to "had". On page 264, "spead" was changed to "spread". On page 275, "library,." was changed to "library,". On page 282, "Ultitimately" was changed to "Ultimately". On page 291, "condi tions" was changed to "conditions". On page 315, "out" was changed to "our". On page 334, "portaits" was changed to "portraits". On page 336, a closing quotation mark was places after "Finis: sweetness and sympathy." On page 353, "Théophile" was changed to "Theophile". On page 355, in the Index, the "Sackville" entry was moved to the "S" section and was identified with small caps as the first "S" word, instead of "St. Ronite", and "Shirabzoshi" was replaced with "Shirabyoshi". 
36783	----	CONCERNING LAFCADIO HEARN [Illustration: LAFCADIO HEARN. _From a Photograph by Gutekunst, 1889._] _Frontispiece._ CONCERNING LAFCADIO HEARN. By GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D. WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY LAURA STEDMAN _WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS_ T. FISHER UNWIN LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20 1908 [_All rights reserved_] CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. HEREDITY AND THE EARLY LIFE 1 II. IN PERSON 7 III. THE PERIOD OF THE GRUESOME 13 IV. THE NEW ORLEANS TIME 33 V. AT MARTINIQUE 57 VI. "GETTING A SOUL" 65 VII. "IN GHOSTLY JAPAN" 81 VIII. AS A POET 93 IX. THE POET OF MYOPIA 103 X. HEARN'S STYLE 119 XI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 137 XII. APPRECIATIONS AND EPITOMES 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _To face page_ LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY GUTEKUNST IN 1889 _Frontispiece_ HEARN AT ABOUT THE AGE OF EIGHT, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH 5 REDUCED FIRST PAGE OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF "YE GIGLAMPZ" 21 LAFCADIO HEARN, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT MARTINIQUE, AUGUST 24, 1888 61 HANDWRITING OF HEARN IN 1889 68 PREFACE THERE are as many possible biographies of a man as there are possible biographers--and one more! Of Lafcadio Hearn there has been, and there will be, no excuse for any biography whatever. A properly edited volume of his letters, and, perhaps, a critical estimate of the methods and development of his imaginative power and literary character are, and still remain, most desirable. That some competent hand may yet be found to undertake this task is still hoped by those who recognize the value of a man's best work. To furnish material and help toward this end is my object in collecting the following pages. The life of a literary man interests and is of value to the world because of the literature he has created. Without a bibliography, without even mention of the works he wrote, his biography would be useless. To correct many untrue and misleading statements and inferences of a serious nature that have been published concerning him and his life, should it ever be undertaken, will prove a labour so difficult and thankless that it will scarcely be entered upon by one who would do it rightly. That it will not be hazarded comes, as I have said, from the fact that it is not needed, because neither Hearn himself, nor his real friends, nor again, a discriminating literary sense, have been, nor can be, under any illusion as to his "greatness." He has been spoken of as "a great man," which, of course, he was not. Two talents he had, but these were far from constituting personal greatness. Deprived by nature, by the necessities of his life, or by conscious intention, of religion, morality, scholarship, magnanimity, loyalty, character, benevolence, and other constituents of personal greatness, it is more than folly to endeavour to place him thus wrongly before the world. The irony of the situation is pathetically heightened by the fact that, supposing him to be very great, "the weaknesses of very great men," which he said should not be spoken of, are amazingly paraded in the letters. Had he ever dreamed that his letters would be published, he would not, and could not, have so unblushingly exposed himself and his faults to the public gaze. The fact has now been writ exceeding large, or it would not be, and should not be, corrected and contradicted. A word to the wise suffices. There remains the question, truly pertinent, concerning the nature and progress toward perfection of his imagination, and of his literary execution. We know nothing, and doubtless we may never know anything definite, accurate and of value about the character either of his father or of his mother. Any attempt, therefore, to estimate what effect heredity had in handing down the strange endowment we find in his early manhood is wholly futile. We may not be too sure concerning either the parentage or nationality ascribed to him. Moreover, in the last analysis, Hearn was no "product of his environment." In a certain sense, he was of the school of Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Loti, and Zola, but with such differences and variations that these teachers may not take much credit or flattery to themselves. The great, the distinctive, the dominating force which controlled and created Hearn's literary makings, his morbid vision, was not "environment" as the critics and scientists mean by the term. These have not yet learned that Art and Life hang upon the perfection and peculiarities of the senses of the artist and of the one who lives, and that intellect and especially æsthetics are almost wholly the product of vision. Conversely, the morbidities and individualisms of Art and Life often depend pre-eminently upon the morbidities of vision. Character, lastly, is the action or reaction of personality against circumstance, not under and dominated by circumstance. To have character is to control circumstance; Hearn was always its slave. Except in one particular, the pursuit of literary excellence, Hearn had no character whatever. His was the most unresisting, most echolike mind I have ever known. He was a perfect chameleon; he took for the time the colour of his surroundings. He was always the mirror of the friend of the instant, or if no friend was there, of the dream of that instant. The next minute he was another being, acted upon by the new circumstance, reflecting the new friend, or redreaming the old and new-found dream. They who blame him too sharply for his disloyalty and ingratitude to old friends do not understand him psychologically. There was nothing behind the physical and neurologic machine to be loyal or disloyal. He had no mind, or character, to be possessed of loyalty or disloyalty. For the most part, he simply dropped his friends, and rarely spoke ill of them or of his enemies. There was nothing whatever in him, except perhaps for the short time when he said his friend had given him a soul, to take the cast and function of loyalty or disloyalty, gratitude or ingratitude. One does not ask originality or even great consistency of an echo, and, of all men that have ever lived, Hearn, mentally and spiritually, was most perfectly an echo. The sole quality, the only originality, he brought to the fact, or to the echo, was colour--a peculiar derivation of a maimed sense. He created or invented nothing; his stories were always told him by others; at first they were gruesome tales even to horror and disgust. He learned by practice to choose lovelier stories, ones always distant, sometimes infinitely distant, and he learned to retell or echo them with more artistic skill and even a matchless grace. His merit, almost his sole merit, and his unique skill lay in the strange faculty of colouring the echo with the hues and tints of heavenly rainbows and unearthly sunsets, all gleaming with a ghostly light that never was on sea or shore. So that, fused as he was with his work, he himself became that impossible thing, a chromatic voice, a multicoloured echo. We must, therefore, accept the facts as we find them, the young man as we find him, uneducated, friendless, without formed character, with a lot of heathenish and unrestrained appetites, crippled as to the most important of the senses, poverty-stricken, improvident, of peculiar and unprepossessing appearance and manners, flung into an alien world in many ways more morbid than himself. That he lived at all is almost astonishing, and that he writhed out, how he did it, and the means whereby he finally presented to the best artistic and literary intellects of the world prized values and enjoyments, is indeed worthy of some attention and study. From letters written to me just prior to his death by that veteran and discriminating critic, Mr. Edmund C. Stedman, I quote a few sentences to show that the appreciation of Hearn has by no means reached its full measure: "I passed an evening with your Hearn manuscript and the supplementary matter by my granddaughter, and found them both well done and of deep interest. Some of your passages are beautifully written and make me think that if you will give us more of the style which is so plainly at your command, you will gain, etc.... The publishers do not understand, as I do, that Hearn will in time be as much of a romantic personality and tradition as Poe now is. I strongly urged one publisher to buy those copyrights owned by three other firms on any terms and in the end bring out a definitive edition of his complete works." As to Miss Stedman's workmanlike bibliography, it should be said that the rule which has been followed in excluding less valuable reviews and notices, was based upon the effort to include doubtful ones only when of exceptional value, by a personal friend of Hearn, etc. Files of ordinary newspapers are not preserved even in local libraries, and, therefore, references to them have been excluded except under peculiar circumstances of authorship, opinions stated, etc. For their kind permission to make extracts from Hearn's published works, grateful acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Little, Brown and Company, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper Brothers, and The Macmillan Company. Should this volume bring in more money than the necessary expenses of compiling it, the excess will be sent to Mrs. Hearn through the Japanese Consul, or in some other way. GEORGE M. GOULD. CHAPTER I.--HEREDITY AND THE EARLY LIFE [Illustration: HEARN AT ABOUT THE AGE OF EIGHT. _From a Photograph._] _To face page 1._ MANY conflicting accounts have been given concerning Hearn's parents and childhood. From his own statements made in 1889, the notes of which, taken down at the moment, are before me, he was born on June 27, 1850, at Leucadia, in Santa Maura, one of the Ionian Islands. His father, he said, was an Irishman, Charles Bush Hearn, Surgeon-Major in the 76th English Infantry Regiment, which had been stationed at Madras, Calcutta. The regiment was later merged into the 22nd West Riding Battalion. His mother was a Greek from Cerigo, another of the Ionian Isles; her name he had forgotten. He spoke of his father and mother as having been married, and of a subsequent divorce, about 1857 or 1858. Allusion was made to a younger brother, named Daniel, who was brought up by an artist, a painter, Richard Hearn, a brother of Charles Bush Hearn, who lived in Paris.[1] Hearn thought this brother was educated as a civil engineer. After the divorce his mother remarried, her second husband being a lawyer, a Greek, name unknown, and living at Smyrna, Asia Minor. Lafcadio's father also remarried, taking his wife to India. Three daughters were said to have been born there. Lafcadio was put under the care of his aunt, Mrs. Sarah Brenane, of Dublin, No. 73 Upper Leeson Street. She was a widow without children. In a letter to me, written prior to 1889, Hearn says: "As for me, I have a good deal in me _not_ to thank my ancestors for; and it is a pleasure that _I cannot_, even if I would, trace myself two generations back, not even one generation on my mother's side. Half these Greeks are mixed with Turks and Arabs--don't know how much of an Oriental mixture I have, or may have." And again, "I do not know anything about my mother, whether alive or dead. My father died on his return from India. There was a queer romance in the history of my mother's marriage." He told me later that this romance was said to have been that Surgeon-Major Hearn was once set upon by the brothers of the young Greek woman to whom he was paying attention, and that he was left supposedly dead, with about a score of dagger-made wounds in his body. [1] In _The Bookbuyer_, May, 1896, Hearn's friend, Mr. J. S. Tunison, speaks of the existence of a brother, "a busy farmer in Northwestern Ohio." In the Dayton, Ohio, _Journal_, of December 25, 1906, Mr. Tunison speaks authoritatively of the discrepant accounts given by many writers, and by Hearn himself, concerning his parents, birth and early years. "Hearn himself had misgivings, and sometimes associated his baptismal name with the not uncommon Spanish name, Leocadie." The boy, of course, could only repeat what he had been told by his relatives or friends. Physiognomy can help little perhaps, but here its testimony is assuredly not confirmatory of the more common story. Any attempt to secure definite information in Ireland would scarcely be successful. One possibility remained: There is still living an Irish gentleman to whom Lafcadio was sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was placed. I have not the right to mention his name. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870, and through his brother-in-law in Ireland, Lafcadio was, as it were, consigned to my informant. The subject is an unpleasant one to him, and he answered my questions with reluctance. He did not like the boy and did not feel that he had any obligation toward him; in fact, he did not feel that he was in any way responsible for his care. Besides, he had heavy duties toward his own children that absorbed all his energies. "I never had a letter from him. He came to the house three times. Mrs. Brenane sent me money, which I gave to him to pay his bills with. When he got work, he never came near me again." He was not sure that Mrs. Brenane was, in truth, Hearn's aunt, and upon being pressed, answered repeatedly, "I know nothing, nobody knows anything true of Hearn's life. He may have been related to my wife's family, but I never knew." Asked why the lad was "shipped" to him, he replied, "I do not know." Inquiries concerning the boy's schooling brought no more than, "I only know that he could never stay long in one school." "His father was Irish, was he not?" "Yes." "And his mother was Greek?" "O yes, I suppose so," but with an indefinite inflection. The mystery, therefore, of Hearn's parentage and boyhood years is probably not to be cleared up. He was, perhaps, a "bad boy," and expelled from several schools; his lifelong hatred and fear of Catholics and Jesuits doubtless dates from these youthful and irrational experiences; but it is useless to inquire whether or not they were in any sense justifiable. A little reflected light is thrown upon this period by an apocryphal anecdote in a letter to me, written while Hearn was at my house, and which Miss Bisland in her "Life and Letters" kindly failed to put in its proper place,[2] as well as omitted to say whence she obtained it: [2] Vol. I, pp. 459-460, just prior to the last paragraph. This again reminds me of something. When I was a boy, I had to go to confession, and my confessions were honest ones. One day I told the ghostly father that I had been guilty of desiring that the devil would come to me in the shape of the beautiful woman in which he came to the Anchorites in the desert, and that I thought that I would yield to such temptations. He was a grim man who rarely showed emotion, my confessor, but on that occasion he actually rose to his feet in anger. "Let me warn you!" he cried, "let me warn you! Of all things never wish that! You might be more sorry for it than you can possibly believe!" His earnestness filled me with fearful joy;--for I thought the temptation might actually be realized--so serious he looked ... but the pretty _succubi_ all continued to remain in hell. The necessary inference, therefore, is that the lad was an unwelcome charge upon those Irish relations or friends of his father, in whose care he was placed. It is said that he always spoke with bitterness of his father, and with love of his mother. Beyond a certain amount of money allotted (by his father?) for his support, neither parent was evidently concerned about his upbringing and welfare, and all who should have been interested in those things made haste to rid themselves of the obligations. If the stories of his boyish "badness" were true, the lad could not be blamed for putting into practice his inherited instincts, so that the pathos of his early misfortunes only increase our sympathy for the youth and his tragedies. (I reproduce a photograph of Lafcadio and his aunt, Mrs. Justin, or Sarah, Brenane. The lad must have been at the time about eight years of age.) The "consignment" of the nineteen-year old youth to the distant relative of the family, who was then living in Cincinnati, explains the reason why, landing in New York, he finally went to Cincinnati. How long he lived in New York City and any details of his life there before he went West, may be held as beyond investigation. Mr. Tunison incidentally speaks of him during this time as "sleeping in dry-goods boxes on the street, etc.," and I have heard that he acted as a restaurant waiter. There have been published stories of a period of want and suffering endured in London before the emigration to New York City. Others concerning great scholarship and the intimate knowledge of several languages, especially French, are surely not true. Even in 1889, after the New Orleans and Martinique periods, Hearn could not speak French with ease or correctness. In Cincinnati he secured the help of a French scholar in translating Gautier's "Émaux et Camées." His want of knowledge of the Latin language is deplored in his letters and, to the last, after a dozen or more years in Japan, his inability to read a Japanese newspaper or speak the language was a source of regret to himself, of errors too numerous to mention, and of grievous limitations in his work as an interpreter. In the one field of which his taste, aptitude and function dictated a wide and stimulating acquaintance, folk-lore, he was lamentably wanting. It might seem unfitting to allude to this were it not well to be discriminating in all cases, and had not Hearn sought to reach authoritativeness in a department wherein he had not gathered the fundamental data. CHAPTER II.--IN PERSON WHEN, in 1889, Hearn appeared in my reception room, although I had not seen any photograph of him, and had not even known of his coming, I at once said, "You are Lafcadio?" The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that I am sure he would have run out of the house if I had not at once shown him an overflowing kindness, or if a tone of voice had betrayed any curiosity or doubt. It was at once agreed that he should stay with me for awhile, and there was no delay in providing him with a seat at my table and a room where he could be at his work of proof-correcting. His "Two Years in the French West Indies" was then going through the press, and an incident connected with the proof-reading illustrates how impossible it was for him, except when necessity drove, to meet any person not already known. He wished to give his reader the tune of the songs printed on pages 426-431, but he knew nothing of music. I arranged with a lady to repeat the airs on her piano as he should whistle them, and then to write them on the music-staff. When the fatal evening arrived, Hearn and I went to the lady's house, but as we proceeded his part in our chatting lapsed into silence, and he lagged behind. Although he finally dragged himself to the foot of the doorstep, after I had rung the bell, his courage failed, and before the door was opened I saw him running as if for life, half a square away! Even before this adventure I had learned that it was useless to try to get him to lunch or dinner if any stranger were present. I think he always listened to detect the possible presence of a stranger before entering the dining-room, and he would certainly have starved rather than submit to such an ordeal. It may be readily imagined that my attempt to secure his services as a lecturer before a local literary society was a ludricrous failure. He would have preferred hanging. I allude to this attitude of his mind from no idle or curious reason, but because it arose from logical and necessary reasons. When, later, he was in Japan, I was once importuned, and should not have yielded, to give a friend, who was about to visit Tôkyô, a note of introduction. As I warned my friend Hearn refused to see visitors. That his extreme shyness depended upon his being unknown, and that it was united to a lack of humour, may be gathered from the fact that, when he came from Martinique, he wore a clothing which inevitably made the passers-by turn and look and smile. Long and repeated endeavours were necessary before I could get his consent to lay aside the outrageous tropical hat for one that would not attract attention. How little he recked of this appears from the tale I heard that a lot of street gamins in Philadelphia formed a _queue_, the leader holding by Hearn's coat-tails, and, as they marched, all kept step and sang in time, "Where, where, where did you get that hat?" At once, upon first meeting Hearn, I instinctively recognized that upon my part the slightest sign of a desire or attempt to study him, to look upon him as an object of literary or "natural" history, would immediately put an end to our relations. Indeed, it never at that time entered my mind to think thus of him, and only since collections of his letters and biographies are threatened has it occurred to me to think over our days and months together, and to help, so far as advisable, toward a true understanding of the man and his art. In 1889 Lafcadio was 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighed 137 pounds, and had a chest girth of 36-3/4 inches. The summer of 1889 made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character. I suspect it was his first experience in anything that might be called home-life. To his beloved _pays des revenants_, Martinique, his mind constantly reverted, with an _Ahnung_ that he should never see it again. There are truth and pathos and keen self-knowledge, frankly expressed in the letters he would write me in the next room, immediately after we had chatted long together, and when he felt that the pen could better express what he shyly shrank from speaking: Ah! to have a profession is to be rich, to have international current-money, a gold that is cosmopolitan, passes everywhere. Then I think I would never settle down in any place; would visit all, wander about as long as I could. There is such a delightful pleasantness about the _first_ relations with people in strange places--before you have made any rival, excited any ill wills, incurred anybody's displeasure. Stay long enough in any one place and the illusion is over; you have to sift this society through the meshes of your nerves, and find perhaps one good friendship too large to pass through. It is a very beautiful world; the ugliness of some humanity only exists as the shadowing that outlines the view; the nobility of man and the goodness of woman can only be felt by those who know the possibilities of degradation and corruption. Philosophically I am simply a follower of Spencer, whose mind gives me the greatest conception of Divinity I can yet expand to receive. The faultiness is not with the world, but with myself. I inherit certain susceptibilities, weaknesses, sensitivenesses, which render it impossible to adapt myself to the ordinary _milieu_; I have to make one of my own wherever I go, and never mingle with that already made. True, I love much knowledge, but I escape pains which, in spite of all your own knowledge, you could wholly comprehend, for the simple reason that you _can_ mingle with men. I am really quite lonesome for you, and am reflecting how much more lonesome I shall be in some outrageous equatorial country where I shall not see you any more;--also it seems to me perfectly and inexplainably atrocious to know that some day or other there will be no Gooley at ---- St. That I should cease to make a shadow some day seems quite natural, because Hearney boy is only a bubble anyhow ("The earth hath bubbles"),--but you, hating mysteries and seeing and feeling and knowing everything,--you have no right ever to die at all. And I can't help doubting whether you will. You have almost made me believe what you do not believe yourself: that there are souls. I haven't any, I know; but I think you have,--something electrical and luminous inside you that will walk about and see things always. Are you really--what I see of you--only an Envelope of something subtler and perpetual? Because if you are, I might want you to pass down some day southward,--over the blue zone and the volcanic peaks like a little wind,--and flutter through the palm-plumes under the all-putrefying sun,--and reach down through old roots to the bones of me, and try to raise me up.... The weakness and even exhaustion which the West Indian climate had wrought in Hearn were painfully apparent. His stay in Philadelphia, warm as that summer was to us, brought him speedily back to physical health. The lesson was not unheeded, nor its implications, by his sensitive mind. I reproduce two photographs of Hearn: the first taken in 1888 (facing page 61); and the second, by Mr. Gutekunst, at my urgent solicitation, in 1889, while Hearn was stopping at my house (_Frontispiece_). The first photograph, taken in Martinique, brings out the habitual sadness and lack of vivacity in his physiognomy. In my picture of 1889 (the second) I was unable, despite all effort, to get Hearn to present to the camera his entire face with naturally open eyes, and the customary expression. He resolutely refused, and consented to the compromise of a two-thirds view _with closed eyes_. And this to me is still the most truthful and hence the most expressive of all his photographs. It is so suggestive because of its negations, so expressive because non-expressive. But it indicates, silently and by inference, the most significant fact about the man. To those who are expert in such things, the stare of the highly myopic eye is known to be not that of mental action and seeing, but of not seeing. When we walk, we are forward-looking beings, and what goes on within the eye or brain and what may be behind us is totally ignored. But for a highly myopic person there is no outward or forward looking. Hearn's closed eye gives, therefore, a decidedly more truthful lesson in physiognomy than does the open and protruding one, which cannot see the coming or future scene, or which sees it so vaguely that its hint of the scene is perhaps more useless than the imagined picture of the totally blind. His inability to see the presenting world had resulted in a renunciation of outlook and an absolute incuriosity as to the future. With weaklings this might have brought about introspection, the mental eye--the product of the physical eye--turned in upon itself. Hearn was too much of an artist to fall into that Death Valley of all æsthetics, and there was a quick acceptance of the logical and inevitable, whence arose the wonder of poetic retrospection. CHAPTER III.--THE PERIOD OF THE GRUESOME WHEN Hearn arrived in Cincinnati, in 1871 or 1872, he was twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. All other methods of making a livelihood except that by his pen had failed, or were soon to fail, and it is not long before the literary way is exclusively and permanently adopted. There was a brief first time of service with Robert Clarke and Company as proof-reader. The exact uses of punctuation, the clearness which the proper marks give to writing, soon earned for him the sobriquet "Old Semicolon" among his fellow reporters. All his life Hearn clung meticulously to his theories concerning the necessity and precise rules of punctuation. Some of his later quarrels with periodical editors and proof-readers arose from differences of opinion in these things. There was a short engagement of Hearn by the librarian, Mr. Thomas Vickers, as private secretary or helper. Among his early friends was a printer, Mr. Henry Watkin, now residing at 1312 McMillan Street, who was kind to him, and who taught him to set type. "In 1874," Mr. O. P. Caylor[3] writes, "Col. Cockerill of the _World_ was managing editor of the Cincinnati _Enquirer_. A few weeks previous to the 'Tan-Yard Murder' Mr. Hearn came to the _Enquirer_ office to sell a manuscript. Upstairs he ventured, but there his courage failed him. It was not enough to induce him to brave the awful editorial presence. So he paced up and down the hall with his velvet restless tread until the awful door opened and the terrible giant came forth. Hearn would, no doubt, have run away had he not been at the rear of the hall when Mr. Cockerill came out into the other end, and the stairway was between. [3] A quotation in the _Author_, January 15, 1890, from an article by Mr. Caylor in the Philadelphia _North American_. "Thus it occurred that the author of 'Chita' submitted his first manuscript. He came with others later, but never could he persuade himself to knock at that editorial door for admission. Up and down, up and down the hall he would pace or glide until Colonel Cockerill came forth, whether the time consumed in waiting was ten minutes or two hours." In _Current Literature_, June, 1896, Colonel John A. Cockerill, writing of Hearn, tells the story thus: "Some twenty years ago I was the editor in charge of a daily newspaper in a Western city. One day there came to my office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms. "In a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditure, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable. "Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written.... "He sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have him work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his great bulbous eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament. "His eyes troubled him greatly in those days. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances." In January or February, 1874, there was a horrible murder, "the famous Tan-Yard case," in Cincinnati, and Hearn's account of it in the _Enquirer_, from the newspaper and reportorial standpoint was so graphic and so far beyond the power of all rivals that he was henceforth assured of employment and of a measure and kind of respect. His friend, Mr. Edward Henderson, formerly city editor of the _Commercial_, now City Clerk in Cincinnati, says that because of his startling report of this murder "his city editors kept him at the most arduous work of a daily morning paper--the night-stations, for in that field mostly developed the sensational events that were worthy of his pen. In these days his powers would be held in reserve to write up what others should discover.... His repertory was strongest in the unusual and the startling. He was never known to shirk hardship or danger in filling an assignment or following up his self-obtained pointer." The beginning of Hearn's literary career was his report of the Tan-Yard Murder case. It was published in the Cincinnati _Enquirer_, November, 1874. I shall quote some parts of it in a footnote to illustrate his innate and studied ability to outfit with words and expressions of the most startling and realistic picturing quality, the most horrible and loathsome facts. Keeping in mind the comparison with the illustrations from his later work in which he was equally capable of painting noble and beautiful things (all except those of a spiritual or religious nature), one is filled with admiration of a faculty so rare and perfect. Those who are sensitive should not read the excerpts which I append, and which are given in obedience to a sense of duty.[4] [4] "An _Enquirer_ reporter visited the establishment some hours later, accompanied by Dr. Maley, and examined all so far discovered of Herman Schilling's charred corpse. The hideous mass of reeking cinders, despite all the efforts of the brutal murderers to hide their ghastly crime, remain sufficiently intact to bear frightful evidence against them. "On lifting the coffin-lid, a powerful and penetrating odour, strongly resembling the smell of burnt beef, yet heavier and fouler, filled the room and almost sickened the spectators. But the sight of the black remains was far more sickening. Laid upon the clean white lining of the coffin, they rather resembled great shapeless lumps of half-burnt bituminous coal than aught else at the first hurried glance; and only a closer investigation could enable a strong-stomached observer to detect their ghastly character--masses of crumbling human bones, strung together by half-burnt sinews, or glued one upon another by a hideous adhesion of half-molten flesh, boiled brains and jellied blood, mingled with coal. "The skull had burst like a shell in the fierce furnace heat, and the whole upper portion seemed as though it had been blown out by the steam from the boiling and bubbling brains. Only the posterior portion of the occipital and parietal bones, and the inferior and superior maxillary, and some of the face bones remained,--the upper portion of the skull bones being jagged, burnt brown in some spots, and in others charred to black ashes. The brain had all boiled away, save a small waste lump at the base of the skull about the size of a lemon. It was crisped and still warm to the touch. On pushing the finger through the crisp, the interior felt about the consistency of banana fruit, and the yellow fibre seemed to writhe like worms in the Coroner's hands. The eyes were cooked to bubbled crisps in the blackened sockets, and the bones of the nose were gone, leaving a hideous hole. "So covered were the jaws and the lower facial bones with coal, crusted blood and gummy flesh, that the Coroner at first supposed that the lower maxillary had been burned away. On tearing away the frightful skull-mask of mingled flesh and coal and charred gristle, however, the grinning teeth shone ghastly white, and the jaws were found intact. They were set together so firmly that it was found impossible to separate them, without reducing the whole mass to ashes. So great had been the heat that the Coroner was able to crumble one of the upper teeth in his fingers. "Besides the fragments of the skull, have been found six ribs of the right side and four of the left; the middle portion of the spinal-column; the liver, spleen, and kidneys; the pelvic bones, the right and left humerus, the femoral bone and the tibia and fibula of both legs. The body had burnt open at the chest, and the heart and lungs had been entirely consumed. The liver had been simply roasted and the kidneys fairly fried. There is a horrible probability that the wretched victim was forced into the furnace alive, and suffered all the agonies of the bitterest death man can die, while wedged in the flaming flue. The teeth were so terribly clinched that more than one spectator of the hideous skull declared that only the most frightful agony could have set those jaws together. Perhaps, stunned and disabled by the murderous blows of his assailants, the unconscious body of the poor German was forced into the furnace. Perhaps the thrusts of the assassin's pitchfork, wedging him still further into the fiery hell, or perhaps the first agony of burning when his bloody garments took fire, revived him to meet the death of flames. Fancy the shrieks for mercy, the mad expostulation, the frightful fight for life, the superhuman struggle for existence--a century of agony crowded into a moment--the shrieks growing feebler--the desperate struggle dying into feeble writhings. And through it all, the grim murderers, demoniacally pitiless, devilishly desperate, gasping with their exertions to destroy a poor human life, looking on in silent triumph, peering into the furnace until the skull exploded, and the steaming body burst, and the fiery flue hissed like a hundred snakes! It may not be true--we hope for humanity's sake it cannot be true; but the rightful secrets of that fearful night are known only to the criminals and their God. They may be brought to acknowledge much; but surely never so much as we have dared to hint at." "When his city editor, in compliance with the urgency of a steeple-climber, consented to send a reporter to take observations of the city from the top of the cross surmounting the spire of St. Peter's Cathedral in Cincinnati, Hearn was the man selected. In mentioning the assignment to him, the city editor handed him a valuable field-glass, with the suggestion that he might find it useful. On taking his departure with the climbers, Hearn quietly handed back the glasses with the remark in undertone, 'Perhaps I'd better not take these; something might happen.' He made the trip to the top of the spire, though the men found it necessary to haul him part of the way in mid-air and to bodily place and hold him on top of the cross. And he produced an account of that thrilling experience that went the round of the newspaper world."[5] [5] Our wonder at the performance is heightened by the fact that Hearn, of course, saw nothing of what he so vividly described. It is little wonder that his "Vocabulary of the Gruesome" became famous, since I have learned from his friend and associate, the artist, Mr. Farney, and also from others, certain facts which demonstrate that this vocabulary was gathered not only or chiefly because of the exigencies of his work as a reporter, or to express the revolting in thrilling words, but because he had a spontaneous lickerishness for the things themselves. He positively delighted in the gruesome. With his fingers he dug into the scorched flesh and the exuding brains of the murdered man's body when it was taken from the furnace, and in another murder case he slid on the floor, as if on ice, in the congealed blood of the victim. "He even drank blood at the abattoirs with the consumptives when that craze had fallen upon the people of Cincinnati." There is more than an excuse for mentioning these things; it is necessary to do so in order to understand the origin and transformation of Hearn's chief endowment as a writer. Even more convincing, perhaps, than these offensive gloatings as regards his native love of the gruesome, is the unconscious testimony given in the history of an illustrated paper established by Mr. Farney and Mr. Hearn. Mr. Henderson has said of Hearn that "very rarely was he known to throw a _soupçon_ of humour into his work." The newspaper venture demonstrates that even when humour was planned Hearn had none to give. Number One, Volume One, of _Ye Giglampz_ was issued in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 21, 1874, and describes itself on the title-page as, "A Weekly Illustrated Journal, Devoted to Art, Literature and Satire." The size of the pages was 14-1/2 × 10-3/4 inches. The subsequent issues were larger, about 16 × 11-1/4 inches. There were eight pages in each number, the first, third, fourth and eighth were illustrated by Mr. H. F. Farney; the others were made up of reading matter. The heading of the editorial page did not exactly repeat that of the title-page, but read as follows: "The Giglampz." Published Daily, except Week-Days. Terms, $2.50 per annum. Address, "Giglampz Publishing Co." 150 West Fourth St. [Illustration: REDUCED FIRST PAGE OF THE FIRST ISSUE.] With the issue of Number Seven (August 2, 1874) appeared a notice that H. F. Farney and Company had purchased the _Giglampz_ from its former proprietors, the new office being henceforth at the North-west corner of Fourth and Race Streets. Number Eight was the last furnished subscribers. Probably the only existing set of this periodical is that kindly lent to me by Mr. Farney at the request of Mr. Alexander Hill of The Robert Clarke Company, Cincinnati. Among the many significant things suggested in looking over the pages, is the fact that this bound file was Hearn's personal copy, his name being written on the cover-leaf by himself--"L. Hearn, 1877"--and just below, this: "Reminiscences of An Editorship under Difficulties." It is noteworthy that nowhere is it publicly announced that Hearn was the editor, although the fact was probably an open secret in Cincinnati at the time. The truth of the foregoing inscription in his handwriting is confirmed by the acknowledgment of his authorship of most of the articles, contributed as well as editorial, conveyed by his customary signature, penciled at the end or beginning of each paragraph or column which he had written. The very title of the paper itself was a witness in the same way, and shows that at that time, although Hearn kept his name concealed, he was not, as later, sensitive concerning his ocular defect.[6] It is plain that the word _Giglampz_ refers to the large and conspicuous spectacles or eye-glasses which at that time (not later) were worn habitually by Hearn. The proof of this comes out in the illustration occupying the full first page of the initial number, and entitled: "A Prospect of Herr Kladderadatsch, Introducynge Mr. Giglampz tu ye Publycke." [6] In the first number is an editorial paragraph, written by Hearn, reading as follows:--"The public has indulged in speculation and no little levity, in regard to our name. In this as in the future conduct of this extraordinary sheet, we seek only to please ourselves. Whether the Publishing Company will declare 'Irish Dividends' in six months, or not, does not concern us. We (the editorial corps) being on a salary, look on public favour with serene indifference. The name pleases us. We look upon it in the light of a conundrum, calculated to induce reflection in simple minds. We hope some one may solve it, as we have incontinently given it up." The scene is that of the stage of a theatre, and Kladderadatsch proudly presents Mr. Giglampz to the wildly applauding audience. The head of the obsequious Mr. Giglampz is very large compared with his body, but most conspicuous is the enormous _pince-nez_ astride a nose of fitting proportions. Mr. Farney was even permitted to give a mere hint of the editor's facial expression. A curious and suggestive, even a pathetic, light is thrown upon Hearn's character by the fact that this personal file of his journal with his own inscriptions, signatures, etc., was found in a second-hand book-store by Mr. Farney after Hearn left Cincinnati. Although it is as much too long for our quoting as it was for introducing the journalistic venture, I cannot help reproducing Hearn's first editorial, the "Salutatory, By a Celebrated French Author, a Friend of Giglampz": It was a dark and fearsome night in the month of June, 1874; and the pavements of Fourth Street were abandoned to solitude. The lamps, dripping huge water-drops fire-tinged from their lurid glare, seemed monstrous yellow goblin-eyes, weeping phosphorescent tears. It was raining, and the funereal sky flamed with lightning. It was such a rain as in the primeval world created verdant seas of slimy mud, subsequently condensed into that fossiliferous strata where to-day spectacled geologists find imbedded the awful remains of the titanic _iguanodon_, the _plesiosaurus_, and the _icthyosaurus_. We sat motionlessly meditative in the shadows of a Gothic doorway of medieval pattern, and ruefully observed the movements of a giant rat, slaking his thirst at a water-spout. Suddenly we were aware of a pressure--a gentle pressure on our shoulder. A hurried glance convinced us that the pressure was occasioned by the presence of a hand. It was a long, bony, ancient hand, dried and withered to the consistency of India-rubber. It might have been compared to the hand of a mummy embalmed in the reign of Rameses III, but we felt a living warmth in its pressure, penetrating our summer linen. The Oriental wizards occasionally need the assistance of a magic candle, in their groping amid ancient tombs--a candle which burns with a fuming stench so foul, that hungry ghouls flee dismayedly away. This candle is made of green fat--the fat of men long dead. For such a candle it is of course necessary to have a candlestick. To procure this candlestick it is necessary to cut off the right hand of a murderous criminal executed by impalement, and having carefully dried it, to insert the candle in its ghastly grasp. Now the hand laid on our shoulder strongly resembled such a hand. The living warmth of its pressure alone restrained us from uttering a shriek of hideous fear. A cold sweat ravaged the starched bosom of our under-garment. Suddenly a face peered out from the shadow, and the sickly glare of the flickering gas-lamp fell full upon it. The aspect of that face immediately reassured us. It was long to grotesqueness and meagre even to weirdness. It would have been strongly Mephistophelic but for an air of joviality that was not wholly saturnine. The eyes were deep, piercing, but "laughter-stirred," as those of Haroun Alraschid. The nose was almost satanically aquiline, but its harsh outline was more than relieved by the long smiling mouth, and the countless wrinkles of merriment that intersected one another in crow's-feet all over the ancient face. The stranger's complexion was that of caout-chouc; and his long lank locks were blacker than the plumage of those yellow-footed birds that prey upon the dead. His whole aspect was that of one who, by some eerie, occult art of self-preservation, had been enabled to live through the centuries. "Am I not addressing the celebrated author----?" said the voice of the uncouthly-featured. It was a half-merry, half-mocking voice--a deep voice that sounded as though conveyed from a vast distance through the medium of a pneumatic tube. It therefore resembled in its tone the dreamily-distant voices never-slumbering Fancy hears in the hours devoted to darkness and slumber by moral people. An enormous drop of soot-tinged water fell upon our nose, incontestably proving that we were awake; and we murmured monosyllabic assent to the stranger's query. "It is well," replied the Unknown, with a latitudinarian smile of joy. "I have been seeking you. I need your assistance, your talent, your mental vigour so enormously manifested in your cyclopean[7] phrenological development." [7] The contrast of this allusion to his large single eye with his morbid shyness about it of late years is noteworthy. "_Sapristi_, monsieur!--permit me to inquire the nature of----" "Attend a little, friend, and your curiosity shall be sated with ample satisfaction. I have existed as you see through all ages. I have lived under a thousand alias names, under the various régimes of a thousand civilizations, which flourished on ancient soil now covered by the mile-deep waters of foaming oceans. I have made my dwelling-place in the mighty palace-halls of Egyptian kings, in the giant cities of dead Assyria, in the residences of Aztec monarchs and Peruvian Incas, in the snow-columned temples of the Greek, and the lordly homes of the luxurious Roman. In fact, I am rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; and have been worshipped as a genius in far-sparkling planets ere this mundane sphere was first evolved from that flaming orb. In all time when individualized intelligent thought existed, I have inculcated in living beings the truth of that sublime and eternal maxim--Laugh and grow fat. To-day men must be taught this glorious truth by the Bullock Press rather than the Tongue. I want your pen, not your tongue. Write me a salutatory for my new illustrated weekly--only five cents a copy." With these words he pressed a glazed Bristol-board card into our trembling hand, and disappeared. By the light of the weeping street-lamps we read thereon this weird legend: GIGLAMPZ The title itself, the Introduction by "Kladderadatsch," and the character of the contributions and cuts make it plain that the third object of the publication, called "Satire," was designed to be much more prominent than "Art" or "Literature." Unquestionably an American _Kladderadatsch_ was planned, and by Hearn and his friends it was supposed that the editor had a sense of humour sufficient to carry on the undertaking. I have quoted the Salutatory to show that with the favouring of youth, ambition, opportunity and the best encouragement, Hearn's mind from the first line drifted inevitably to the fearsome, the weird, the unearthly and far-away. By no power or necessity could his imagination be forced or bound to the task of producing things comic or even satiric, especially such humour and jokes as the Cincinnati newspaper reader wanted in 1874. Of the twelve columns of reading in the first number of _Giglampz_, Hearn contributed about eight, made up of fifteen or twenty distinct paragraphs. In the second number his contributions number seven; in the third, six; in the fourth, three; in the fifth, four; in the sixth, two; in the seventh, one; in the eighth, one. In about a dozen of the first number, he somewhat unsuccessfully tried to be humorous or satiric, while six were frankly tragical, critical, bitter, etc. In the succeeding numbers Hearn made little effort to be humorous; in the fifth number he describes with startling power a picture of "a hideous scene in the interior of a seraglio;" in number six he returns to the Orient and in "The Fantasy of a Fan" mixes poetry, prose and fancy with a hinting of the subtle soft witchery of the Hearn of twenty-five years later.[8] In the second number is a full-page cut, in which Beecher is depicted as standing before a crowd of jeerers prior to being placed in the stocks, with the scarlet letter "A" upon his breast. Hearn especially requested Mr. Farney to make him one of the conspicuous spectators. The bespectacled face is easily recognizable in the copy given me by the artist. In the seventh number Hearn describes in two columns the story he supposes behind the pictured Gabriel Max, called "The Last Farewell" (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York). It shows so early suggestions of the manhood strength of the wordmaster that I copy it: [8] Mr. Farney tells me that he had to compel Hearn, even then, to moderate the boldness of sentences which would by their sensualism and licence shock their Cincinnati readers. THE TALE A PICTURE TELLS "_Butchered to make a Roman Holiday_" The remarkably fine engraving from Gabriel Max's picture, "The Last Farewell," in a late issue of the Berlin _Illustrirte Zeitung_ (and which the New York _Graphic_ a few days since stole to spoil in the stealing), is worthy of the celebrated original at Munich--a painting which will never be forgotten by those who have once beheld it. Among modern painters, probably Max has no superior in the art of harmoniously blending the horrible with the pathetic; and in none of his works is this peculiar power exhibited to better advantage than in "The Last Farewell:" a marvel of colour and composition, one of those rare pictures which seem to reflect the living shadows of a dead age with the weird truthfulness of a wizard's mirror. A beautiful Roman girl is exposed in the Flavian amphitheatre, to be devoured by wild beasts. She can scarcely be eighteen years old, judging from the slender delicacy of her limbs and the childish sweetness of the pretty little brown face which she has vainly been striving to screen from the rude gaze of the shameless populace with the remnants of a rich black veil--probably torn by the rough hands of some brutal lanista. She leans with her back to the great wall of stone, calmly awaiting her fate without any signs of fear, although the hot, foul breath of a panther is already warm upon her naked feet. To her right, but a few feet away, a leopard and a huge bear are tearing each other to pieces; on her left, another den has just been thrown open, and at its entrance appears the hideous head of an immense tiger, with eyes that flame like emeralds. You can almost feel the warmth of the fierce summer sun shining on that scene of blood and crime, falling on the yellow sands of the arena, drying the dark pools of human blood the wild beasts have left unlapped. You can almost hear the deep hum of a hundred thousand voices above, and the hideous growlings of the contending brutes below. You wonder whether there is one heart in all that vast crowd of cruel spectators wherein some faint impulse of humanity still lingers, one tongue charitable enough to exclaim: "Poor little thing!" No: only wicked whispers followed by coarse laughter; monstrous indifference in the lower tiers, brutal yells of bloodthirsty impatience from the upper seats. Two Roman knights relieve the monotony of the scene by strange speculation. "One hundred sesterces that the tiger gets her first!" "Two hundred on the panther!" "Done, by the gods! Where are the lions?" "Why, that cursed barbarian killed the last three this morning, one after another. The finest lions of the lot, too." "Who are you talking about?--that tall, dark Thracian?" "No: he was killed the day before by the same gladiator that killed the lions. I mean that golden-haired giant--that Goth. Says he was chief in his own country, or something. He's killed everybody and everything pitted against him so far. And this morning they put him naked in the arena, with nothing but a mirmillo's shield, and a sword; and let the lions loose on him one after another. I bet a thousand sesterces on that little Numidian lion; but the rascal killed him as he sprang, with one sword-thrust, and I lost my thousand sesterces. By Hercules, that Goth is a match for a dozen lions!" "Brave fellow, by all the gods! Did they give him the wooden sword?" "Julius Cortonus says they did. I didn't stay to see the rest of the games, for I was too angry about my thousand sesterces." "Furies take that tiger!--I believe the brute's afraid of the girl!" * * * * * "Why, it is madness to throw such a fine-limbed girl as that to the lions!" cries a Greek merchant, lately arrived in Rome. "Eyes and hair, by Zeus, like Venus Anadyomene. I could sell her for a fortune in a slave-market." "Aedepol! not in a Roman slave-market, you fool. Why, I've known Lucullus to throw better-looking girls than that into his fishpond, to fatten his lampreys with. May Cerberus swallow that cursed tiger!" * * * * * The tiger has not yet moved; his vast head and flaming green eyes are just visible at the door of the den. The leopard and the bear are still tearing one another. The panther is gradually, stealthily, noiselessly approaching the poor, helpless girl. Suddenly a fresh, bright-red rose is thrown from the seats above: it is the last earthly greeting, the last farewell token of some old friend--perhaps a brother, perhaps (O God!) a lover! It falls on the blood-stained sand, shattering itself in perfumed ruin at the maiden's feet. She starts as the red leaves scatter before her. She advances from the wall, and boldly withdrawing the fragments of her poor, torn veil, looks up into the mighty sea of pitiless visages--looks up with her sweet, childish, cherry-lipped face, and those great, dark, softly sad Roman eyes--to thank him by a last look of love. "Who can it be?" No one the maiden knows. She only sees a seemingly endless row of cruel and sensual faces, the faces of the wild beast populace of Rome,--the faces which smile at the sight of a living human body, torn limb from limb by lions, and scattered over the sands in crimson shreds of flesh.... Suddenly a terrible yet friendly eye meets and rivets the gaze of her own--an eye keen and coldly-blue as a blade of steel. A sternly handsome Northern face it is, with flowing yellow hair. For an instant the iron lips seem to soften in a smile of pity, and the keen blue eyes become brighter. So do the soft dark ones they meet in that piteous farewell. She has found her unknown friend. ... A crash--a fierce growl--a faint, helpless cry--a spray of warm, bright blood. * * * * * "Ah, Caius! you've lost your hundred sesterces. The Fates are against you to-day!" "Curse the Fates! Did you see the fool who threw her the rose?" "That great tall Titan of a fellow, with the yellow hair?" "Yes. That's the Goth." "What! the gladiator who killed the lions?" "The same who won his freedom this morning. See! the fool's wiping his eyes now. These Goths can fight like Hercules, but they whine like sick women when a girl is hurt. They think up in the North that women are to be worshipped like the immortal gods. I wish they'd make the great red-headed brute go down and kill that cursed tiger!" Hearn's single contribution to the last number of the fated _Giglampz_ was a four-column retelling of "the weird story of Loki's evil children from the strange folk-lore of Ancient Scandinavia." It was thus blood, sensualism and fiendishness that still aroused Hearn's interest when not only not compelled to the choice, but when they were contraindicated and wholly illogical. But it was all a little less revolting, less real, more artistic, than the tan-yard reporting, and it was drawn from more remote sources. Mr. Henderson suggests the same when he writes: "But it was not in this slavery for a living even to crush out of him the determination to advance and excel. In the small hours of morning, into broad daylight, after the rough work of the police rounds and the writing of perhaps columns, in his inimitable style, he could be seen, under merely a poor jet of gas, with his one useful eye close to book and manuscript, translating 'One of Cleopatra's Nights.' ... "An Oriental warmth and glow pervaded him. While his lines were hard ones in the grime and soot and trying weather of Cincinnati, from which his frail body shrank continually, his trend of thought was largely tropical. Perhaps he saw beyond the dusky faces, rolling eyes and broad noses of the people of the Cincinnati levee, the mixed people of the West Indies and the beautiful little ones of Japan, with whom he was destined to live before long. However that may be, his greatest pleasure, after a translation from Gautier or an original tragedy where he could in his masterful way use his vocabulary of the gruesome, was to study and absorb the indolent, sensuous life of the negro race, as he found it in Cincinnati and New Orleans, and to steep them in a sense of romance that he alone could extract from the study. Things that were common to these people in their everyday life, his vivid imagination transformed into a subtle melody of romance. The distant booming upon the midnight air of a river steamer's whistle was for him the roustabout's call to his waiting mistress at the landing, and his fruitful pen drew the picture of their watching and coming and meeting." The words _indolent and sensuous life_ are also significant. The tropics, their fatalism and the kind of life there lived were drawing him with secret but irresistible force. Now begins to mix with and mollify the gruesome a softer element, also Oriental, or what is much the same thing, tropical--sympathy with and study of the simple and unlettered, those who are the improvident slaves of fate, thoughtless impulse or heedless desire. To them, as we shall see, Hearn's mind turned more and more. His was essentially an Oriental mind and heart, an exotic weed (and weeds may become the loveliest of flowers) dropped by some migrating bird upon the strange crabbed soil of the crudest of Occidentalism. Never did Hearn stop yearning for the warmth, the fatalism and the laziness of tropic semi-barbarism. The gruesome was not being killed, but was being modified and tamed by civilization. Hearn had been discharged from the _Commercial_, where his salary was $25 a week, "on an ethical point of policy which need not be discussed here. The _Commercial_ took him on at $22." Judge M. F. Wilson, of Cincinnati, tells me that his discharge was caused by his seeking a licence for and an open marriage with a coloured woman. The licence was refused, because illegal at that time. The law was repealed a little later. The marriage did not take place.[9] [9] Mr. George Mortimer Roe, at that time a friend of Hearn, now living at Long Beach, California, writes me: "Hearn was quite persistent in his efforts to persuade me to assist him in getting the licence, but I told him I could not aid him in his ambition to be guilty of miscegenation. For many years we had been the best of friends, but from that time on he always avoided me, scarcely speaking to me if by accident we did meet." Mr. Henderson continues thus: "As Hearn advanced in his power to write, the sense of the discomforts of his situation in Cincinnati grew upon him. His body and mind longed for the congeniality of southern air and scenes. One morning, after the usual hard work of an unusually nasty winter night in Cincinnati, in a leisure hour of conversation, he heard an associate on the paper describe a scene in a Gulf State. It was something about a grand old mansion of an antebellum cotton prince, with its great white columns, its beautiful private drive down to the public road, whitewashed negro-quarters stretching away in the background, in the distance some cypress and live-oaks and Spanish moss, and close by a grove of magnolias with their delightful odours and the melody of mocking-birds in the early sunlight. Hearn took in every word of this, though he had little to say at the time, with great keenness of interest, as shown by the dilation of his nostrils. It was as though he could see and hear and smell the delights of the scene. Not long after this, on leaving Cincinnati for New Orleans, he remarked: 'I have lost my loyalty to this paper, and change was inevitable. Perhaps it isn't so much the lack of opportunity here or a lack of appreciation of associations as this beastly climate. I seem to shrivel up in this alternation of dampness, heat and cold. I had to go sooner or later, but it was your description of the sunlight and melodies and fragrance and all the delights with which the South appeals to the senses that determined me. I shall feel better in the South and I believe I shall do better.'" Some of his Cincinnati acquaintances speak of his obsequious, even fawning, manner ("timid and feline of approach," says Henderson), of his "washing his hands with invisible water"--characteristics not dictated by the parentage ascribed to him, not consonant with his photographs, and not wholly with his gruesome traits. He wore heavy myopic spectacles at this time, not to see (because they were wholly discarded later), but probably in order not to be seen--_i.e._ to hide the double deformity of his eyes. One must remember that with or without spectacles the world a foot or two away was much of a mystery to Hearn, and that one fears a surely existent and near-by mystery. One approaches it or comes within its power with doubt, dislike and caution. The play of facial expression was not to be seen by Hearn. All Uriah Heeps may not be myopic, but all highly myopic persons will have slow, stealthy, careful, even catlike attitudes and manners; every step they take must be done with hesitation, bowed head and great care, in order not to fall or stumble against something. The wholly blind walk with more decision and quickness. Of course this slow, soft carefulness of manner, "the velvet feline step," was Hearn's all his life. It followed inexorably that, though possessed of a healthy and athletic body, there was possible for him no athletics which required accuracy of sight or sequent precision and celerity of movement. That with good eyes he would have been an utterly different man in character and in literature, is as certain as that he would have had a very different manner, movement and style of physical existence. With good eyes he would have been strong, athletic, bold, as is admirably illustrated by the fact that in the single sport in which little vision was required--swimming--he was most expert, and that he enjoyed this exercise to the fullest degree. To scale a steeple in order to describe the city from that unusual point of view was a task worthy of yellow journalism which cared little for accuracy but much for "scare" headlines. Hearn saw little or nothing of the city, of course. The only letters written during the Cincinnati period, known to exist, are those of 1876, called, "Letters to a Lady," published in the volume, _Letters from the Raven_, Milton Bronner, editor.[10] One other work, the origins of which date from this period, is "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and with this is demonstrated the beginning of the influence of the modern French school of story-writers. Hearn was tiring of the worst brutality and coarseness of Occidentalism, and seeking a way to the true home of his mind. The ghastly must become the ghostly. The Frenchman's art was to become his half-way house. [10] Brentano's, 1907. CHAPTER IV.--THE NEW ORLEANS TIME I HAVE somewhere read of a nomad child of the desert, born and rocked upon a camel, who was ever thereafter incapable of resting more than a day in one place. Whether or not the wandering father gave the homeless son his illogical spirit of unrest, matters less than that Hearn had it to a morbid degree. Any place rather than Cincinnati would have been better for the happiness and success of the emigrating boy, but his relatives had ridded themselves of the burden by assenting to his wish. Excepting that to Japan, the only sensible move he made was from Cincinnati toward the tropics, to the half-way house thither--New Orleans. The desire to seek the _au delà_ was present, his friends tell me, throughout the stay in Cincinnati. Perhaps the single city in the world which would satisfy his dream more nearly than could any other, was New Orleans. Being psychologically for the most part of degenerate Latin stock, and especially of the French variety, with the requisite admixture of exotic and tropical barbarism; bathed, but not cooked, in the hot and brilliant sunshine he loved and hated; touched and energized by too little Teutonic blood and influence, New Orleans offered to the unhappy man the best possible surroundings for the growth of his talents. Adding to this fortunate concensus of circumstance and partly a corollary of it was the most fortunate of all accidents that could have occurred to him--that is, the existence of a daily newspaper such as the _Times-Democrat_; of a paying mass of subscribers relishing Hearn's translations from the most artistic French writers of the short-story; and, most important of all, the presence on the bridge of the noble Captain of the Newspaper enterprise, the veteran editor, Mr. Page M. Baker. One shudders to think what would have been Hearn's later career had it not been for the guidance and help of this wise, sympathetic and magnanimous friend. For the one thing needed by Hearn in those who would be his friends rather than their own was magnanimity. It was his frequent misfortune in life to come under the influence of those as incapable of true unselfishness and real kindness as it was natural for them to be cunning and to use an assumed friendship for hidden flatteries and purposes of their own. Most of these would not have dreamed of associating with the man for any reason other than to stand in the reflected light of his literary fame. Most of them had as little care for his poetic prose, and as little appreciation or knowledge of good literature as they had of "the enclitic _de_." They had no magnanimity, only wile instead of it. As Hearn was also deprived of large-mindedness in all affairs of the world, he was unhappily prone to accept the offered bribe. He wanted above all things to be flattered and to do as his imperious impulses and weak will suggested. Any one who recognized these things in him and seconded the follies, remained his permitted "friend," but those who withstood them in the least and ran counter to his morbid trends and resolves--these were speedily "dropped," and insulted or grieved to silence. If they had magnanimity, they bore with the man in pity and answered his insults with kind words and kinder deeds. They recognized that they were responsible not to the man but to the carrier of a great talent, and although they might not forget, they gladly forgave, if possibly they might speed him on his predestined way. Of this number was Baker. Directly or indirectly through him, came a long and happy period of life; came the congenial, educating work, without slavery, of the translations and other easy reportorial services. Of equal importance were the financial rewards. Before and after the New Orleans time not the least of Hearn's misfortunes was his intolerable and brutalizing improvidence and impecuniousness. Under Baker's friendship he came to what for such a person was affluence and independence. He found leisure to read and study and think outside of the journalistic pale, and better still, perhaps,--better to his thinking, at least--he secured the means to indulge his life-long desire for curious and out-of-the-way books. During this time it grew to consciousness with him that in everything, except as regards his beloved Art, he had a little learned to recognize the worth of money. But within him grew ever stronger the plague of the unsatisfied, the sting of unrest, and he was compelled to obey. In a letter to me from Martinique, after he had recognized his mistake, he admits and explains as follows: I seldom have a chance now to read or speak English; and English phrases that used to seem absolutely natural already begin to look somewhat odd to me. Were I to continue to live here for some years more, I am almost sure that I should find it difficult to write English. The resources of the intellectual life are all lacking here,--no libraries, no books in any language;--a mind accustomed to discipline becomes like a garden long uncultivated, in which the rare flowers return to their primitive savage forms, or are smothered by rank, tough growths which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. Nature does not allow you to think here, or to study seriously, or to work earnestly: revolt against her, and with one subtle touch of fever she leaves you helpless and thoughtless for months. But she is so beautiful, nevertheless, that you love her more and more daily,--that you gradually cease to wish to do aught contrary to her local laws and customs. Slowly, you begin to lose all affection for the great Northern nurse that taught you to think, to work, to aspire. Then, after a while, this nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern Nature succeeds in persuading you that labour and effort and purpose are foolish things,--that life is very sweet without them;--and you actually find yourself ready to confess that the aspirations and inspirations born of the struggle for life in the North are all madness,--that they wasted years which might have been delightfully dozed away in a land where the air is always warm, the sea always the colour of sapphire, the woods perpetually green as the plumage of a green parrot. I must confess I have had some such experiences. It appears to me impossible to resign myself to living again in a great city and in a cold climate. Of course I shall have to return to the States for a while,--a short while, probably;--but I do not think I will ever settle there. I am apt to become tired of places,--or at least of the disagreeable facts attaching more or less to all places and becoming more and more marked and unendurable the longer one stays. So that ultimately I am sure to wander off somewhere else. You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,--the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;--and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;--yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. Such is exactly my present feeling,--an unutterable weariness of the aggressive characteristics of existence in a highly organized society. The higher the social development, the sharper the struggle. One feels this especially in America,--in the nervous centres of the world's activity. One feels it least, I imagine, in the tropics, where it is such an effort just to live, that one has no force left for the effort to expand one's own individuality at the cost of another's. I clearly perceive that a man enamoured of the tropics has but two things to do:--To abandon intellectual work, or to conquer the fascination of Nature. Which I will do will depend upon necessity. I would remain in this zone if I could maintain a certain position here;--to keep it requires means. I can earn only by writing, and yet if I remain a few years more, I will have become (perhaps?) unable to write. So if I am to live in the tropics, as I would like to do, I must earn the means for it in very short order. I gave up journalism altogether after leaving N. O. I went to Demerara and visited the lesser West Indies in July and August of last year,--returned to New York after three months with some MS.,--sold it,--felt very unhappy at the idea of staying in New York, where I had good offers,--suddenly made up my mind to go back to the tropics by the same steamer that had brought me. I had no commission, resolved to trust to magazine-work. So far I have just been able to scrape along;--the climate numbs mental life, and the inspirations I hoped for won't come. The real--surpassing imagination--whelms the ideal out of sight and hearing. The world is young here,--not old and wise and grey as in the North; and one must not seek the Holy Ghost in it. I suspect that the material furnished by the tropics can only be utilized in a Northern atmosphere. We will talk about it together. That he never thought to return to New Orleans is demonstrated by the fact that when he left, he shipped his books to another good friend and great editor, Mr. Alden, to keep for him. When he came to the United States in 1889, he fully intended returning to some tropical land. But it was otherwise ordered, and most fortunately, for a year or two more of life under such conditions would have killed both mind and body. Upon Hearn's arrival in New Orleans, he began sending a series of charming letters to the Cincinnati _Commercial_, signed "Ozias Midwinter."[11] They are, indeed, exquisite, and as certainly of a delicacy and beauty which must have made the reader of that time and newspaper wonder what strange sort of a correspondent the editor had secured. The first letter was about Memphis, passed on his way South. I cite some parts to show how the gruesome was merging into or being supplanted by something larger and better, and also to illustrate Hearn's growing interest in colours. [11] Kindly secured by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, Ohio, from a friend and lent to me. The stranger, however, is apt to leave Memphis with one charming recollection of the place--the remembrance of the sunset scene from the bluffs across the river over Arkansas. I do not think that any part of the world can offer a more unspeakably beautiful spectacle to the traveller than what he may witness any fair evening from those rugged old bluffs at Memphis. The first time I saw it the day had been perfectly bright and clear,--the blue of the sky was unclouded by the least fleecy stain of white cloud; and the sun descended in the west,--not in a yellow haze, or a crimson fog, but with the splendour of his fiery glory almost undimmed. He seemed to leave no trace of his bright fires behind him; and the sky-blue began to darken into night-purple from the east almost immediately. I thought at first it was one of the least romantic sunsets I had ever seen. It was not until the stars were out, and the night had actually fallen, that I beheld the imperial magnificence of that sunset. * * * * * I once thought, when sailing up the Ohio one bright Northern summer, that the world held nothing more beautiful than the scenery of the Beautiful River--those voluptuous hills with their sweet feminine curves, the elfin gold of that summer haze, and the pale emerald of the river's verdure-reflecting breast. But even the loveliness of the Ohio seemed faded, and the Northern sky-blue palely cold, like the tint of iceberg pinnacles, when I beheld for the first time the splendour of the Mississippi. "You must come on deck early to-morrow," said the kind Captain of the _Thompson Dean_; "we are entering the Sugar Country." So I saw the sun rise over the cane-fields of Louisiana. It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its setting at Memphis, but of another colour;--an auroral flush of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests of cocoanut palms. Then the day broke gently and slowly--a day too vast for a rapid dawn--a day that seemed deep as Space. I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a vaulted church-roof beside that sky--a sky so softly beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite. And the giant river broadened to a mile--smooth as a mirror, still and profound as a mountain lake. Between the vastness of the sky and the vastness of the stream, we seemed moving suspended in the midst of day, with only a long, narrow tongue of land on either side breaking the brightness. Yet the horizon never became wholly blue. The green-golden glow lived there all through the day; it was brightest in the south. It was so tropical, that glow;--it seemed of the Pacific, a glow that forms a background to the sight of lagoons and coral reefs and "lands where it is always afternoon." Below this glow gleamed another golden green, the glory of the waving cane-fields beyond the trees. Huge sugar-mills were breathing white and black clouds into the sky, as they masticated their mighty meal; and the smell of saccharine sweetness floated to us from either shore. Then we glided by miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls; and by the mouths of broad bayous;--past swamps dark with cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient trees;--past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot through with gold. The magnificent old mansions of the Southern planters, built after a generous fashion unknown in the North, with broad verandas and deliciously cool porches, and all painted white or perhaps a pale yellow, looked out grandly across the water from the hearts of shadowy groves; and, like villages of a hundred cottages, the negro quarters dotted the verdant face of the plantation with far-gleaming points of snowy whiteness. And still that wondrous glow brightened in the south, like a far-off reflection of sunlight on the Spanish Main. "But it does not look now as it used to in the old slave days," said the pilot, as he turned the great wheel. "The swamps were drained, and the plantations were not overgrown with cottonwood; and somehow or other the banks usen't to cave in then as they do now." I saw indeed signs of sad ruin on the face of the great plantations; there were splendid houses crumbling to decay, and whole towns of tenantless cabins; estates of immense extent were lying almost unfilled, or with only a few acres under cultivation; and the vigorous cottonwood trees had shot up in whole forests over fields once made fertile by the labour of ten thousand slaves. The scene was not without its melancholy; it seemed tinged by the reflection of a glory passed away--the glory of wealth, and the magnificence of wealth; of riches and the luxury of riches. O fair paradise of the South, if still so lovely in thy ruin, what must thou have been in the great day of thy greatest glory! White steamboats, heavily panting under their loads of cotton, came toiling by, and called out to us wild greeting long and shrill, until the pilot opened the lips of our giant boat, and her mighty challenge awoke a thousand phantom voices along the winding shore. Red sank the sun in a sea of fire, and bronze-hued clouds piled up against the light, like fairy islands in a sea of glory, such as were seen, perhaps, by the Adelantado of the Seven Cities. "Those are not real clouds," said the pilot, turning to the west, his face aglow with the yellow light. "Those are only smoke clouds rising from the sugar mills of Louisiana, and drifting with the evening wind." The daylight died away and the stars came out, but that warm glow in the southern horizon only paled, so that it seemed a little further off. The river broadened till it looked with the tropical verdure of its banks like the Ganges, until at last there loomed up a vast line of shadows, dotted with points of light, and through a forest of masts and a host of phantom-white river boats and a wilderness of chimneys the _Thompson Dean_, singing her cheery challenge, steamed up to the mighty levee of New Orleans. The letters descriptive of New Orleans scenes and life deserve republishing had I space for them here. In a brief paragraph, a sentence perhaps, almost in a word, is given the photograph, chromatic and vitalized in Hearn's unrivalled picturesque style, of the levees, the shipping, the sugar-landing, the cotton-shipping, the ocean steamers, the strange mixture of peoples from all countries and climes; the architecture, streets, markets, etc. The Vendetta of the Sicilian immigrants is described with a strength and vividness which bear eloquent witness to Hearn's innate pleasure in such themes. There is also shown his beginning the study of Creole character, grammar, and language. A peculiarly striking picture is painted of the new huge cotton-press, as a monster whose jaws open with a low roar to devour the immense bale of cotton and to crush it to a few inches of thickness. I cannot exclude this excerpt: Do you remember that charming little story, "Père Antoine's Date-Palm," written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and published in the same volume with "Marjorie Daw" and other tales? Père Antoine was a good old French priest, who lived and died in New Orleans. As a boy, he conceived a strong friendship for a fellow student of about his own age, who, in after years, sailed to some tropical island in the Southern Seas, and wedded some darkly beautiful woman, graceful and shapely and tall as a feathery palm. Père Antoine wrote often to his friend, and their friendship strengthened with the years, until death dissolved it. The young colonist died, and his beautiful wife also passed from the world; but they left a little daughter for some one to take care of. The good priest, of course, took care of her, and brought her up at New Orleans. And she grew up graceful and comely as her mother, with all the wild beauty of the South. But the child could not forget the glory of the tropics, the bright lagoon, the white-crested sea roaring over the coral reef, the royal green of the waving palms, and the beauty of the golden-feathered birds that chattered among them. So she pined for the tall palms and the bright sea and the wild reef, until there came upon her that strange homesickness which is death; and still dreaming of the beautiful palms, she gradually passed into that great sleep which is dreamless. And she was buried by Père Antoine near his own home. By and by, above the little mound there suddenly came a gleam of green; and mysteriously, slowly, beautifully, there grew up towering in tropical grace above the grave, a princely palm. And the old priest knew that it had grown from the heart of the dead child. So the years passed by, and the roaring city grew up about the priest's home and the palm-tree, trying to push Père Antoine off his land. But he would not be moved. They piled up gold upon his doorsteps and he laughed at them; they went to law with him and he beat them all; and, at last, dying, he passed away true to his trust; for the man who cuts down that palm-tree loses the land that it grows upon. "And there it stands," says the Poet, "in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady, whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamoured. May the hand wither that touches her ungently!" Now I was desirous above all things to visit the palm made famous by this charming legend, and I spent several days in seeking it. I visited the neighbourhood of the old Place d'Armes--now Jackson Square--and could find no trace of it; then I visited the southern quarter of the city, with its numberless gardens, and I sought for the palm among groves of orange-trees overloaded with their golden fruit, amid broad-leaved bananas, and dark cypresses, and fragrant magnolias and tropical trees of which I did not know the names. Then I found many date-palms. Some were quite young, with their splendid crest of leafy plumes scarcely two feet above the ground; others stood up to a height of thirty or forty feet. Whenever I saw a tall palm, I rang the doorbell and asked if that were Père Antoine's date-palm. Alas! nobody had ever heard of the Père Antoine. Then I visited the ancient cathedral, founded by the pious Don Andre Almonaster, Regidor of New Orleans, one hundred and fifty years ago; and I asked the old French priest whether they had ever heard of the Père Antoine. And they answered me that they knew him not, after having searched the ancient archives of the ancient Spanish Cathedral. Once I found a magnificent palm, loaded with dates, in a garden on St. Charles Street, so graceful that I felt the full beauty of Solomon's simile as I had never felt it before: "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree." I rang the bell and made inquiry concerning the age of the tree. It was but twenty years old; and I went forth discouraged. At last, to my exceeding joy, I found an informant in the person of a good-natured old gentleman, who keeps a quaint bookstore in Commercial Place. The tree was indeed growing, he said, in New Orleans Street, near the French Cathedral, and not far from Congo Square; but there were many legends concerning it. Some said it had been planted over the grave of some Turk or Moor--perhaps a fierce corsair from Algiers or Tunis--who died while sailing up the Mississippi, and was buried on its moist shores. But it was not at all like the other palm-trees in the city, nor did it seem to him to be a date-palm. It was a real Oriental palm; yea, in sooth, such a palm as Solomon spake of in his Love-song of Love-songs. "I said, I will go up to the palm-tree; I will take hold of the boughs thereof." ... I found it standing in beautiful loneliness in the centre of a dingy woodshed on the north side of New Orleans Street, towering about forty feet above the rickety plank fence of the yard. The gateway was open, and a sign swung above it bearing the name, "M. Michel." I walked in and went up to the palm-tree. A labourer was sawing wood in the back-shed, and I saw through the windows of the little cottage by the gate a family at dinner. I knocked at the cottage-door, and a beautiful Creole woman opened it. "May I ask, Madame, whether this palm-tree was truly planted by the Père Antoine?" "Ah, Monsieur, there are many droll stories which they relate of that tree. There are folks who say that a young girl was interred there, and it is also said that a Sultan was buried under that tree--or the son of a Sultan. And there are also some who say that a priest planted it." "Was it the Père Antoine, Madame?" "I do not know, Monsieur. There are people also who say that it was planted here by Indians from Florida. But I do not know whether such trees grow in Florida. I have never seen any other palm-tree like it. It is not a date-palm. It flowers every year, with a beautiful yellow blossom the colour of straw, and the blossoms hang down in pretty curves. Oh, it is very graceful! Sometimes it bears fruit, a kind of oily fruit, but not dates. I am told that they make oil from the fruit of such palms." I thought it looked so sad, that beautiful tree in the dusty woodyard, with no living green thing near it. As its bright verdant leaves waved against the blue above, one could not but pity it as one would pity some being, fair and feminine and friendless in a strange land. "_Oh, c'est bien gracieux_," murmured the handsome Creole lady. "Is it true, Madame, that the owner of the land loses it if he cuts down the tree?" "_Mais oui!_ But the proprietors of the ground have always respected the tree, because it is so old, so very old!" Then I found the proprietor of the land, and he told me that when the French troops first arrived in this part of the country they noticed that tree. "Why," I exclaimed, "that must have been in the reign of Louis XIV!" "It was in 1679, I believe," he answered. As for the Père Antoine, he had never heard of him. Neither had he heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. So that I departed, mourning for my dead faith in a romance which was beautiful. Next to his best Japanese studies, I suspect it will finally come to recognition that Hearn's greatest service to literature is his magnificent series of translations during the New Orleans years. As a translator there were given him his data by creative minds. His own mental equipment prevented creation, and his clearly set limits as a translator added power to his ability and function as a colourist and word-artist. His was almost a unique expertness of entering into the spirit of his models, refeeling their emotions, reimagining their thought and art, and reclothing it with the often somewhat hard and stiff material of English weaving. All of their spirit philologically possible to be conveyed to us, we may be sure he re-presents. For his was the rare power of the instant, the iridescent, the wingèd word. I think it was innate and spontaneous with him, a gift of the inscrutable, illogic, and fantastically generous-niggard Fates. All his studies and conscious efforts were almost unavailing either to hinder or to further its perfection. If to Fate we may not be grateful, we can at least thank the weird lesser gods of life for the mysterious wonder of the gift. The wealth of loving labour silently offered in the 187 or more translations published in the _Times-Democrat_ is marvellous. Hearn brought to my house the loose cuttings from the files, and we got them into some order in "scrapbooks." But the dates of publication and other details are often characteristically wanting. Elsewhere in the present volume the titles, etc., of the stories are listed. Preceded by those of "One of Cleopatra's Nights," they form a body of literary values which should be rescued from the newspaper files and permanently issued in book-form for the pleasure and instruction of English readers. To do this I have most generously been given permission by Hearn's ever helpful and discriminating friend, Mr. Page M. Baker, editor of the _Times-Democrat_. Hearn knew well the difficulties of the translator's art. "One who translates for the love of the original will probably have no reward save the satisfaction of creating something beautiful and perhaps of saving a masterpiece from less reverent hands." So anxious was he to do such work that he was willing to pay the publication expenses. As pertinent, I copy an editorial of his on the subject, which was published in the _Times-Democrat_, during the period in which he was so busy as a translator: The New York _Nation_ has been publishing in its columns a number of interesting and severe criticisms upon translations from foreign authors. These translations are generally condemned, and with good specifications of reasons,--notwithstanding the fact that some of them have been executed by persons who have obtained quite a popular reputation as translators. One critic dwells very strongly upon the most remarkable weakness of all the renderings in question;--they invariably fail to convey the colour and grace of the original, even when the meaning is otherwise preserved. Speaking of the translators themselves, the reviewer observes: "There is not one _artist_ among them." All this is very true; but the writer does not explain the causes of this state of affairs. They are many, no doubt;--the principal fact for consideration being that there is no demand for artistic work in translation. And there is no demand for it, not so much because it is rare and unlikely to be appreciated as because it is dear. Artistic translators cannot afford to work for a song,--neither would they attempt to translate a five-hundred-page novel in three weeks or a month as others do. Again, artistic translators would not care to attach their names to the published translation of a fourth-or fifth-class popular novel. Finally, artistic translations do not obtain a ready market with first-class American publishers, who, indeed, seldom touch domestic translations of foreign fiction, and depend for their translations of European literature upon transatlantic enterprise. Thus the artistic translator may be said to have no field. He may sell his work to some petty publisher, perhaps, but only at a price that were almost absurd to mention;--and the first-class publishers do not care to speculate in American translations at all. We might also add that the translator's task is always a thankless one,--that however superb and laborious his execution, it can never obtain much public notice, nor even so much as public comprehension. The original author will be admired,--the translator unnoticed, except by a few critics. Moreover, the men capable of making the most artistic translations are usually better employed. The translator of a great French, German, or Italian masterpiece of style, ought, in the eternal fitness of things, to be a man able to write something very artistic in his own tongue. No one seems to doubt that Longfellow was the man to translate Dante,--that Tennyson could parallel Homer (as he has shown by a wonderful effort) in the nineteenth-century English,--that Carlyle re-created Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" by his rendering of it,--that Austin Dobson was the first to teach English readers some of the beauties of Gautier's poetry,--that Swinburne alone could have made François Villon adopt an English garb which exactly fitted him. But the same readers perhaps never gave a thought to the fact that the works of Flaubert, of Daudet, of Droz, of Hugo, of at least a score of other European writers, call for work of an almost equally high class on the part of the translator, and never receive it! What a translation of Daudet could not Henry James give us!--how admirably John Addington Symonds could reproduce for us the Venetian richness of Paul de Saint Victor's style! But such men are not likely to be invited, on either side of the Atlantic, to do such work;--neither are they likely to do it as a labour of love! A splended translation of Flaubert might be expected from several members of what is called "The New England School;" but what Boston publisher would engage his favourite literary man in such pursuits? It is really doubtful whether the men most capable of making artistic translations could afford, under any ordinary circumstances, to undertake much work of the kind, except as a literary recreation. At all events, the English-reading world cannot hereafter expect to obtain its translations from other European languages through the labour of the best writers in its own. The only hope is, that the recklessness shown by publishers in their choice of translators will provoke a reaction, and that such work will be more generously remunerated and entrusted to real experts hereafter. It is unfortunately true that the translators who work for English publishers are far more competent than those who do similar work in the United States; forasmuch as transatlantic firms are glad to print cheap popular translations, while only inferior American firms care to undertake them. Another obstacle to good translations in the United States is that none of the great literary periodicals will devote space to them. The English and the French magazines and reviews are less conservative, and some very wonderful translations have been published by them. Artistic translation might be admirably developed in this country by the establishment of a new magazine-policy. The wise reader, if he is also a sincere friend of Hearn, must wish that the correspondence published had been limited to the first volume. Room aplenty in this could have been made for the dozen valuable paragraphs contained in the second. It is not strange that the letters of Hearn worth saving were written before his departure for Japan. He repeatedly had urged that letter-writing both financially and mentally was expensive to the writer. In Japan he was so incessantly busy, much with his teaching and more with his real literary work, that time and will were wanting for that sort of letters which are of interest to the general reader. The interest of the person addressed is another affair. The dreary half-thousand pages of the correspondence of the Japanese time are most disappointing to one who has been thrilled by almost every page of the incomparable letters to Krehbiel and to a few others. Besides the two reasons for this which I have suggested, there are others which may perhaps be evident to some judicious readers, but which at this time may scarcely be plainly stated. At present the trees are so thick that the forest cannot be seen, but some day an amused and an amusing smile of recognition and disgust will curl the lips of the literary critic. There are two other considerations which should be held in mind: One of them was brought to me by a correspondent of Hearn who had frequently noted it; sometimes (has it happened before?) Hearn used his "friend" to whom he was writing, as a sort of method of exercising his own fancy, as a gymnastics in putting his imagination through its paces, or for a preliminary sketching in of notes and reminders to be of possible use in later serious work. Moreover, the plan was of service in rewarding his correspondents for their praise and appreciation. Of a far more substantial character were the letters sometimes written in gratitude for money received. Hearn flattered himself, as we know, that he was without "cunning," but there is at least one exquisitely ludicrous letter in existence which shows an inverted proof of it, in the execution of an Indian war-dance, because of "the ways and means" furnished. As published, Hearn's letters may be classified as follows: To Krehbiel 1887 (3); 1878 (5); 1879 (2); 1880 (3); 1881 (4); 1882 (4); 1883 (4); 1884 (13); 1885 (8); 1886 (6); 1887 (4) 56 Hart 1882 (3); 1883 (1) 4 Ball 1882 (2); 1883 (4); 1885 (3) 9 O'Connor 1883 (4); 1884 (2); 1885 (2); 1886 (2); 1887 (2) 12 Albee 1883 (1); 1898 (2) 3 Gould 1887 (5); 1888 (4); 1889 (8) 17 Bisland 1887 (8); 1889 (11); 1890 (3); 1900 (1); 1902 (3); 1903 (9); 1904 (1) 36 Tunison 1889 (1) 1 Chamberlain 1890 (7); 1891 (13); 1895 (22) 42 Nishida 1890 (2); 1891 (2); 1892 (2); 1893 (9); 1894 (2); 1895 (3); 1896 (3); 1897 (2) 25 Hirn 1890 (1); 1902 (5); 1903 (1) 7 Baker 1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894 (1); 1895 (3); 1896 (2) 8 Hendrick 1891 (2); 1892 (4); 1893 (10); 1894 (6); 1895 (6); 1896 (9); 1897 (7); 1898 (2); 1902 (2) 48 Otani 1891 (1); 1892 (1); 1894 (1); 1897 (1); 1898 (2); 1900 (1) 7 Ochiai 1893 (2); 1894 (2); 1896 (2) 6 McDonald 1897 (10); 1898 (25); 1899 (19) 54 Fenollosa 1898 (3); 1899 (2) 5 Blank 1898 1 Foxwell 1899 2 Yasuchochi 1901 1 Tanabe 1904 1 Crosby 1904 1 Fujisaki 1904 1 --- 347 Besides these, the valuable series of "Letters from a Raven," and the sixteen in the same volume "To a Lady" are noteworthy. The latter are of little value either for biography or literature. But the letters to Watkin are so sincere, often childlike, indeed, that they will be prized by the discriminating. Another admirable series, copies of which I have, is made up of letters to Professor R. Matas, of New Orleans. To these it is hoped will sometime be added those which must exist, to Mr. Alden, who was an early and sincere friend. There are a number of unpublished letters to Gould, and the published ones have been so mutilated that they should be correctly republished. Almost anything written by Hearn before he went to Japan, or in some instances reflecting friendships and feelings existing before he sailed, may prove of as inestimable value as most letters written thereafter will probably be found valueless. It is noteworthy that the first series, edited by Miss Bisland, was commenced in 1877, when Hearn was twenty-seven years of age, and that for many years Mr. Krehbiel was almost his sole correspondent. But the inimitable perfection and preciousness of these fifty-six letters! They are well worth all his other set productions, published or burned, of the same years. Many are singly worth all the rest of our letters. Here the dreamer--and a dreamer he always was until he got out of his cocoon--was sincere, hopeful, planful, as playful as his sombre mind would permit, but always magnificently, even startlingly, unreserved. Remembering that Hearn's mind was essentially an echoing and a colouring mechanism, it is at once a glorious tribute to, and a superlative merit of Mr. Krehbiel to have given the primary and stimulating voice to the always listening dreamer. To have swerved him out of his predestined rôle so much as to make these pages so astonishingly full of _musical_ reverberations, is a tribute to his own musical enthusiasm and power as it is also a demonstration of the echo-like, but fundamentally unmusical, nature of his friend's mind. If only in the final edition of Hearn's works, these letters with selections of some pages from a few others, could be made into a handy, small, and cheap volume for the delighting of the appreciators of literature and of literary character! Comparison of the spiritual and almost _spirituelle_ flashings of these, with the ponderous and banal sogginess of hundreds upon hundreds of other pages of his letters, arouses the profound regret that Hearn to the world was "impossible," that, as he says, he "could not mingle with men," that no other voices ever so intimately reached the heart of him, or of his dreaming. Even here the amazing coloration furnished by "The Dreamer," as he calls himself, makes us at times feel that the magic of the word-artist and colour-mixer was almost superior to the enduring and awakening reality of Mr. Krehbiel. To this friend, as he writes, he spoke of his thoughts and fancies, wishes and disappointments, frailties, follies, and failures, and successes--even as to a brother. And that was not all he saw and heard in "his enchanted City of Dreams." The slavery to ignoble journalism, what he calls a "really nefarious profession," was to be resolutely renounced from the day of his arrival in New Orleans. It is "a horrid life," he "could not stand the gaslight;" he "damned reportorial work and correspondence, and the American disposition to work people to death, and the American delight in getting worked to death;" he rebelled against becoming a part of the revolving machinery of a newspaper, because "journalism dwarfs, stifles, emasculates thought and style," and he was bound to "produce something better in point of literary execution." There was also a not frankly confessed resolve to become respectable in other ways, and to be done with a kind of entanglement of which he was painfully conscious in the Cincinnati life. "I think I can redeem myself socially here! I have got into good society;" "it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole State of Ohio," he writes, and he is proud of living in a Latin city. He recognizes what Mr. Krehbiel calls his "peculiar and unfortunate disposition," and which he later sets forth as "a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, variable, nervous disposition." Hearn visits a few friends awhile and then disappears for six months, so that he wishes to be hidden in New York except to Krehbiel and Tunison; he will pay a visit to the others he must see just before leaving town--for he is a "demophobe." He tried a secret partnership in keeping a restaurant, and thought to carry on a little French bookstore. He resolved at different times to go to Europe, to Cuba, to Texas, to Cincinnati, and planned all sorts of occupations. The indications soon multiply that in more ways than in worldly matters he is at variance with his world. He "regards thought as a mechanical process;" he has "no faith in any faith;" "individual life is a particle of that eternal force of which we know so little;" "Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul;" Jesus is a legend and myth; he is "not a believer in free will, nor in the individual soul," etc. Think of a man writing to a Christian minister, think of a Christian minister receiving without protest a personal letter with this in it: "Nor can I feel more reverence for the crucified deity than for that image of the Hindoo god of light holding in one of his many hands Phallus, and yet wearing a necklace of skulls, etc." And Hearn, as to ethics, has the courage to write his friend of his convictions: "Passion was the inspiring breath of Greek art and the mother of language; its gratification the act of a creator, and the divinest rite of Nature's temple." In other letters, unpublished, that exist, Hearn is morbidly frank as to sexual licence and practices. In tropical cities there is "no time for friendship--only passion for women, and brief acquaintance for men." Without the influence of sexualism there can be no real greatness; "the mind remains arid and desolate," and he quotes approvingly:--"Virginity, Mysticism, Melancholy--three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by the Christ," etc. "I do not find it possible to persuade myself that the 'mad excess of love' should not be indulged in by mankind," introduces a brilliant page upon the theme, ending with, "after all what else do we live for--ephemeræ that we are?" To my protest he wrote, "'Moral' feelings are those into which the sexual instinct does not visibly enter;" and again, "The sexual sense never tells a _physical_ lie. It only tells an ethical one." There is, to be sure, no answer to a man who says such things. It is astonishing, how conscious and at the same time how careless Hearn was of his characteristics and trends. In 1878 he could coldly prepare to attempt a get-rich-quick scheme, "a fraud, which will pay like hell, an advertising fraud," etc., because "there is no money in honest work." At this time also he knew that his own wandering passion was "the strongest of all," and that his deepest desire was "to wander forever here and there until he should get old and apish and grey and die." His misfortunes he confessed were of his own making because it was absolutely out of the question for him to "keep any single situation for any great length of time," hating the mere idea of it, "impossible to stay anywhere without getting into trouble." "No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I," he correctly avows. He recognizes that "the unexpected obstacle to success was usually erected by himself." He acknowledges his ignorance and escapes from it and from the labour, expense, and duty of scholarship by flying, as many others have done, to the world of Imagination, which alone is left to him. "It allows of a vagueness of expression which hides the absence of real knowledge, and dispenses with the necessity of technical precision and detail." He "never reads a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination." Knowing that he has not true and real genius, he "pledges himself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous. It quite suits my temperament," and he "hopes to succeed in attracting some little attention." The monstrous, the enormous, and the lurid, is sought in the letters. The sentence at the bottom of page 226, Volume One of the "Life and Letters," and the ghastly story, pages 322-323, show the gruesome still much alive, and page 306 that blood, fury, and frenzy haunt his nightmare dreams. "In history one should only seek the extraordinary, the monstrous, the terrible; in mythology the most fantastic and sensuous, just as in romance," And yet he defends himself as a lover of Greek art, detests "the fantastic beauty that is Gothic," yet prides himself on being Arabesque. Even the love of Beaudelaire creeps in, and the brutal, horrible photograph of Gautier is "grander than he imagined." Of course to such a mind Matthew Arnold is a "colossal humbug"--and worse. With increasing frequency are repeated the complaints of disillusionment; he is frightened at the loss even of the love of the beautiful, and his friend tries in vain to rouse him from his ghost-life and dreaming. There are absurd excuses why he cannot work; when among beautiful things he cannot write of them, when he is away he is longing for them; there are months when he cannot do anything, and a little thing is produced with great pain and labour. "The old enthusiasm has completely died out of me." The people and the city are adequately cursed, and upon the debilitating climate is laid a proper and ever-repeated anathema. He loathes the North, especially New York City, "shudders at the bare idea of cold;" he yearns and pines for a still more tropical country which he knows may kill him, and which came near doing so. The _Wanderlust_ is upon him as passages on pages 183, 193, 196, 197, 207, 215, 223, 224, 398 of Volume One of the "Life and Letters" illustrate. At last he is off for Martinique, where work and even thought are still more impossible because of the benumbing heat. Here follows a list of the unsigned editorials contributed by Hearn to his paper. It is made up from two of the scrap-books left me, and is entitled: SUNDAY AND SPECIAL EDITORIALS BY LAFCADIO HEARN FOR THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT, 1885-1887. 1. The "Peronospora Ferrani" and Cholera Vaccination. 2. Literary Pessimism. 3. "The Song Celestial." 4. The Canonization of the Mahdi. 5. "Successor of Tamerlane." 6. The World's Journalism. 7. A Scientific Novelty. 8. The Jewish Question in Europe (Suppressed by the management). 9. Russian Literature Abroad. 10. The European Trouble. 11. Missionaries as Linguists. 12. Courbet. 13. Poetry and Pay. 14. The Present and Future of India. 15. An Archaeological Novel. 16. An Evolutional History. 17. A New Pompeii. 18. Archæology in Cambodia. 19. The Great "I-Am." 20. A Terrible Novel. 21. The Latin Church in the East and Bismarck. 22. English Policy in China. 23. The Fear of Death. 24. A Danger to Egypt--The Senousiya. 25. Archaeological News from China. 26. Icelandic Prospects. 27. A Great English Physician. 28. Academical Triumphs. 29. The Magician of Paris. 30. Tolstoi's Vanity of Wisdom. 31. "Minos." 32. Newspapers and Religion. 33. Minos. 34. A Concord Compromise. 35. De Mercier on Dante. 36. The Origin of Christmas. 37. "Immortality" according to Dr. Holland. 38. The Future of Idealism. 39. "Solitude." 40. Dr. Holland's Defenders. 41. The Religion of Suffering. 42. The Ruins of Carthage. 43. A Defence of Pessimism. 44. Over-Education in Germany. 45. Decadence as a Fine Art. 46. Use of the Eye or the Ear in Learning Languages. 47. The Shadow of the "Light of Asia." 48. The Jew upon the Stage. 49. Some Theosophical Iconoclasm. 50. "Hamlet's Note-Book." 51. The Invasion of the Desert. 52. Resurrected Æstheticism. 53. Translations. 54. Nihilistic Literature in the United States. 55. Some Human Frailty. 56. An Art-Reformer. 57. Some Notes on Creole Literature. 58. The Scientific Value of Creole. 59. "l'OEuvre." 60. A Havanese Romance. 61. Some Supposed Sanscrit Translations. 62. The Omnivorous Newspaper. 63. A Religious Nightmare. 64. Joaquin Miller. 65. Pictures vs. Text. 66. "Follow the Donkey Path." 67. A Sketch of the Creole Patois. 68. In Spain. 69. Chinese Belief in God. 70. "Towards the Gulf." 71. Tennyson's Locksley Hall. 72. "Doesn't Want Any Progress." 73. The Howard Memorial Library--A Letter from Charles Dudley Warner. 74. A Definitive Rossetti. 75. The Chinese Future. 76. Artistic Value of Myopia. 77. Colours and Emotions. CHAPTER V.--AT MARTINIQUE THE lure of the Sea and of the Unknown was upon Hearn during the entire stay at New Orleans. How deeply it entered his heart is shown in a fragment rescued by his friend, Dr. Matas, which has been kindly sent me. The copy is in print, but when and where it was published we have been unable to learn. It was probably written in 1885 or 1886. As it gives glimpses at once into Hearn's mind, of his fateful desire to roam, of his Nature-love, and, better, of his growing mastery of technic and imagery, I reproduce herewith the fragment, which he entitled: GULF WINDS Golden oranges piled up in bins,--apples of the Southern Hesperides;--a medley of meridional tongues,--silky Latin tongues and their silkier patois; Chinese buyers yellow as bananas, quadroons with skin like dead gold; swarthy sailors from the Antilles; sharp odours of fruit freshly disembarked;--all the semi-tropical sights and sounds of the French market. I stood beside an orange-bin; and priced the fruit. Fifty cents a hundred! While wondering how much the fruit-vender's profit could possibly be, I was insensibly attracted by something unusual in his face--a shadow of the beauty of the antique world seemed to rest upon it. "Are you not a Greek?" I asked, for there was no mistaking the metoposcopy of that head. Yes; he was from Zante--first a sailor, now a fruit-vender; some day, perhaps, he would be a merchant. It is among those who sell, not among those who buy, that the most curious studies of human nature and of the human face are to be made in the French market. These dealers are by no means usually French, but they are mostly from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of Southern Europe. They are wanderers, who have wandered all over the face of the earth to find rest at last in this city of the South; they are sailors who have sailed all seas, and sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, and finally anchored their lives by the levee of New Orleans. The Neapolitan Italian, the Spaniard, the Corsican, the Levantine Greek, seek rest from storm here, in a clime akin to their own and under a sky as divinely blue, and at a port not far distant from their beloved sea. For these Levantine sailors hate dusty inland cities and the dry air of the Great West. If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea;--if, in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, which none can hear without awe, and which no musician can learn;--if you have ever watched wonderingly the far sails of the fishing-vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or silver under the moon, or golden in the glow of sunrise;--if you once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers, and received the Ocean-god's christening, the glorious baptism of salt,--then, perhaps, you know only too well why these sailors of the Levant cannot seek homes within the heart of the land. Twenty years may have passed since your ears last caught the thunder of that mighty ode of hexameters which the sea has always sung and will sing forever, since your eyes sought the far line where the vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of rolling water,--since you breathed the breath of the ocean, and felt its clear ozone living in your veins like an elixir. Have you forgotten the mighty measure of that mighty song? have you forgotten the divine saltiness of that unfettered wind? Is not the spell of the sea strong upon you still? So that when the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, there comes to you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, "Come!" So that when the silent night comes,--you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean-shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, an ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of that sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and "the city sickening on its own thick breath." And I think that the Levantine sailors dare not dwell in the midst of the land, for fear lest dreams of a shadowy sea might come upon them in the night, and phantom winds call wildly to them in their sleep, and they might wake to find themselves a thousand miles beyond the voice of the breakers. Sometimes, I doubt not, these swarthy sellers of fruit, whose black eyes sparkle with the sparkle of the sea, and whose voices own the tones of ocean-winds, sicken when a glorious breeze from the Gulf enters the city, shaking the blossoms from the magnolia-trees and the orange-groves. Sometimes, I doubt not, they forsake their Southern home when the dream comes upon them, and take ship for the Spanish Main. Yet I think most men may wake here from the dreams of the sea, and rest again. It is true that you cannot hear the voice of the hoary breakers in the moonlight,--only the long panting of the cotton-presses, the shouting of the boats calling upon each other through the tropical night, and the ceaseless song of night-birds and crickets. But the sea-ships, with their white wings folded, are slumbering at the wharves; the sea-winds are blowing through the moon-lit streets, and from the South arises a wondrous pale glow, like the far reflection of the emerald green of the ocean. So that the Greek sailor, awaking from the vision of winds and waves, may join three fingers of his right hand, after the manner of the Eastern Church, and cross himself, and sleep again in peace. Hearn left New Orleans in July, 1887, and was soon settled at St. Pierre, Martinique. His letters to Dr. Matas form the principal sources of information concerning himself and his work during his stay there. From them I choose a few selections which bear upon his literary labours. At first, of course, all is perfection: I am absolutely bewitched, and resolved to settle down somewhere in the West Indies. Martinique is simply heaven on earth. You must imagine a community whose only vices are erotic. There are no thieves, no roughs, no snobs. Everything is primitive and morally pure--except in the only particular where purity would be out of harmony with natural conditions. As for the climate, it is divine--though this is the worst season. And I have begun to hate all that is energetic, swift, rapid in thought or action, all rivalry, all competition, all striving in the race of success. It is just enough to live here: no, it is too much!--it is more than any ordinary human being deserves to enjoy. It makes one feel like crying for joy just to look about one. Couldn't I induce you to abandon the beastly civilization of the U. S., and live somewhere down here forever more,--where everybody is honest and good-natured and courteous, and where everything is divine? Man was not intended to work in this part of the world: while you are here, you cannot quite persuade yourself you are awake,--it is a dream of eternal beauty,--all the musky winds, all the flower-months of Paradise! New Orleans is the most infernal hole in the entire Cosmos. Don't live in it! Confound fame and wealth and reputation and splendour. You don't need any of these things here; they are superfluous; they are obsolete; they are nuisances; they are living curses. Settle here. Humming-birds will fly into your chamber to wake you up. What on earth you can find to live for in the U.S. I am now at a loss to see. You'll get old there;--here you will remain eternally young: the palms distil Elixir Vitæ. But it is simply foolishness to write to you--because I can't write about this place. All ambition to write has been paralyzed--let Nature do the writing--in green, azure and gold! [Illustration: LAFCADIO HEARN. _From a Photograph taken at Martinique, August 24th, 1888._] (Letter from St. Pierre, July 30, 1887.) I am not at all sure of my literary future,--I do not mean pecuniarily, for I never allow that question to seriously bother me: to write simply to make money is to be a d----d fraud, so long as one can aim at higher things. But I do not feel the same impulses and inspirations and power to create;--I have been passing through a sort of crisis,--out of enthusiasm into reality and I do not feel so mentally strong as I ought. The climate had much to do with it in the beginning, causing a serious weakness of memory;--that is now passed; but I feel as if _mon âme avait perdu ses ailes_. Perhaps something healthier and stronger may come of it; but in the meanwhile I suffer from great disquietude, and occasional very black ideas; and praise sounds to me like a malicious joke, because I feel that my work has been damnably bad. The fact that I _know_ it has been bad, encourages me to believe I may do better, and find confidence in myself. I have enough MS. for a volume of French colonial sketches, and do not think I will be able to do much more with Martinique for the present; but I also have accumulated material out of which something will probably grow. I would now like to attempt some Spanish studies. Northern air will do me good, though I do not like the idea of living in it. But when, after all this stupid, brutal, never-varying heat, you steam North, and the constellations change, and the moon stands up on her feet instead of lying on her back lasciviously,--and the first grand whiff of cold air comes like the advent of a Ghost,--Lord! how one's brain suddenly clears and thrills into working order. It is like a new soul breathed into your being through the nostrils--after the Creator's fashion of animating his Adam of clay. Perhaps you think I have been a poor correspondent. You can scarcely imagine the difficulties of maintaining a friendly chat by letter while trying to do literary work here. Most people who attempt literature here either give it up after a short time, or go to the graveyard: there are a few giants,--like Dr. Rufz de Lavison (who never finished his Études nevertheless), Davey the historian; Dessalles who suddenly disappeared leaving his history incomplete. But I fear I am no giant. At 2 or 2.30 p.m. if you try to write, your head feels as if a heated feather pillow had been stuffed into your skull. To write at all one must utilize the morning;--that is given to make the pot boil: one can write letters only at intervals, paragraph by paragraph, or between solid chapters of downright wearing-out work. Nevertheless, one learns to love this land so much as to be quite willing to abandon anything and everything to live in it. As in the old Sunday-school hymn, "only man is vile:" nature and Woman are unspeakably sweet. I suppose I will not be able to meet you in New York this fall: you will be too busy. Next summer it will be possible, I hope. Perhaps you will have the pleasure of a little book or two from me during the cold weather: I will revise things in New York. It has been a horrible agony to have my stuff printed without being able to see the proofs, and full of mistakes. "Chita" has been a great literary success--contrary to expectation. I find success is not decided by the press, nor by first effect on the public: opinions of literary men count much more, and these have been better than I imagined they could be. (1887) Well, I am caught! The tropics have me, for better or worse, so long as I live. Life in a great northern city again would be a horror insupportable. Yet I have had great pain here. I have been four months without a cent of money where nobody would trust me: you know what that means, if you have ever had a rough-and-tough year or two: otherwise you could not imagine it. I have had disillusions in number. I find worst of all, there is no inspiration in the tropics,--no poetry, no aspiration, no self-sacrifice, no human effort. Now, that I can go where I like, do as I please--for I have won the fight after all,--I still prefer one year of Martinique to a thousand years of New York. What is it? Am I demoralized; or am I simply better informed than before? I don't really know. (1887) New York, September 29, 1887.[12] [12] Written during a brief stay in New York, whither he had gone in the fall of 1887. Dear Friend Matas:--I am going back to the tropics,--probably for many years. My venture has been more successful than I ever hoped; and I find myself able to abandon journalism, with all its pettinesses, cowardices, and selfishnesses, forever. I am able hereafter to devote myself to what you always said was my _forte_: the study of tropical Nature--God's Nature,--violent, splendid, nude, and pure. I never hoped for such fortune. It has come unasked. I am almost afraid to think it is true. I am afraid to be happy! _c/o_ Dr. George M. Gould, 119 South Seventeenth St., Philadelphia, June 5, 1889. Dear Friend Matas:--Your letter of March 21 only reached me to-day, June 5th; but made me very glad to get it. I have been back from the West Indies about three weeks--do not know how long I shall stay. It seemed like tearing my heart out to leave Martinique; and though I am now in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, among dear friends, and with the splendid spectacle before me of man's grandest efforts--not a wild cyclone of electricity and iron like New York, but a great quiet peace--the tropical Nature with all its memories haunts me perpetually,--draws my thought back again over the azure sea and under the turquoise sky to the great palms and the volcanic hills and the beautiful brown women. I know I shall have to go back to the tropics sooner or later. The effect of the climate, as you know, is deadly to mental work. Physically, however, I felt better in it,--less nervous than I ever was before. Only one's will to work is broken down; and it is better only to collect material there to work up elsewhere. That sort of work I am busy at just now. I have a signed contract for publication of "Chita" in book-form; and the result of my two years' absence will be forthcoming in a volume of larger size. You know Philadelphia, I suppose, the beautiful city; and I suppose you know that physicians here form the leaders of, and give the tone to, social life. It seems to me but just that they should,--representing the highest intellectual rank of civilization when they are really worthy of the profession. ... As for other people wondering what has become of me; that is just what I want. I do not care to have any one know what I am doing till it is done.... I have happily got over a sort of crisis, however, which isolated me more than I would have liked to be isolated from the world at large: the distrust of myself. [Illustration: HANDWRITING OF HEARN IN 1889. _face page 63._] Concerning the value of Hearn's Martinique work, I am permitted to quote from a letter written to him on May 24, 1890, by the late Edmund C. Stedman,--and there could be no better judge and critic: "I will not leave without telling you how much I am your debtor for the fascinating copious record of your life in the Windward Islands, and for your 'Youma'--both of which I take with me to 'Kelp Rock'--and which we shall know by heart ere long. The 'Two Years' came when I was 'moving' in New York, etc.,--so that books and letters, unacknowledged, perforce have piled up on my table. I am grateful for your remembrance and your gifts. _No_ book could please me more than your 'Two Years.' Those Islands are my Hesperides--I had begun a series of poems and lyrics, cast in the Caribees, but your prose poems put mine to shame--and I am glad to listen to your music and leave my own unsung." CHAPTER VI.--"GETTING A SOUL" SHORT though it was in time, the Philadelphia visit in 1889 has a value long in significance, that deserves epitomization. To begin with, it was Hearn's first experience of anything that might be called home-life. Its result was a softening and normalizing of him both as to character and as to manner, which was most evident. Secondly, and as he chose to put it, I "gave him a soul." By this poetic paraphrase he meant that I had succeeded in bringing to his recognition the existence of Freedom in what he thought determinism;--that intelligence, purpose, and beneficence lie behind biology, and that human beings are not always, and may never be wholly, the slaves of the senses, and the dupes of desire. Beauty itself, which he so widely sought, I asked him to note, is a needless, harmful, and even impossible thing in a world of adamantine logic and necessity. Above all, I demonstrated the existence of Duty, "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," not only in the abstract, but in concrete lives, in social and historic exemplifications, and that only by means of men and women who obey conscience is social and historic progress brought about. They who have not seen that can have no "soul;" they who do see it, have soul, durable or great according to the clearness of the seeing and the obedience to the implication. Fully and freely Hearn acknowledged the vision, and never afterward could he be wholly the same as he had been before. But the Providence of the Oriental and semi-barbarous is Improvidence, and their God is Fate. Hearn came to hate, or to pretend to hate, the truth which had now slipped through his spiritual eyes, but he could not undo or outroot it entirely; "henceforth by the vision splendid is on his way attended." Thirdly, this new viewpoint, this new spirit or soul, I got incorporated in a little art-work, or ethical study--"Karma," published in _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890, after Hearn had gone to Japan. To the world and without the knowledge of its making, "Karma" must have seemed an illogical and even impossible thing for Hearn to have written. It is apparently the sole work which he ever wrote, created _de novo_ and without the data having been found or brought to him from without. But it was only a seeming creation. It was only the telling, the colouring, that was his, as in his other tales before or after. In our long walks and talks in the Park at night, we wrought out the title, the datum, and the whole trend of the story. He rebelled, but I held him to the task, which he finally executed with frank and artistic loyalty. The pride or indifference, even the dislike, of its readers, the writer, or inspirer, is as nothing compared with the fact that by it and from it Hearn learned something of love and duty that had never before been a living reality to him. What an infinite distance it was removed from anything dreamed during the Cincinnati period, or to be derived from Flaubert, Gautier, or Beaudelaire! After that his future work could never be, and never was, what it was from the writing, "_Everything you feel you would not like me to know._" I do not think there is exaggeration of the importance of the story, and what led up to its writing, in saying that it was the greatest of the turning-points in his life, and that directly because of it the magnificent works of the Japanese period were profoundly influenced through the attitude of mind thereby gained. Concerning the heroine of the tale Hearn wrote me: Your objection to my idea is quite correct. I have already abandoned it. It would have to be sexual. Never could find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood, which in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about sex, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect natures inspire a love that is a fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive--pregnant with future pains innumerable. But, fourthly, that in which I feel as great a pride, is compelling him to go to Japan. Others could have reported for lurid yellow journalism, others might possibly have translated as well as he, others could have told the West Indian stories, but--not even his beloved Lowell--only Hearn could have written of the Japanese life and soul as Hearn has done. He had no thought of the journey when I showed him his duty and his opportunity. By argument, pleading, almost compulsion, I at last wearied his opposition, and he went, with reluctance, after months of halting in detested New York City in which he learned by bitter experience that it was no place for him, and that his beloved tropics should not be again sought. How disappointed he was in his New York friends and prospects may be gathered from the following excerpt taken from one of his letters to me. I had used all my influence to keep him from a stay in the city. He wrote as follows: Dear Gooley, your advice is good from your way of looking at it; but I am much stronger in New York than you imagine, and my future in it is plain and perfect sailing if I keep good health. I am only embarrassed for the moment. I am quite a lion here, and could figure in a way you would hardly guess, if I were not such a man of tentacles. I am not afraid of the cold--though it disheartens fancy a little; but I shall leave fancy alone for a while. No, Gooley, dear Gooley, I shall make my way in New York--don't be afraid for me. He soon became convinced that I was right and finally resumed the journey unwillingly. The end has justified the means and the sacrifices. It is plain that the Japanese period and work crown his life-labours splendidly, and that his masterful pictures of Japanese characters, traditions, and religion now constitute one of our most precious literary treasures. They have also been of profound service to Japan. When he left my home, he, of his own accord, asked me to care for his library, then in the home of Mr. Alden at Metuchen, New Jersey, who two years previously had consented to take charge of it, and had paid shipping expenses, insurance, etc. None can imagine anything ungenerous or unkind in Mr. Alden. An old Cincinnati acquaintance characterizes Hearn's action in the matter as "a swindle." I have no knowledge or hint how it was or could be of that nature. Hearn wrote all the letters, and made all the arrangements to have the books sent to me. Mr. Alden authorizes me to say: "I was perfectly convinced at the time of the transfer of the library to Dr. Gould that he had no desire for its possession, and that the transfer was made solely in accordance with Mr. Hearn's request. I am quite sure that Dr. Gould fully explained the matter to me at the time. I feel sure that Dr. Gould acted precisely as I should have done if I had retained possession of the library; that is, readily giving it up to any legitimate claimant." I found the books of no value to me, and they surely have been an expense. I tried, later, to prevail upon Hearn to allow me to ship them to him in Japan, but I never received any replies to my letters. He asked for the catalogue, some of the old books, and beside these, at his request, a number of expensive new books were at various times bought and sent to him. I suspect that as there was not a book on Japan in the collection, and as he had a plethora of data at hand such as he wanted, the library gathered with so much love and enthusiasm was no longer of use to him, especially under the conditions of his life there. Hearn gained strength and power as regards both truth and art, in so far as he was true to the better in himself; all his trouble and his weakness were born out of the lower self he would not, or could not, sacrifice. His worship of the blood-curdling and revolting gave him some temporary vogue among the readers of yellow newspaperdom, but not until that was renounced for the compromise of the "odd and ghostly" did he begin to show an ability to reach something more worthy in human nature than the degenerate reporter catered to. The next step in advance was the cultivation of the artistic pornography of the sensualistic French story-writer. Not until he renounced this did he once more come to the something of more use to the reading world which fills the Martinique epoch. His disinclination to go to Japan, I more than suspect, was owing to a half consciousness that there was in that nation too much civilization, too good character, and even too much religion to suit the tastes which had been uppermost in motiving his past literary labours. His going into utter, illogical, and absurd captivity to the atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Herbert Spencer was a sorry sacrifice of his nobler office and better destiny to the fate that relentlessly dogged his footsteps. He was forced into all the humanity and beneficence possible to him by Japanese restraint, art, and truth. His cries of disillusion over the Japanese were largely the anger of the semi-barbaric wanderer held by family ties, paternity, etc., when he found himself prevented from again seeking the faraway tropical pseudo-paradises of peoples but one remove from savagery. In the pre-Japanese periods only the lurid, the monstrous, the enormous, only hot crime, and sexual passion, could excite his liveliest interest, and all great literature was as much ignored as if it did not exist. There is not a hint in all he did that he had read a line of the great creators of literature,--the Greek dramatists, Dante, Goethe, Shakespere, and a hundred more; he could not give time to read, much less study them. His pretension of ability to teach English literature was soon recognized even by the Japanese, and it is well that over-zealous friends did not secure him a lectureship at Cornell University. To be sure, he never had time to study even the history of his own science and art,--but he never would have done so, it is plain, if leisure and opportunity had been offered him. The ideal and the rewards of scholarship never entered his mind. Perhaps it was best for his peculiar office and proficiency that he allowed all erudition to go unlooked-upon. And yet if he had been possessed of sufficient virility and objectivity of mind to have learned the Japanese language, what would the labour not have been worth? That he could not read a Japanese book or newspaper after fourteen years of life among the people is most disconcerting. It is a tribute to the amazing delicacy and receptiveness of his mind that while he could not speak to his wife or children in their own tongue, he should still have so accurately caught the Japanese spirit and so admirably conveyed it to us. The history of Hearn's ghoulish pleasure in the gruesome and sensualistic, runs from the tan-yard horror and Cincinnati reportorial days, through the translated stories of the New Orleans epoch, to his "St. Anthony." In "Stray Leaves" it is but little softened, and yet the atmosphere is brightening. It glitters and flashes like vengeful lightning about the clouds of his mind with the Martinique epoch, etc.; but in the Japanese writing even the "Mountain of Skulls" and other stories are so far removed from reality that our disgust sinks to a smile of sighing wonder that the gruesome could still be so loved by him. It is only a few of the brutal and a small brutalized public that seeks such _contes drolatiques_ (without Balzac's wit, satire, and power, of course), and so again perforce, Hearn was weaned from his morbidities. Dominated by his developing art and also by the need to sell his writings, he thus rose, partly by the command of his readers, to the choice of less and less repulsive themes and methods, and, awed by the Japanese spirit of gentleness and beauty, he finally endowed their national soul-life with a prismatic glory which they themselves had hardly suspected. Hearn deserted the god of religion, and, except in one respect, he was faithless to the god of ethics. He was, therefore, without any divinity. For a mind that had no creative ability, that _must_ have its _subjects_ furnished to it, a mind whose sole function was to colour the data chosen or given from without,--this inner emptiness could only be deceived by but could not be satisfied with the inner emptiness of Spencerism. He acknowledged that religion was the mother of all civilization, arts, and laws, and that all social systems, arts, and laws, antique or modern, were begotten and nurtured by ethics,--and yet there was no reality in, no reason for the existence of either religion or ethics in this world of mechanics and of fatalism, grim and inexorable. Hearn speaks somewhere of his aspiration to be considered a "thinker," and once he praises "science" as a source of data for working into the art forms of his beloved poetic prose. But science to him was as impossible as was he to polite society; Spencer gave him leave, he thought, to consider his atheism, irreligion, and sensualisticism as scientifically authorized, and logically justified. He was always hankering after the old heathen, even savage, gods of his father and mother; and every time he went Fantee with them, he came back to a saner world weakened and still more at war with himself. He always sought an impossible world where Teutonic worth and honour could supply a decadent Latin, with half-savage languor and never failing delights of the senses and of art,--art which, in the last analysis, was his only god. But his tragedy was that he always hastened to turn his god into a fetich, while even his mind caught disquieting glimpses of the awful truth that all genuine worship abjures fetichism. As sensualism is the superstition of love, so fetichistic art is the superstition of true æsthetics. For the most part, minds are mechanical not chemical compoundings, or if chemic, they are in very unstable equilibrium. There are strange and wayward traits, illogic and unfused to unity with the others. There may be psychopathic and isolation wards in the psyche, "retreats," and all manner of diseases of individual organs. Most people go Fantee, often or seldom, and are able to hide their fetichisms from even their best friends. If we observe ourselves at all, most of us wonder at the curious mix of self-contradictories in ourselves. The few whose souls and bodies are fused to clear-cut unity, the component metal melted to harmony in the foundry of Fate and of Purpose,--these clang loyally in absolute and precise tone-colour. In commoner folk the failure of the flux, and the flaws in the casting, have only a social significance, but with the Hearns, with thinkers and writers, the affair has an infinite purport. Hearn could never make his writings and his art impulses square with his beloved materialistic, deterministic philosophy. He did not believe in soul or in souls, and yet his soul was always treating of souls, and showing the invisible thread of continuity which links souls to Soul. Therefore he is always happiest when his _daimon_ breaks from the restraint of theory and fate and pictures the play of free spirit, of soul unconquered by fate, of life victorious over death in some sad way or bright. Concerning Hearn's treatment of friends, editors, and publishers, as it bears sharply upon his literary character and productivity, as little as may or must be said: He was under bonds to Fate to abuse worst the majority of his friends who were most magnanimous, helpful, and kind to him personally, or who were most discriminating and encouraging toward his art and artistic ideals. To his former Cincinnati comrades, except the old printer-friend, he scarcely ever wrote after he left them, and the most faithful of these recently writes me: "I never pretended to be a friend to him; I was merely one to whom he resorted when all the rest cast him out. He never found me wanting, but he got few letters from me, and none that were flattering." "I used to love Matas" are Hearn's pitiful words. It is with sorrow and pain that we note the sudden cessation in 1887 of the letters to Krehbiel. This noble friend had drawn from Hearn a beautiful world of play and enduring memories, and one may be more than sure that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed. Baker had been his most helpful and best friend, and yet for a fancied wrong Hearn wrote him a letter filled with insult and ruffianism which a gentleman could not answer, hardly forgive, and never forget. Did Hearn know anybody of character in the West Indies? To the greatest of American editors, the one who "discovered" him and introduced him to a national and international audience, who treated him with a sweet and gracious benignity, even after a shamelessness that is indescribable--to this good man there is not a published letter, although many, and many more, must exist. One day while at my house, Hearn rushed to his room, seized the man's picture on the wall, tore it in a hundred pieces, and danced and spat upon it in a furious rage. In subsequent letters to me he explained his hatred--how he broke his engagements, how he borrowed money from his loathed and insulted friend, how he got credit through him from his tailor, etc. Gently the abused one bore it all and without the least remonstrance, writing me, "Hearn has utterly cast me off; I was loath to part with him." Professor Chamberlain and others kindly explain the curious morbid psychology which Hearn had exhibited towards them. To the last, love and trust breathed from Hearn's letters to me, and yet I learn that to others long afterward he wrote of me with bitterness and malevolent injustice. And yet he had written me after I saw him for the last time, in this way: "Please don't write me at all, or expect me to write, for some months. I do not need any money. I have a good deal on my mind, and am apt, in consequence, to do very stupid or very unkind things in an unlucky moment." And then he wrote: "No, dear Gooley, I will never be indifferent to you! Never think that; I understand better than you suppose. If I am silent at intervals, never doubt me, dear teacher and brother; and you will find everything come right." How often is the pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving way to foolish, needless, and degrading inherited instincts at the expense of the higher life and usefulness! As to some who ludicrously boast of the long continuance of an intimate friendship, there are many letters of Hearn extant and unpublished which blow out that vanity with an amusing smile. The matter, generally, might not have so real an importance were it not that the publishing of literature has a vast deal to do with literature, and, closely examined, Hearn's quarrels with editors, publishers, and the public, is a matter that reaches out astonishingly both as regards himself, his books, and the interest in him, as well as beyond the question of Hearn or of any or all of his friends. Until one silent man consents to speak--which may never be--the discussion of the essence of the affair cannot be set forth in any detail. Passages in Hearn's letters relating thereto should never have been published, or a hundred other things should have been as frankly published. When such publicity shall exist the reasons will be manifest why one publisher destroyed an entire fresh edition of one book of Hearn, why another acted differently, why one is praised or praises himself, why others are blamed, why some are silent although a word would end the injustice, etc. One phase may be noted in passing:--Whatever Hearn's rights or wrongs as to the author's relations with publishers and editors, it was beyond the ken of his mind that one who may gloriously sacrifice all his own temporal blessings in striving after artistic excellence, has no right to ask the same altruism of those engaged in the publishing business. Hearn blamed the crude world, and, for him, its representatives in the persons of editors and their masters, the publishers, for wishing a certain kind of literature. As well blame the bookseller for not sending the book you had not ordered. He who deliberately chooses to give the world a literature he knows it does not want, must accept the rejection and editing of his manuscripts, and the absence of the world's cheques. He chose poverty and may not abuse them who allowed his choice to be realized. It is sad enough, but it is more than childish to grumble, more than ignoble to rail. The search for "inspiration," as he called it, was with Hearn constant and lifelong. Thus, early in his career, he wrote to his friend, Dr. Matas: So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the perfume of the sea, he can't help writing _something_. And he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed--vivifying, illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion--the sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple. You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ.... And again he wrote: I think I _must_ get inspiration. The real secret of art is feeling. The highest form of that feeling is that which the splendour of Nature gives--the thrill and awe of terrible beauty. This is that inexplicable communication of the mind with the Unknowable that has created the religious sense. Said a friend to me yesterday, who is not a believer:--"I stood in the Alps at sunrise, and I knew what religion meant." And I think that passage in Wilson on Fetichism superb where he says that the sight of the splendid sky first created the religious sense. Terribly perverted this sense has been, no doubt; but it belongs, I fancy, to those things which are eternal, and will have many a glorious avatar before our planet floats off into the cemetery of dead worlds. It is, I believe, the most powerful possible motive for true modern poetry--in harmony with science and scientific faith; and that is what I am going to look for. Such quotations could be multiplied indefinitely, but toward the end they become begging, and moaning in character. The "inspiration" is diligently hunted, hungrily waited for; at last the failure in its coming grows pitiful and tragic. For what is inspiration? If, with the fatal fashion of our fashionable fatalism, we think "we have outgrown all that," all that which was real and genuine inspiring, we at least cannot outgrow that which bred the belief in the inspiring, the trust in spirit and in spiritual truths and forces. Is it all primitive childishness, this faith in a real breathing-in of the higher life into our more carnal hearts and minds? Far from it! It is the veriest of verities, and the _deniers_ of the conditions of inspiration dry up the springs of that "inspiration" which they so hungrily seek. The semblance cannot be without the reality. It will not come, lasting and inexhaustible, by any trick of literary technic. Out of the light of common day is not born that which never was on any sea or shore. Place, time, circumstance, are not, as Hearn thought, the gods of "Inspiration." "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and even a heathen god would hardly visit the altar with his sacred fire if the priests mocked at the power and the very existence of the deity. It is most plain that Hearn early and zealously studied the Bible--hundreds of allusions bear witness of the fact--and that he learned from it the revivification of words, the use of phrase, metaphor, belief, something of the art of reaching in toward the depths of men's moral and religious nature and experience: but all, just so evidently, as a literary art, a _tour de force_, the skill of the expert workman, handling them as symbols for the sake of the skill, while smiling scornfully at any belief in their reality. Language is the most spirit-like creation of man's mind, the thing nearest him, woven out of his own soul-substance, instinct with his life, haunted with his love, his hate, his suffering. Playing with words, using them as art-stuff, regardless of the experience and love and suffering which gave them conceiving and gives them quickening, is likely to bring upon the artist a sad revenge. Pleading in vain for "inspiration," Hearn died a score or more of years before he should have died. It should be emphasized that Hearn had but one possible way, chosen or compelled, to make a living. His terrible myopia shut him out from every calling except that of a writer. Moreover, leaving aside the danger to his little vision from so much ocular labour, he had other and almost insurmountable handicaps as a poet or maker of literature: He had no original thing to say, for he was entirely without creative power, and had always to borrow theme and plot. Then he had never seen form, knew almost nothing of it as it exists out there, so that his sole technic was that of a colourist, and also to endow our dead and dying words with life--a "ghostly" life it was, and as he chose it to be--but living it assuredly was. That he over-coloured his pictures, that he over-sensualized his words, of this there is no question--but monotones and senescents that we are, let us not smile too superciliously! Let us learn; and above all let us enjoy! For, his alone was the palette of the painter of the afterglow of Earth's last sunset. And his the unique miracle of clothing with the hues of a hopeless rainbow, the faint reverberations of bells far sunk in the wreck and wrack of ruined centuries; of reintoning the prayers of Nirvâna-entering souls; of remoaning dear ancient and expiring griefs; of seeing with shut eyes the sad smiles of never-answered loves and never-meeting lovers. With him, hushed, we hearken to Muezzin Bilâl's call from his tower, to the broken sobs of a dancing-girl's passion, or to the plaintive beggings of dying babes for the cold breasts of dead mothers. CHAPTER VII.--"IN GHOSTLY JAPAN" PERHAPS I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt Japan had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during the stay with me. Beyond question, Mr. Lowell's volume had a profound influence in turning his attention to Japan and greatly aided me in my insistent urging him to go there. In sending the book Hearn wrote me this letter: Gooley!--I have found a marvellous book,--a book of books!--a colossal, splendid, godlike book. You must read every line of it. Tell me how I can send it. For heaven's sake don't skip a word of it. The book is called "The Soul of the Far East," but its title is smaller than its imprint. HEARNEYBOY. P.S.--Let something else go to H--, and read this book instead. May God eternally bless and infinitely personalize the man who wrote this book! Please don't skip one solitary line of it, and don't delay reading it,--because something, much! is going to go out of this book into your heart and life and stay there! I have just finished this book and feel like John in Patmos,--only a d----d sight better. He who shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off and his name blotted out of the Book of Life.[13] [13] Mr. Percival Lowell's book soon reached me containing the inscription: "To George M. Gould, with best love of his spiritual pupil, L. H." I have intentionally retained colloquialisms in these excerpts, the indications of our familiarity, etc., to give a glimpse into the heart of the affectionate and sweet-natured man. There is not much to say about the Japanese period. The splendid books speak for themselves. There is little in the almost valueless letters that interest the literature-lover and give him concern about the literature-maker. There is one short page[14] which is worth the remainder of the book. The development of inborn characteristics goes on, despite the grafted soul, almost as fatalistically as Hearn would have wished, and in this instance in accordance with his theory of the unalterability of character. But this period is of surpassing interest solely because of the beautiful books and articles written. To analyze them is both impossible and undesirable. They are for our enjoyment, and after us generations will be delighted by them. [14] _Life and Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 337 and 338. Hearn's views and practices as regards love and the feminine are not of sympathetic interest to those who think that monogamy is good and advisable. He hopes his son will not follow in his father's footsteps as regards every damozel in his path, and in this respect become the "disgraceful person he [the father] used to be." He "half suspects" the Oriental husband is right in loving his wife least of all others related to or dependent upon him, and quotes approvingly unquotable things about the laws of (sexual) nature, managing, _more suo_, to make beautiful the pursuit of beauty "in vain." Than the other, the woman-beauty of soul is the lesser. "It doesn't make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife. The less intellectual the more lovable,--for intellectual converse a man _can't_ have with women." When contemplating legal marriage with "his wife" in 1892, he calculates shrewdly the advantages of the plan. He arrived in Japan in 1890 and in less than two years "my little wife and I have saved nearly 2,000 Japanese dollars between us." When he has made her independent he will quit teaching, and "wander about awhile and write 'sketches' at $10.00 per page." In 1893 he found difficulties in registering the birth of his son. Hearn was still a British subject. If the boy should be a Japanese citizen, the registry must be in the mother's name; if in the father's name, he would become a foreigner. To become a Japanese citizen would mean for Hearn a great reduction in his salary as a teacher under Government pay. "Why was I so foolish as to have a son?" "Really _I_ don't know." In 1895 he "cuts the puzzle" by becoming a Japanese citizen, "losing all chance of Government employment at a living salary." Immediately Hearn "hopes to see a United Orient yet bound into one strong alliance against our cruel Western Civilization," "against what is called Society and what is called Civilization." For those who boasted of being his friends, it seems an astonishing thing that they should make Hearn portray his vices, his moral nakedness, so publicly. Of course he did not dream of the _exposé_. It is to his merit, however, that he would place the truth boldly and baldly before his friends. He confesses that the scandalous parts of a book are what he likes best, that he is "a Fraud," "a vile Latin," etc.,--"_Vive le monde antique!_" He is "_not respectable_." "Carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churches! how I hate them!! Would I had been born savage; the curse of civilized cities is upon me." He admits that he "cannot understand the moral side, of course," and urges that "the most serious necessity of life is not to take the moral side of it seriously. We must play with it, as with an _hetaira_." It is needless to add that in this composition and resolve lay Hearn's weakness, his tragedy, and his missing of "greatness." A man so willed must finally see that it is the source of pitiful instabilities and waywardness. "I have been at heart everything by turns." He learns the old trick of blaming "Fate" and "the other fellow;" he is hard-pushed, ignored, starved, morally humiliated:--"the less a man has to do with his fellow-men the better;" "it becomes plain why men cannot be good to one another;" character may not be bettered or changed; "no line exists between life and not-life;" "likes and dislikes never depart;" if Spanish, Italian, or French (instead of English, German, or American) he "can be at home with a villain," etc. Finally there comes that burst of frankness:--"I have more smallness in me than you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for twenty or twenty-five years, he must have acquired something of the disposition peculiar to house-rodents,--mustn't he?" Then increase the complaints of "treachery," the wish for "justice," the desire to go away, somewhere, anywhere; and the limit of the amazing is reached in praising _The Conservator_ and _The Whim_ for bravery and goodness, and in hating Virchow thoroughly. Was Virchow so loathsome because this great scientist found an impassable demarcation between life and the not-life?--"all cells are derived from cells." Is it surprising that his old imagined enemies, the Jesuits, are believed to be hidden in every place, lurking to thwart every ambition or success, even to kill him?[15] [15] Those who care may see how this suspicion obfuscates his mind in an article against some of Hearn's statements, by Henry Thurston, in _The Messenger_, January 1906. No man is wholly bad who loves children, none wholly good who does not love them. In a nation of child-lovers, as Hearn's Japanese writings bear witness, he began to catch glimpses of truth hitherto unrecognized. Concerning his eldest son (a fourth child was expected in 1903) Hearn wrote: "No man can possibly know what life means until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole Universe changes,--and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before." Naturally he was drawn to the rich child-lore and fairy tales of Japan. With great difficulty I have secured copies of a number of fairy stories edited by him and published in Japan by T. Hasegawa, Tôkyô, in a style beautiful and dainty beyond superlatives. As mine are probably the only ones in our country, I have ventured to copy herewith two of the tales:-- THE OLD WOMAN WHO LOST HER DUMPLING Long, long ago, there was a funny old woman, who liked to laugh and to make dumplings of rice-flour. One day, while she was preparing some dumplings for dinner, she let one fall; and it rolled into a hole in the earthen floor of her little kitchen and disappeared. The old woman tried to reach it by putting her hand down the hole, and all at once the earth gave way, and the old woman fell in. She fell quite a distance, but was not a bit hurt; and when she got up on her feet again, she saw that she was standing on a road, just like the road before her house. It was quite light down there; and she could see plenty of rice-fields, but no one in them. How all this happened, I cannot tell you. But it seems that the old woman had fallen into another country. The road she had fallen upon sloped very much; so, after having looked for her dumpling in vain, she thought it must have rolled farther away down the slope. She ran down the road to look, crying: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" After a little while she saw a stone Jizo standing by the roadside, and she said: "O Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?" Jizo answered: "Yes, I saw your dumpling rolling by me down the road. But you had better not go any farther, because there is a wicked Oni living down there, who eats people." But the old woman only laughed, and ran on farther down the road, crying: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And she came to another statue of Jizo, and asked it: "O kind Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?" And Jizo said: "Yes, I saw your dumpling go by a little while ago. But you must not run any farther, because there is a wicked Oni down there, who eats people." But she only laughed, and ran on, still crying out: "My dumpling, my dumpling! Where is that dumpling of mine?" And she came to a third Jizo, and asked it: "O dear Lord Jizo, did you see my dumpling?" But Jizo said: "Don't talk about your dumpling now. Here is the Oni coming. Squat down here behind my sleeve, and don't make any noise." Presently the Oni came very close, and stopped and bowed to Jizo, and said: "Good-day, Jizo San!" Jizo said good-day, too, very politely. Then the Oni suddenly snuffed the air two or three times in a suspicious way, and cried out: "Jizo San, Jizo San! I smell a smell of mankind somewhere--don't you?" "Oh!" said Jizo, "perhaps you are mistaken." "No, no!" said the Oni, after snuffing the air again, "I smell a smell of mankind." Then the old woman could not help laughing, "Te-he-he!"--and the Oni immediately reached down his big hairy hand behind Jizo's sleeve, and pulled her out,--still laughing, "Te-he-he!" "Ah! ha!" cried the Oni. Then Jizo said: "What are you going to do with that good old woman? You must not hurt her." "I won't," said the Oni. "But I will take her home with me to cook for us." "Very well," said Jizo; "but you must really be kind to her. If you are not I shall be very angry." "I won't hurt her at all," promised the Oni; "and she will only have to do a little work for us every day. Good-bye, Jizo San." Then the Oni took the old woman far down the road, till they came to a wide deep river, where there was a boat, and took her across the river to his house. It was a very large house. He led her at once into the kitchen, and told her to cook some dinner for himself and the other Oni who lived with him. And he gave her a small wooden rice-paddle, and said: "You must always put only one grain of rice into the pot, and when you stir that one grain of rice in the water with this paddle, the grain will multiply until the pot is full." So the old woman put just one rice-grain into the pot, as the Oni told her, and began to stir it with the paddle; and, as she stirred, the one grain became two,--then four,--then eight,--then sixteen,--thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on. Every time she moved the paddle the rice increased in quantity; and in a few minutes the great pot was full. After that, the funny old woman stayed a long time in the house of the Oni, and every day cooked food for him and for all his friends. The Oni never hurt or frightened her, and her work was made quite easy by the magic paddle--although she had to cook a very, very great quantity of rice, because an Oni eats much more than any human being eats. But she felt lonely, and always wished very much to go back to her own little house, and make her dumplings. And one day, when the Oni were all out somewhere, she thought she would try to run away. She first took the magic paddle, and slipped it under her girdle; and then she went down to the river. No one saw her; and the boat was there. She got into it, and pushed off; and as she could row very well, she was soon far away from the shore. But the river was very wide; and she had not rowed more than one-fourth of the way across, when the Oni, all of them, came back to the house. They found that their cook was gone, and the magic paddle too. They ran down to the river at once, and saw the old woman rowing away very fast. Perhaps they could not swim: at all events they had no boat; and they thought the only way they could catch the funny old woman would be to drink up all the water of the river before she got to the other bank. So they knelt down, and began to drink so fast that before the old woman was half way over, the water had become quite low. But the old woman kept on rowing until the water had got so shallow that the Oni stopped drinking, and began to wade across. Then she dropped her oar, took the magic paddle from her girdle, and shook it at the Oni, and made such funny faces that the Oni all burst out laughing. But the moment they laughed, they could not help throwing up all the water they had drunk, and so the river became full again. The Oni could not cross; and the funny old woman got safely over to the other side, and ran away up the road as fast as she could. She never stopped running until she found herself at home again. After that she was very happy; for she could make dumplings whenever she pleased. Besides, she had the magic paddle to make rice for her. She sold her dumplings to her neighbours and passengers, and in quite a short time she became rich. THE BOY WHO DREW CATS A long, long time ago, in a small country-village in Japan, there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good people. They had a number of children, and found it very hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little girls learned to help their mother almost as soon as they could walk. But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit for hard work. He was very clever,--cleverer than all his brothers and sisters; but he was quite weak and small, and people said he could never grow very big. So his parents thought it would be better for him to become a priest than to become a farmer. They took him with them to the village-temple one day, and asked the good old priest who lived there, if he would have their little boy for his acolyte, and teach him all that a priest ought to know. The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard questions. So clever were the answers that the priest agreed to take the little fellow into the temple as an acolyte, and to educate him for the priesthood. The boy learned quickly what the old priest taught him, and was very obedient in most things. But he had one fault. He liked to draw cats during study-hours, and to draw cats even when cats ought not to have been drawn at all. Whenever he found himself alone, he drew cats. He drew them on the margins of the priest's books, and on all the screens of the temple, and on the walls, and on the pillars. Several times the priest told him this was not right; but he did not stop drawing cats. He drew them because he could not really help it. He had what is called "the genius of an artist," and just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an acolyte;--a good acolyte should study books. One day after he had drawn some very clever pictures of cats upon a paper screen, the old priest said to him severely: "My boy, you must go away from this temple at once. You will never make a good priest, but perhaps you will become a great artist. Now let me give you a last piece of advice, and be sure you never forget it: 'Avoid large places at night;--keep to small.'" The boy did not know what the priest meant by saying, "Avoid large places,--keep to small." He thought and thought, while he was tying up his little bundle of clothes to go away; but he could not understand those words, and he was afraid to speak to the priest any more, except to say good-bye. He left the temple very sorrowfully, and began to wonder what he should do. If he went straight home, he felt sure his father would punish him for having been disobedient to the priest: so he was afraid to go home. All at once he remembered that at the next village, twelve miles away, there was a very big temple. He had heard there were several priests at that temple; and he made up his mind to go to them and ask them to take him for their acolyte. Now that big temple was closed up, but the boy did not know this fact. The reason it had been closed up was that a goblin had frightened the priests away, and had taken possession of the place. Some brave warriors had afterwards gone to the temple at night to kill the goblin; but they had never been seen alive again. Nobody had ever told these things to the boy; so he walked all the way to the village, hoping to be kindly treated by the priests. When he got to the village, it was already dark, and all the people were in bed; but he saw the big temple on a hill at the other end of the principal street, and he saw there was a light in the temple. People who tell the story say the goblin used to make that light, in order to tempt lonely travellers to ask for shelter. The boy went at once to the temple, and knocked. There was no sound inside. He knocked and knocked again; but still nobody came. At last he pushed gently at the door, and was quite glad to find that it had not been fastened. So he went in, and saw a lamp burning,--but no priest. He thought some priest would be sure to come very soon, and he sat down and waited. Then he noticed that everything in the temple was grey with dust, and thickly spun over with cobwebs. So he thought to himself that the priests would certainly like to have an acolyte, to keep the place clean. He wondered why they had allowed everything to get so dusty. What most pleased him, however, were some big white screens, good to paint cats upon. Though he was tired, he looked at once for a writing-box, and found one, ground some ink, and began to paint cats. He painted a great many cats upon the screens; and then he began to feel very, very sleepy. He was just on the point of lying down to sleep beside one of the screens, when he suddenly remembered the words: "Avoid large places;--keep to small." The temple was very large; he was all alone; and as he thought of these words--though he could not quite understand them--he began to feel for the first time a little afraid; and he resolved to look for a small place in which to sleep. He found a little cabinet, with a sliding door, and went into it, and shut himself up. Then he lay down and fell fast asleep. Very late in the night he was awakened by a most terrible noise,--a noise of fighting and screaming. It was so dreadful that he was afraid even to look through a chink of the little cabinet: he lay very still, holding his breath for fright. The light that had been in the temple went out; but the awful sounds continued, and became more awful, and all the temple shook. After a long time silence came; but the boy was still afraid to move. He did not move until the light of the morning sun shone into the cabinet through the chinks of the little door. Then he got out of his hiding-place very cautiously, and looked about. The first thing he saw, lying dead in the middle of it, an enormous monster rat,--a goblin-rat,--bigger than a cow! But who or what could have killed it? There was no man or other creature to be seen. Suddenly the boy observed that the mouths of all the cats he had drawn the night before, were red and wet with blood. Then he knew that the goblin had been killed by the cats which he had drawn. And then, also, for the first time, he understood why the wise old priest had said to him: "Avoid large places at night;--keep to small." Afterwards that boy became a very famous artist. Some of the cats which he drew are still shown to travellers in Japan. At once upon reaching Japan (it is plain Hearn never forgave me for compelling him to go) begin the complaints of the downright hard work of writing, consequent upon the loss of ideals. He breaks with publishers--an old-time story; he is losing his inspiration, and his only hope is that it will return to him again; in any Latin country he could at once, he thinks, get back the much coveted "thrill," or _frisson_. He would at last even relish the hated United States. From the beginning he tires of the Japanese character, and grows more and more tired the longer he stays; it has no depth, this thin soul-stream; it is incapable of long-sustained effort, prolonged study; he cannot much longer endure Japanese officialism; and the official "is something a good deal lower than a savage and meaner than the straight-out Western rough." He would wish never to write a line again about any Japanese subjects. Things finally came to such a pass that the only successful stimulus to work was that some one should do or say something horribly mean to him, and the force of the hurt could be measured in the months or years of resultant labour. As none ever did a mean thing to him, one may suspect that the psychology of his sudden enmities towards others was that he must perforce _imagine_ that he had been "horribly" treated. The old _Wanderlust_, never wholly absent, returns strongly upon him; in less than a year he dreams of leaving Japan and his wife, and of "wandering about awhile;" he projects "a syndicate" whereby he may go to Java (rather than Manila, where the Jesuits were), or, "a French colony,--Tonkin, Noumea, or Pondicherry." A tropical trip is planned for six months of every year. But the "butterfly-lives" dependent upon him prevent, of course. He always spoke of returning often. At the last there is a savage growl that after thirteen years of work for Japan, in which he had sacrificed everything for her, he was "driven out of the service and practically banished from the country." Hearn's nostalgia for the nowhere or the anywhere was only conquered by death. In 1898 the logic of his life, of his misfortune, and character, begins to grow plainer, and he "fears being blinded or maimed so as to prove of no further use." It seems that if he had been able to do what he tried so often, and longed so fervently to do, he would have run away into the known or unknown, leaving children, wife, and all the ties that bound him to any orderly life. His vision had become almost useless; he had lost his lectureship; more and more it grew impossible to coax or force out of his mind such beautiful things as in younger days; the Furies of his atheism, pessimism, and lovelessness were close on his track; the hope of lectureships in the United States had failed,--nothing was left, nothing except one thing, which, chosen or not, came at the age of fifty-four. Lessing has said that "Raphael would have been the great painter he was even if he had been born without arms," and Burke has told of a poet "blind from birth who nevertheless could describe visible objects with a spirit and justness excelled by few men blessed with sight." What irony of Fate it is that one almost blind should teach us non-users of our eyes the wonder and glory of colour; that the irreligious one should quicken our faith in the immaterial and unseen; that a sensualist should strengthen our trust in the supersensual; that one whose body and life were unbeautiful should sing such exquisite songs of silent beauty that our straining ears can hardly catch the subtle and unearthly harmonies! For Hearn is another of many splendid illustrations of the old truth that a man's spirit may be more philosophic than his philosophy, more scientific than his science, more religious than his creed, more divine than his divinity. CHAPTER VIII.--AS A POET THAT Hearn was a true poet none will deny, but it was one of the frequent seeming illogicalities of his character that he had no love of metric or rhymed poetry. I doubt if there is a single volume of such poetry in his library, and I never heard him repeat a line or stanza, and never knew him to read a page of what is called poetry. I suspect the simple reason was that his necessities compelled him rigidly to exclude everything from his world of thought which did not offer materials for the remunerating public. He had to make a living, and whence tomorrow's income should come was always a vital concern. Poetry of the metric and rhymed sort does not make bread and butter; hence there was no time to consider even the possibility of "cultivating the muses on a little oatmeal." Of poetry he once wrote:--"The mere ideas and melody of a poem seem to me of small moment unless the complex laws of versification be strictly obeyed." The dictum, considering its source, is exquisitely ludicrous; for Hearn poetry could not be coined into dollars, even if he had had the mind and heart to learn anything of "the complex laws of versification." Elsewhere he excused his manifest utter ignorance of poetry and want of poetic appreciation by saying that there is so little really good poetry that it is easy to choose. He confessed his detestation of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, preferring Dobson, Watson, and Lang. "Of Wordsworth--well, I should smile!" "Refined poetry" he held of little or no value, but he found the "vulgar" songs of coolies, fishermen, etc., very true and beautiful poetry. He vainly tried to translate some of Gautier's poems. He attempted original verse-making but a few times, and from my scrap-book I reproduce one of the results, kindly furnished me by Mr. Alexander Hill, of Cincinnati, to whom it was given by Mr. Tunison. Perhaps it was printed in _Forest and Stream_. A CREOLE BOAT SONG Hot shines the sun o'er the quivering land, No wind comes up from the sea, Silent and stark the pine woods stand, And the mock-bird sleeps in the Mayhaw tree, Where, overhung with brier and vine, The placid waters slip and shine And dimple to thy lover's view-- La belle rivière de Calcasieu. Under the bending cypress trees, Bedecked with pendulous cool grey moss That woos in vain the recreant breeze And silently mourns its loss. With drowsy eye, in my little boat I dreamily lie, and lazily float Lulled by the thrush's soft Te-rue-- On La belle rivière de Calcasieu. A heron stands, like a ghost in grey, Knee-deep 'mongst the bending water lilies, And yellow butterflies lightly play 'Midst the blooms of fragrant amaryllis; The swift kingfisher winds his reel, Saying his grace for his noonday meal, And a hawk soars up to the welkin blue O'er La belle rivière de Calcasieu. Across the point, where the ferry plies, I hear the click of the boatman's oar, And his Creole song, with its quavering rise Re-echoes soft from shore to shore; And this is the rhyme that he idly sings As his boat at anchor lazily swings, For the day is hot, and passers few On La belle rivière de Calcasieu. "I ain't got time for make merry, me I ain't got time for make merry; My lill' gall waitin' at de River of Death To meet her ole dad at de ferry. She gwine be dere wid de smile on her face, Like the night she died, when all de place Was lit by the moonbeams shiverin' troo La belle rivière de Calcasieu. "O sing dat song! O sing dat song! I ain't got time for make merry! De angel come 'fore berry long, And carr' me o'er de ferry! He come wid de whirlwind in de night-- He come wid de streak of de morning light-- He find me ready--yass, dass true-- By La belle rivière de Calcasieu. "Den who got time for make merry, eh? Den who got time for make merry? De fire burn up de light 'ood tree, De bird eat up de berry. Long time ago I make Voudoo, An' I dance Calinda strong and true, But de Lord he pierce me troo and troo On La belle rivière de Calcasieu." In the Watkin letters, Hearn transcribes a poem of six stanzas written by himself for the decoration of the soldiers' graves at Chalmette Cemetery in 1878. Far more successful, for obvious reasons, was an attempt at echoing a bit of Eastern fancy. A strange, gruesome, Oriental being had caught his eye at New Orleans, who translated for him some characteristic Eastern verses. Hearn thus rendered them in English:[16] [16] From Hearn's manuscript copy through the kindness again of Mr. Tunison and Mr. Hill. THE RUSE From _Amaron Satacum_ Late at night the lover returns unlooked-for, Full of longing, after that cruel absence;-- Finds his darling by her women surrounded; Enters among them:-- Only sees his beautiful one, his idol, Speaks no word, but watches her face in silence, Looks with eyes of thirst and with lips of fever Burning for kisses. Late it is; and, nevertheless, the women, Still remaining, weary his ears with laughter, Prattling folly, tantalizing his longing-- Teasing his patience. Love weaves ruse in answer to gaze beseeching;-- Shrill she screams: "O heaven!--What insect stings so!" And with sudden waft of her robe outshaken, Blows the vile light out. I find the following verses in his scrap-book of the New Orleans period:[17] [17] Dated July 11, 1885. THE MUMMY (After the French of Louis Bouilhet) Startled,--as by some far faint din Of azure-lighted worlds, from sleep, The Mummy, trembling, wakes within The hypogeum's blackest deep,-- And murmurs low, with slow sad voice: "Oh! to be dead and still endure!-- Well may the quivering flesh rejoice That feels the vulture's gripe impure! "Seeking to enter this night of death, Each element knocks at my granite door:-- 'We are Earth and Fire and Air,--the breath Of Winds,--the Spirits of sea and shore. "'Into the azure, out of the gloom, Rise!--let thine atoms in light disperse!-- Blend with the date-palm's emerald plume!-- Scatter thyself through the universe! "'We shall bear thee far over waste and wold: Thou shalt be lulled to joyous sleep By leaves that whisper in light of gold, By murmur of fountains cool and deep. "'Come!--perchance from thy dungeon dark Infinite Nature may wish to gain For the godlike Sun another spark, Another drop for the diamond rain.' * * * * * "Woe! mine is death eternal! ... and I feel Them come, as I lie alone,-- The Centuries, heavy as drifted sand Heaping above my bed of stone! "O be accursed, ye impious race!-- Caging the creature that seeks to soar; Preserving agony's weird grimace, In hideous vanity, evermore!" * * * * * Aux bruits lointains ouvrant l'oreille, Jalouse encor du ciel d'azur, La momie en tremblant s'éveille Au fond de l'hypogée obscur. Oh, dit-elle, de sa voix lente, Etre mort, et durer toujours. Heureuse la chaire pantelante Sous l'ongle courbé des vautours. Pour plonger dans ma nuit profonde Chaque element frappe en ce lieu. --Nous sommes L'air! nous sommes l'onde! Nous sommes la terre et le feu! Viens avec nous, le steppe aride Veut son panache d'arbres verts, Viens sous l'azur du ciel splendide, T'éparpiller dans l'univers. Nous t'emporterons par les plaines Nous te bercerons à la fois Dans le murmure des fontaines Et la bruissement des bois. Viens. La nature universelle Cherche peut-être en ce tombeau Pour de soleil une étincelle! Pour la mer une goutte d'eau! * * * * * Et dans ma tombe impérissable Je sens venir avec affroi Les siècles lourds comme du sable Qui s'amoncelle autour de moi. Ah! sois maudite, race impie, Qui le l'être arrêtant l'essor Gardes ta laideur assoupie Dans la vanité de la mort. In one of Hearn's letters to the Cincinnati _Commercial_, written soon after his arrival in New Orleans, he writes: Here is a specimen closely akin to the Creole of the Antilles. It is said to be an old negro love-song, and I think there is a peculiar weird beauty in several of its stanzas. I feel much inclined to doubt whether it was composed by a negro, but the question of its authorship cannot affect its value as a curiosity, and, in any case, its spirit is thoroughly African. Unfortunately, without accented letters it is impossible to convey any idea of the melody, the liquid softness, the languor, of some of the couplets. My translation is a little free in parts. I Dipi me vouer toue, Adèle, Ape danse calinda, Mo reste pour toue fidèle, Liberte a moin caba. Mo pas soussi d'autt negresses, Mo pas gagnin coeur pour yo; Yo gagnin beaucoup finesses; Yo semble serpent Congo. II Mo aime toue trop, ma belle, Mo pas capab resiste; Coeur a moin tout comme sauterelle, Li fait ne qu'appe saute. Mo jamin contre gnoun femme Qui gagnin belle taille comme toue; Jie a ton jete la flamme; Corps a toue enchene moue. III To tant comme serpent sonnette Qui connin charme zozo, Qui gagnin bouche a li prette Pour servi comme gnoun tombo. Mo jamin voue gnoun negresse Qui connin marche comme toue, Qui gagnin gnoun si belle gesse; Corps a toue ce gnoun poupe. IV Quand mo pas vouer toue, Adèle, Mo sentt m'ane mourri, Mo vini com' gnoun chandelle Qui ape alle fini: Mo pas vouer rien sur la terre Qui capab moin fait plaisi; Mo capab dans la rivière Jete moin pour pas souffri. V Dis moin si to gagnin n'homme; Mo va fals ouanga pour li; Mo fais li tourne fantome, Si to vle moin pour mari. Mo pas le in jour toue boudeuse; L'autt femme, pour moin ce fatras; Mo va rende toue bien heureuse; Mo va baill' toue bell' madras. TRANSLATION I Since first I beheld you, Adèle, While dancing the _calinda_, I have remained faithful to the thought of you: My freedom has departed from me. I care no longer for all other negresses; I have no heart left for them: You have such grace and cunning: You are like the Congo serpent. II I love you too much, my beautiful one: I am not able to help it. My heart has become just like a grasshopper, It does nothing but leap. I have never met any woman Who has so beautiful a form as yours. Your eyes flash flame; Your body has enchained me captive. III Ah, you are so like the serpent-of-the-rattles Who knows how to charm the little bird, And who has a mouth ever ready for it To serve it for a tomb! I have never known any negress Who could walk with such grace as you can, Or who could make such beautiful gestures: Your body is a beautiful doll. IV When I cannot see you, Adèle, I feel myself ready to die; My life becomes like a candle Which has almost burned itself out. I cannot, then, find anything in the world, Which is able to give me pleasure;-- I could well go down to the river And throw myself in it that I might cease to suffer. V Tell me if you have a man; And I will make an _ouanga_ charm for him; I will make him turn into a phantom, If you will only take me for your husband. I will not go to see you when you are cross; Other women are mere trash to me; I will make you very happy, And I will give you a beautiful Madras handkerchief. I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called "line of beauty" serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women?--something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination?--something of Lilith and Lamia? The French have a beautiful verb expressive of this idea, _serpenter_, "to serpent"--to curve in changing undulations like a lithe snake. The French artist speaks of the outlines of a beautiful human body as "serpenting," curving and winding like a serpent. Do you not like the word? I think it is so expressive of flowing lines of elegance--so full of that mystery of grace which puzzled Solomon; "the way of a serpent upon a rock." The allusion to Voudooism in the last stanza especially interested me, and I questioned the gentleman who furnished me with the song as to the significance of the words: "I will make him turn into a phantom." I had fancied that the term _fantome_ might be interpreted by "ghost," and that the whole line simply constituted a threat to make some one "give up the ghost." "It is not exactly that," replied my friend; "it is an allusion, I believe, to the withering and wasting power of Voudoo poisons. There are such poisons actually in use among the negro obi-men--poisons which defy analysis, and, mysterious as the poisons of the Borgias, slowly consume the victims like a taper. He wastes away as though being dried up; he becomes almost mummified; he wanes like a shadow; he turns into a phantom in the same sense that a phantom is an unreal mockery of something real." Thus I found an intelligent Louisianan zealous to confirm an opinion to which I was permitted to give expression in the _Commercial_ nearly three years ago--that a knowledge of secret septic poisons (probably of an animal character), which leave no trace discoverable by the most skilful chemists, is actually possessed by certain beings who are reverenced as sorcerers by the negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States, but more especially of the West Indies, where much of African fetichism has been transplanted. OZIAS MIDWINTER. CHAPTER IX.--THE POET OF MYOPIA THE dependence not only of the literary character and workmanship of a writer, but even his innermost psyche, upon vision, normal or abnormal, is a truth which has been dimly and falteringly felt by several writers. Concerning "Madame Bovary," and his friend Flaubert, Maxime du Camp reflects some glintings of the truth. But these and others, lacking the requisite expert definiteness of knowledge, have failed to catch the satisfying and clear point of view. To illustrate I may quote the paragraph of du Camp: "The literary procedure of Flaubert threw everybody off the track and even some of the experts. But it was a very simple matter; it was by the accumulation and the superposition of details that he arrived at power. It is the physiologic method, the method of the myopes who look at things one after the other, very exactly, and then describe them successively. The literature of imagination may be divided into two distinct schools, that of the myopes and that of the hyperopes. The myopes see minutely, study every line, finding each detail of importance because everything appears to them in isolation; about them is a sort of cloud in which is detached the object in exaggerated proportions. They have, as it were, a microscope in their eye which enlarges everything. The description of Venice from the Campanile of St. Mark, that of Destitution in 'Captain Fracasse,' by Gautier are the capital results of myopic vision. The hyperopes, on the other hand, look at the _ensemble_, in which the details are lost, and form a kind of general harmony. The detail loses all significance, except perhaps they seek to bring it into relief as a work of art.... Besides, the myopes seek to portray sensations, while the hyperopes especially aim at analysis of the sentiments. If a hyperopic writer suddenly becomes myopic, his manner of thinking, and consequently of writing, at once is modified. What I call the school of the myopes, Gautier names the school of the rabids. He said to Mérimée: 'Your characters have no muscles,' and Mérimée answered, 'Yours have no draperies.'" But there is one consequence, common both to Flaubert and to Hearn, a most strange unity of result flowing from a seemingly opposed but really identical cause in the two men. I have elsewhere set forth the reasons for my belief that the secret of Flaubert's life, character, and literary art consisted in an inability to think and write at the same time. He was one of the most healthy and brilliant of men when he did not read or write, but his mind refused to act creatively whenever he wrote or read. From this resulted his epilepsy. Fathered by the fear of this disease, mothered by opium, and reared by unhygiene and eye-strain, came the miserable "St. Anthony" of the second remaking. In the failure of this pitiful work there was naught left except bottomless pessimism, the "cadenced phrase," and all the rest, called "Madame Bovary" and "art for art's sake." There never was a greater sufferer from eye-strain than Flaubert, whose eyes were strikingly beautiful, and seemingly of extraordinary perfection as optical instruments. From this fact flowed the entire tragedy of the man's life and of his life-work. His friend du Camp says that had it not been for his disease he would have been, not a writer of great talent, but a man of genius. Hearn had the most defective eyesight, he was indeed nearly blind; but physically he suffered little from this cause,--and yet his choice of subjects and methods of literary workmanship, and every line he wrote, were dictated and ruled by his defect of vision. Opium, with the impossibility of writing and creating at the same time, dominated Flaubert's work and working, and the similar result was begot by Hearn's enormous monocular myopia. From Martinique, before I had met him, Hearn wrote me: I am very near-sighted, have lost one eye, which disfigures me considerably; and my near-sightedness always prevented the gratification of a natural _penchant_ for physical exercise. I am a good swimmer, that is all. In reply to nearly all the questions about my near-sightedness I might answer, "Yes." I had the best advice in London, and observe all the rules you suggest. Glasses strain the eye too much--part of retina is gone. The other eye was destroyed by a blow at college; or, rather, by inflammation consequent upon the blow. I can tell you more about myself when I see you, but the result will be more curious than pleasing. Myopia is not aggravating. In "Shadowings," the chapter on "Nightmare-Touch," Hearn describes with his gift of the living word the dreams and hauntings he endured when as a boy he was shut in his room in the dark. It is a pitiful history, and shows how a child may suffer atrociously from the combination of an abnormally exuberant fancy and eye-strain, probably with added ocular disease. The subjective sensations and images were alive and Hearn's innate tendency to the horrible and hideous gave them the most awful of nightmarish realities. I have already given (facing page 5) a copy of a little photograph of Hearn at about the age of eight, standing by Mrs. Brenane. It will be seen that the right eyeball was at this time about as large and protruding as in later life. This leaves a doubt whether the destruction of the left was due to the blow at college at the age of sixteen. In one of my letters he uses the word "scrofulous" in alluding to himself. It was not only during the last years of his life, that, as he says, "it was now largely a question of eyes." It was always the most important of all questions; first, physically and financially, because all hung upon his ability to write many hours a day. How his little of visual power was preserved under the work done is a marvel of physiology. So unconscious was Hearn of the influence of eye-strain in ruining the health of others (he himself had no eye-strain in the ordinary meaning of the term) that he wonders why the hard students about him were inexplainably dying, going mad, getting sick, and giving up their studies. This is hardly to be considered a fault of Hearn when educators and physicians and oculists the world over, never suspect the reason. Moved by sympathy, and perhaps by the vaguest feeling that to Hearn's poor vision were due, in part at least, both his personal and literary characteristics, I early besought him to make use of scientific optical helps in order to see the world better, and to carry on his writing with greater ease, and with less danger to the little vision left him. He had but one eye, which was evidently enormously nearsighted. The other had been lost in youth. I found that he had about 25 diopters of myopia, to use the jargon of the oculist, and that consequently he knew little about the appearance of objects even a few feet away. In writing he was compelled to place the paper or pen-point about three inches from his eye. With the proper lens it was possible to give him vision of distant objects about one-fourth as clear as that of normal eyes. For a minute my disappointment was equal to my surprise when I found that he did not wish to see with even this wretched indistinctness, and that he would not think of using spectacles or eyeglasses. Later I found the reason for his action. He sometimes carried a little lens or monocle in his pocket, which somewhat bettered his vision, but in the several months he spent with me I saw him use it only once or twice, and then merely for an instant. I am almost sure that the reason for this preference for a world almost unseen, or seen only in colours, while form and outline were almost unknown, was never conscious with Hearn, although his mind was alert in detecting such psychologic solutions in others. In studying his writings, this reason finally has become clear to me. When one chooses an artistic calling, Fate usually, and to the artist unconsciously, dictates the kind of art-work and the method of carrying it to realization. The blind do not choose to be painters, but musicians; the deaf do not think of music, though nothing prevents them from being good painters. The dumb would hardly become orators or singers, but they might easily be sculptors, or painters, or designers. It is as evident that the poet is largely a visualizer, if one may so designate this psychic function, and without sight of the world of reality and beauty, poetry will inevitably lack the charm of the real and the lovely. Every great writer, in truth, shows more or less clearly that the spring and secret of his imagination lie preponderantly in the exceptional endowment, training, or sensitiveness of one of the principal senses of sight, hearing, or touch. A thousand quotations might be made from each of a dozen great writers to prove the thesis. The man born blind, however, cannot become a poet, because true poetry must be conditioned upon things seen--"simple, sensuous, and passionate" demands the great critic; but interwoven and underrunning the simplicity, the passion, and the sense, is and must be the world as mirrored by the eye. All thinking, all intellectual activity, is by no means of the image and the picture; all words are the product of the imagining, and the very letters of the alphabet are conventionalized pictures. Physiologically, or normally, the perfection of the artist and of his workmanship thus depends upon the all-round perfection of his senses, the fulness of the materials and of his experience which these work on and in, and the logical and æsthetic rightness of systematization. Conversely, a new pathology of genius is coming into view which shows the morbidizing of art and literature through disease, chiefly of the sense-organs of the artist and literary workman, but also by unnatural living, selfishness, sin, and the rest. As Hearn was probably the most myopic literary man that has existed, his own thoughts upon _The Artistic_ _Value of Myopia_ are of peculiar interest. In 1887 one of his editorials in the _Times-Democrat_ runs as follows:-- Probably more than one reader, on coming to page 15 of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's delightful book, "Landscape," was startled by the author's irrefutable statement that "the possession of very good eyesight may be a hindrance to those feelings of sublimity that exalt the poetic imagination." The fact is, that the impressiveness of natural scenery depends a great deal upon the apparent predominance of _mass_ over _detail_, to borrow Mr. Hamerton's own words; the more visible the details of a large object,--a mountain, a tower, a forest wall, the less grand and impressive that object. The more apparently uniform the mass, the larger it seems to loom; the vaguer a shadow-space, the deeper it appears. An impression of weirdness,--such as that obtainable in a Louisiana or Florida swamp-forest, or, much more, in those primeval and impenetrable forest-deeps described so powerfully by Humbolt,--is stronger in proportion to the spectator's indifference to lesser detail. The real effect of the scene must be a _general_ one to be understood. In painting, the artist does not attempt miscroscopic _minutiæ_ in treating forest-forms; he simply attempts to render the effect of the masses, with their characteristic generalities of shadow and colour. It is for this reason the photograph can never supplant the painting--not even when the art of photographing natural colours shall have been discovered. Mr. Hamerton cites the example of a mountain, which always seems more imposing when wreathed in mists or half veiled by clouds, than when cutting sharply against the horizon with a strong light upon it. Half the secret of Doré's power as an illustrator was his exaggerated perception of this fact,--his comprehension of the artistic witchcraft of _suggestion_. And since the perception of details depends vastly upon the quality of eyesight, a landscape necessarily suggests less to the keen-sighted man than to the myope. The keener the view, the less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of mysterious attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like the eye of the hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of each leaf. Far-seeing persons can, to a certain degree, comprehend this by recalling the impressions given in twilight by certain unfamiliar, or by even familiar objects,--such as furniture and clothing in a half-lighted room. The suggestiveness of form vanishes immediately upon the making of a strong light. Again, attractive objects viewed vaguely through a morning or evening haze, or at a great distance, often totally lose artistic character when a telescope is directed upon them. In the February number of _Harper's Magazine_ we find a very clever and amusing poem by the scholarly Andrew Lang upon this very theme. The writer, after describing the christening-gifts of various kindly fairies, tells us that the wicked one-- --Said: "I shall be avenged on you. My child, you shall grow up nearsighted!" With magic juices did she lave Mine eyes, and wrought her wicked pleasure. Well, of all the gifts the Fairies gave, _Her's_ is the present that I treasure! The bore, whom others fear and flee, I do not fear, I do not flee him; I pass him calm as calm can be; I do not cut--I do not see him! And with my feeble eyes and dim, Where _you_ see patchy fields and fences, For me the mists of Turner swim-- _My_ "azure distance" soon commences! Nay, as I blink about the streets Of this befogged and miry city, Why, almost every girl one meets Seems preternaturally pretty! "Try spectacles," one's friends intone; "You'll see the world correctly through them." But I have visions of my own And not for worlds would I undo them! This is quite witty and quite consoling to myopes, even as a cynical development of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's artistic philosophy. Still, it does not follow that the myope necessarily possesses the poetic faculty or feeling;--neither does it imply that the presbyope necessarily lacks it. If among French writers, for example, Gautier was notably nearsighted, Victor Hugo had an eye as keen as a bird's. It is true that a knowledge of the effect of shortsightedness on the imagination may be of benefit to a nearsighted man, who, possessing artistic qualities, can learn to take all possible advantage of his myopia,--to utilize his physical disability to a good purpose; but the longsighted artist need not be at a loss to find equally powerful sources of inspiration--he can seek them in morning mists, evening fogs, or those wonderful hazes of summer afternoons, when the land sends up all its vapours to the sun, like a smoke of gold. Beaudelaire, in his _Curiosités Esthétiques_, made an attempt to prove that the greatest schools of painting were evolved among hazy surroundings--Dutch fogs, Venetian mists, and the vapours of Italian marsh-lands. The evolutionary tendency would seem to indicate for future man a keener vision than he at present possesses; and a finer perception of colour--for while there may be certain small emotional advantages connected with myopia, it is a serious hindrance in practical life. What effect keener sight will have on the artistic powers of the future man, can only be imagined--but an increasing tendency to realism in art is certainly perceptible; and perhaps an interesting chapter could be written upon the possible results to art of perfected optical instruments. The subject also suggests another idea,--that the total inability of a certain class of highly educated persons to feel interest in a certain kind of art production may be partly accounted for by the possession of such keen visual perception as necessarily suppresses the sensation of breadth of effect, either in landscape or verbal description. Thus, according to Flaubert, the myope looks at things one after another and describes details, while Hearn says the exact opposite. Both are wrong. The oculist will feel constrained to differ somewhat from Hearn in the foregoing article. In May 1887 he reviews editorially an article of my own which I had sent him during the preceding year. Again, because there has never been a literary artist with a colour-sense so amazingly developed as that of Hearn, I venture to copy his commendation of my views: COLOURS AND EMOTIONS (May 8, 1887) The evolutionary history of the Colour-Sense, very prettily treated of by Grant Allen and others, both in regard to the relation between fertilization of flowers by insects, and in regard to the æsthetic pleasure of man in contemplating certain colours, has also been considered in a very thorough way by American thinkers. Perhaps the most entertaining and instructive paper yet published on the subject was one in the _American Journal of Ophthalmology_ last September. It has just been reprinted in pamphlet form, under the title of "The Human Colour-Sense as the Organic Response to Natural Stimuli;" and contains a remarkable amplification of these theories, rather suggested than laid down by the author of "Physiological Æsthetics." Of course, the reader whom the subject can interest, comprehends that outside of the mind no such thing as colour exists; and that the phenomena of colours, like those of sound, are simply the results of exterior impressions upon nerve apparatus specially sensitive to vibrations--in the one case of ether, in the other of air. Everybody, moreover,--even those totally ignorant of the physiology of the eye--know that certain colours are called primary or elementary. But it has probably occurred to few to ask why,--except in regard to mixing of paints in a drawing-school. The theories of Gladstone and Magnus that the men of the Homeric era were colour-blind, because of the absence from the Homeric poems of certain words expressive of certain colours, have been disproved by more thorough modern research. The primitive man's sense of colour, or the sensitiveness of his retina to ether vibrations, may not have been as fine as that of the Roman mosaic-worker who could select his materials of 30,000 different tints, nor as that of Gobelin weavers, who can recognize 28,000 different shades of wool. But the evidence goes to show that the sense of colour is old as the gnawing of hunger or the pangs of fear,--old as the experience that taught living creatures to discern food and to flee from danger. There is, however, reason to suppose, from certain developmental phenomena observed in the eyes of children and newly-born animals, that the present condition of the colour-sense has been gradually reached--not so much in any particular species, as in all species possessing it,--just as vision itself must have been gradually acquired. Also showy colours must have been perceived before tints could be discerned; and even now we know through the spectroscope, that the human eye is not yet developed to the fullest possible perceptions of colour. Now the first colours recognized by the first eyes must have presumably been just those we call primary,--Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. Yellow, the colour of gold, is also the colour of our sun; the brightest daylight has a more or less faint tinge even at noon, according to the state of the atmosphere;--and this tinge deepens at sunrise and sunset. Red is the colour of blood,--a colour allied necessarily from time immemorial with violent mental impressions, whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world. Blue,--the blue of the far away sky,--has necessarily always been for man the colour mysterious and holy,--always associated with those high phenomena of heaven which first inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. These colours were probably first known to intelligent life; and their impressions are to-day the strongest. So violent, indeed, have they become to our refined civilized sense, that in apparel or decoration three of them, at least, are condemned when offered pure. Even the armies of the world are abandoning red uniforms;--no refined people wear flaming crimsons or scarlets or yellows;--nobody would paint a house or decorate a wall with a solid sheet of strong primary colour. Blue is still the least violent, the most agreeable to the artistic sense; and in subdued form it holds a place, in costume and in art, refused to less spiritual colours. It might consequently be expected there should exist some correlation between the primary colours and the stronger emotional states of man. And such, indeed, proves to be the case. Emotionally the colours come in the order of Red, Yellow, Green, Blue. Red still appeals to the idea of Passion,--for which very reason its artistic use is being more and more restrained. Very curious are the researches made by Grant Allen showing the fact of the sensual use of the red. In Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads "(the same suppressed work republished in this country under its first title, "Laus Veneris"), the red epithets appear 159 times, while gold, green and blue words occur respectively 143, 86 and 25 times. In Tennyson's beautiful poem, "The Princess," the red words occur only 20 times, the gold 28, the green 5, the blue once. With all his exquisite sense of colour, Tennyson is sparing of adjectives;--there is no false skin to his work; it is solid muscle and bone. Next to Red, the most emotional colour is Yellow--the colour of life, and of what men seem to prize next to life,--Gold. We fancy we can live without green sometimes; it comes third; but it is the hue associated with all the labours of man on the earth, since he began to labour. It is the colour of Industry. Blue has always been, since man commenced to think, and always will be, until he shall have ceased to think,--associated with his spiritual sense,--his idea of many gods or of One,--his hopes of a second life, his faith, his good purposes, his perception of duty. Still, all who pray, turn up their faces toward the eternal azure. And with the modern expansion of the Idea of God, as with the modern expansion of the Idea of the Universe, the violet gulf of space ever seems more mystical,--its pure colour more and more divine, and appeals to us as the colour of the Unknowable,--the colour of the Holy of Holies. That Hearn wrote not from his own experience, out of his own heart, and with its blood, was due to the fact that life had denied him the needed experience; the personal materials, those that would interest the imaginative or imagining reader, did not exist. He must borrow, at first literally, which for him meant translation or retelling. The kind of things chosen was also dictated by the tragedy and pathos of his entire past life. But as if this pitiful tangling of the strands of Destiny were not enough, Fate added a knot of still more controlling misfortune. His adult life was passed without the poet's most necessary help of good vision. Indeed he had such extremely poor vision that one might say it was only the merest fraction of the normal. A most hazy blur of colours was all he perceived of objects beyond a foot or two away. There was left for him the memory of a world of forms as seen in his childhood; but that fact throws into relief the fact that it was a memory. It needs little psychologic acumen to realize how inaccurate would be our memories of trees, landscapes, mountains, oceans, cities, and the rest, seen only thirty years ago. How unsatisfying, how unreliable, especially for artistic purposes, must such memories be! To be sure, these haunting and dim recollections were, or might have been, helped out a little by pictures and photographs studied at the distance of three inches from the eye. The pathos of this, however, is increased by the fact that Hearn cared nothing for such photographs, etchings, engravings, etc. I never saw him look at one with attention or interest. Paintings, water-colours, etc., were as useless to him as the natural views themselves. Another way that he might have supplemented his infirmity was by means of his monocle, but he made little use of this poor device, because he instinctively recognized that it aided so meagrely. One cannot be sure how consciously he refused the help, or knew the reasons for his refusal. At best it could give him only a suggestion of the accurate knowledge which our eyes give us of distant objects, and not even his sensitive mind could know that it minimized the objects thus seen, and almost turned them into a caricaturing microscopic smallness, like that produced when we look through the large end of an opera-glass. What would we think of the world if we carried before our eyes an opera-glass thus inverted? Would not a second's such use be as foolish as continuous use? There was an optical and sensible reason for his refusal. With the subtle wisdom of the unconscious he refused to see plainly, because his successful work, his unique function, lay in the requickening of ancient sorrows, and of lost, aimless and errant souls. He supplemented the deficiencies of vision with a vivid imagination, a perfect memory, and a perfection of touch which gave some sense of solidity and content, and by hearing, that echo-like emphasized unreality; but his world was essentially a two-dimensional one. To add the _comble_ to his ocular misfortunes, he had but one eye, and therefore he had no stereoscopic vision, and hence almost no perception of solidity, thickness, or content except such as was gained by the sense of touch, memory, judgment, etc. The little glimpse of stereoscopic qualities was made impossible by the fact of his enormous myopia, and further by the comparative blindness to objects beyond a few inches or a few feet away from the eye. The small ball becomes flat when brought sufficiently near the eye. Practically the world beyond a few feet was not a three-dimensional one; it was coloured it is true, and bewilderingly so, but it was formless and flat, without much thickness or solidity, and almost without perspective.[18] Moreover, Hearn's single eye was divergent, and more of the world to his left side was invisible to him than to other single-eyed persons. Most noteworthy also is another fact,--the slowness of vision by a highly myopic eye. It takes it longer to see what it finally does see than in the case of other eyes. So all the movements of such a myopic person must be slow and careful, for he is in doubt about everything under foot, or even within reach of the hands. Hearn's myopia produced his manners. [18] I have gathered, but must omit, a hundred illuminating quotations from Hearn's writings, illustrating the truth of the formlessness and non-objectivity of his world, and how colour dominated his poorly seen universe. Intellect, one must repeat, is largely, almost entirely, the product of vision,--especially the æsthetic part of intellect. And intellect, it should not be forgotten, is "desiccated emotion"; which brings us up sharply before the question of the effect upon æsthetic and general feeling, upon the soft swirl and lift and flitting rush of the emotional nature, in a psyche so sensitive and aerial as that of Hearn. In this rare ether one loses the significance of words, and the limitations of logic, but it may not be doubted that in the large, the summarized effect of thirty years of two-dimensional seeing and living, of a flat, formless, coloured world, upon the immeasurably quick, sensitive plate of Hearn's mind, was--well, it was what it was! And who can describe that mind! Clearly and patently, it was a mind without creative ability, spring, or the desire for it. It was a mind improcreant by inheritance and by education, by necessity and by training, by poverty internal and external. To enable its master to live, it must write, and, as was pitifully evident, if it could not write in obedience to a creative instinct, it must do the next best thing. This residual second was to describe the external world, or at least so much of the externals of all worlds, physical, biological, or social, as romance or common-sense demanded to make the writing vivid, accurate, and bodied. Any good literature, especially the poetic, must be based on reality, must at least incidentally have its running obligato of reality. For the poet, again emphasized, vision is the intermediary, the broad, bright highway to facts. Prosaically, local colour requires the local seer. Barred from this divine roadway to and through the actual universe, the foiled mind of Hearn could choose but one course: to regarment, transform, and colour the world, devised and transmitted by others, and reversing the old [Greek: o logos sarx egeneto] rewrite the history of the soul as [Greek: sarx o logos egeneto], for in Hearn's alembic the solidest of flesh was "melted" and escaped in clouds of spirit; it was indeed often so disembodied and freed that one is lost in wonder at the mere vision of the cloudland so eerie, so silent, so void, so invisibly far, and fading ever still farther away. But, chained to the _here_ Hearn could not march on the bright road. He could never even see the road, or its ending. If freed to go, _there_ became _here_ with the intolerable limitation of his vision, the peculiarity of his unvision. The world, the world of the _there_ must be brought to him, and in the bringing it became the _here_. In the process, distant motion or action became dead, silent, and immobile being; distance was transformed to presence, and an intimacy of presence which at one blow destroyed scene, setting, and illumination. For, except to passionate love, nearness and touch are not poetical or transfiguring, and to Hearn love never could come; at least it never did come. Except in boyhood he never, with any accuracy of expression or life, saw a human face; at the best, he saw faces only in the frozen photographs, and these interested him little. With creative instinct or ability denied, with the poet's craving for open-eyed knowing, and with the poet's necessity of realizing the world out there, Hearn, baldly stated, was forced to become the poet of myopia. His groping mind was compelled to rest satisfied with the world of distance and reality transported by the magic carpet to the door of his imagination and fancy. There in a flash it was melted to formless spirit, recombined to soul, and given the semblance of a thin reincarnation, fashioned, refashioned, coloured, recoloured. There, lo! that incomparable wonder of art, the haunting, magical essence of reality, the quivering, elusive protean ghost of the tragedy of dead pain, the smile of a lost universe murmuring _non dolet_ while it dies struck by the hand of the beloved murderer. CHAPTER X.--HEARN'S STYLE "THE 'lovers of the antique loveliness,'" wrote Hearn, "are proving to me the future possibilities of a long-cherished dream--the English realization of a Latin style, modelled upon foreign masters, and rendered even more forcible by that element of _strength_ which is the characteristic of the northern tongues." "I think that Genius must have greater attributes than mere creative power to be called to the front rank,--the thing created must be beautiful; it does not satisfy if the material be rich. I cannot content myself with ores and rough jewels, etc." "It has long been my aim to create something in English fiction analogous to that warmth of colour and richness of imagery hitherto peculiar to Latin literature. Being of a meridional race myself, a Greek, I _feel_ rather with the Latin race than with the Anglo-Saxon; and trust that with time and study I may be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of latter-day English or American romance." "The volume, 'Chinese Ghosts,' is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph some day, _poetical prose_." "A man's style, when fully developed, is part of his personality. Mine is being shaped to a particular end." Hearn advised the use of the etymological dictionary in order to secure "that subtle sense of words to which much that _startles_ in poetry and prose is due." But although always remaining an artist in words, he, at his best, came to know that artistic technique in ideas is a more certain method of arousing and holding the readers' interest. He also strongly urges a knowledge of Science as more necessary to the formation of a strong style. In this, however, he never practised what he commended, because he had no mind for Science, nor knowledge of scientific things. He spoke with pride of writing the scientific editorials for his paper, but they were few and may quickly be ignored. Flaubert was Hearn's literary deity; the technique of the two men was identical, and consisted of infinite pains with data, in phrase-building, sentence-making, and word-choosing. With no writer was the filing of the line ever carried to higher perfection than with both master and pupil; fortunately the younger had to make his living by his pen, and therefore he could not wreck himself upon the impossible task as did Flaubert. For nothing is more certain to ruin style and content, form as well as matter, than to make style and form the first consideration of a writer. Flaubert, the fashion-maker and supreme example of this school, came at last to recognize this truth, and wished that he might buy up and destroy all copies of "Madame Bovary;" and he summed up the unattainableness of the ideal, as well as the resultant abysmal pessimism, when he said that "form is only an error of sense, and substance a fancy of your thought." His ever-repeated "Art has no morality," "The moment a thing is true it is good," "Style is an absolute method of seeing things," "The idea exists only by virtue of its form," etc., led Flaubert and his thousand imitators into the quagmire which Zola, Wilde, Shaw, and decadent journalism generally so admirably illustrate. That Hearn escaped from the bog is due to several interesting reasons, the chief being his poverty, which compelled him to write much, and his audience, which, being Anglo-Saxon (and therefore properly and thoroughly cursed), would not buy the elegant pornography of Flaubert and the gentlemen who succeeded, or did not succeed, in the perfection of the worship and of the works of the master of them all. And then Hearn was himself at least part Anglo-Saxon, so that he shrank from perfection in the method. There is a pathetic proof of the lesson doubly repeated in the lives of both Flaubert and Hearn. "St. Anthony" was rewritten three times, and each time the failures might be called, great, greater, greatest. There lies before me Hearn's manuscript translation of the third revision of the work, in two large volumes, with a printed pamphlet of directions to the printer, an Introduction, etc.,--a great labour assuredly on Hearn's part. No publisher could be found to give it to the world of English readers![19] Moreover, there was never in his life any personal happiness, romance, poetry, or satisfaction which could serve as the material of Hearn's æsthetic faculty. Almost every hour of that life had been lived in physical or mental anguish, denied desire, crushed yearnings, and unguided waywardness. Born of a Greek mother, and a roving English father, his childhood was passed in an absurd French school where another might have become a dwarfed and potted Chinese tree. Flung upon the alien world of the United States in youth, without self-knowledge, experience, or self-guiding power, he drank for years all the bitter poisons of poverty, banality, and the rest, which may not shatter the moral and mental health of strong and coarse natures. By nature and necessity shy beyond belief, none may imagine the poignant sufferings he endured, and how from it all he writhed at last to manhood and self-consciousness, preserved a weird yet real beauty of soul, a morbid yet genuine artist-power, a child-like and childish, yet most involuted and mysterious heart, a supple and subtle, yet illogical and contentless intellect. [19] Particulars concerning the manuscript translation of "St. Anthony" are given in the Bibliography of Miss Stedman, Hearn's "Argument" of the book being reprinted in full. The most striking evidence of the pathetic and unmatched endowment and experience is that, while circumstance dictated that he should be a romancer, no facts in his own life could be used as his material. There had been no romance, no love, no happiness, no interesting personal data, upon which he could draw to give his imagination play, vividness, actuality, or even the semblance of reality. So sombre and tragic, moreover, had been his own living that the choice of his themes could only be of unhealthy, almost unnatural, import and colouring. He therefore chose to work over the imaginings of other writers, and perforce of morbid ones. A glance at his library confirms the opinion. When Hearn left for Japan, he turned over to me several hundred volumes which he had collected and did not wish to take with him. His most-prized books he had had especially rebound in dainty morocco covers, and these, particularly, point to the already established taste, the yearning for the strange, the weird, and the ghost-like, the gathered and pressed exotic flowers of folklore, the banalities and morbidities of writers with unleashed imaginations, the love of antique religions and peoples, the mysteries of mystics, the descriptions of savage life and rites--all mixed with dictionaries, handbooks, systems of philosophy, etc. Under the conditioning factor of his taste, it is true that his choice, or his _flair_, was unique and inerrant. He tracked his game with fatal accuracy to its lair. His literary sense was perfect, when he set it in action, and this is his unique merit. There has never been a mind more infallibly sure to find the best in all literatures, the best of the kind he sought, and probably his translations of the stories from the French are as perfect as can be. His second published volume, the "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," epitomizes and reillumines this first period of his literary workmanship. The material, the basis, is not his own; it is drawn from the fatal Orient, and tells of love, jealousy, hate, bitter and burning vengeance, and death, sudden and awful. Over it is the wondrous mystical glamour in which he, like his elder brother Coleridge, was so expert in sunsetting these dead days and deathless themes. His next book, "Some Chinese Ghosts," was a reillustration of the same searching, finding, and illuminating. Flaubert's choice of subjects, as regards his essential character, was of the most extreme illogicality; his cadenced phrase and meticulous technique were also not the product of his character or of his freedom. In the Land of Nowhere, Hearn was likewise compelled to reside, and it was necessarily a land of colour and echo, not one of form. The suffering Frenchman emptied of inhabitants or deimpersonalized his alien country, while the more healthy Anglo-Saxon peopled it with ghosts. "Have you ever experienced the historic shudder?" asked Flaubert. "I seek to give your ghost a ghostly shudder," said Hearn. Flaubert wrote:-- "The artist should be in his work, like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere. "Art should be raised above personal affections and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to give it the perfection of the physical sciences by means of pitiless method." And Hearn's first and most beloved "Avatar," and his most serious "St. Anthony"--works dealing with the mysteries and awesomeness of disembodied souls and ideals--"could not get themselves printed." Moreover, in all that he afterwards published there are the haunting far-away, the soft concealing smile, and the unearthly memories of pain, the detached spirits of muted and transmuted dead emotions, and denied yearnings, the formless colourings of half-invisible and evanishing dreams. For with Hearn's lack of creative ability, married to his inexperience of happiness, he could but choose the darksome, the tragical elements of life, the [Greek: pathos] even of religion, as his themes. His intellect being a reflecting, or at least a recombining and colouring faculty, his datum must be sought without, and it must be brought to him; his joyless and even his tragic experience compelled him to cull from the mingled sad and bright only the pathetic or pessimistic subjects; his physical and optical imprisonment forbade that objectivation and distinctive embodiment which stamp an art work with the seal of reality, and make it stand there wholly non-excusing, or else offering itself as its own excuse for being. True art must have the warp of materiality, interwoven with the woof of life, or else the coloration and designs of the imagination cannot avail to dower it with immortality. Working within the sad limits his Fates had set, Hearn performed wonders. None has made tragedy so soft and gentle, none has rendered suffering more beautiful, none has dissolved disappointment into such painless grief, none has blunted the hurt of mortality with such a delightful anæsthesia, and by none have death and hopelessness been more deftly figured in the guise of a desirable Nirvâna. The doing of this was almost a unique doing, the manner of the [Greek: poiêsis] was assuredly so, and constitutes Hearn's claim to an artist's "For ever." He would have made no claim, it is true, to this, or to any other endless existence, but we who read would be too indiscriminating, would be losers, ingrates, if we did not cherish the lovely gift he brings to us so shyly. Restricted and confined as was his garden, he grew in it exotic flowers of unearthly but imperishable beauty. One will not find elsewhere an equal craftsmanship in bringing into words and vision the intangible, the far, fine, illusive fancy, the ghosts of vanished hearts and hopes. Under his magic touch unseen spirit almost reappears with the veiling of materiality, and behind the grim and grinning death's-head a supplanting smile of kindness invites pity, if not a friendly whisper. As to literary aim, Hearn distinctly and repeatedly confessed to me that his ideal was, in his own words, to give his reader "a ghostly shudder," a sense of the closeness of the unseen about us, as if eyes we saw not were watching us, as if long-dead spirits and weird powers were haunting the very air about our ears, were sitting hid in our heart of hearts. It was a pleasing task to him to make us hear the moans and croonings of disincarnate griefs and old pulseless pains, begging piteously, but always softly, gently, for our love and comforting. But it should not be unrecognized that no allurement of his art can hide from view the deeper pathos of a horrid and iron fatalism which to his mind moved the worlds of nature or of life, throttled freedom, steeled the heart, iced the emotions, and dictated the essential automatism of our own being and of these sad dead millions which crowd the dimly seen dreams of Hearn's mind. It may be added that, accepting the command of his destiny, Hearn consciously formed an ideal to which he worked, and even laboured at the technique of its realization. I have talked with him upon these and similar subjects for many long hours, or got him to talk to me. The conversations were usually at night, beneath trees, with the moonlight shimmering through and giving that dim, mystic light which is not light, so well suited to such a poet and to his favourite subjects. As to technique, there was never an artist more patient and persistent than he to clothe his thought in its perfect garment of words. Sometimes he would be able to write with comparative ease a large number of sheets (of _yellow_ paper--he could write on no other) in a day. At other times the words did not suit or fit, and he would rewrite a few pages scores of times. Once I knew him to labour over six lines an entire day, and then stop weary and unsatisfied. I had to supply a large waste-basket and have often wished I had kept for comparison and a lesson in practical æsthetics the half-bushel or more of wasted sheets thrown away nearly every day. Just as those outfitted with good eyes must find Hearn's world too formless and too magnificently coloured, so normal civilized persons will find it altogether too sexually and sensually charged. Whenever able to do so he turns a description to the ghostly, but even then _c'est toujours femme!_ A mountain is like a curved hip, a slender tree takes the form of a young girl budding into womanhood, etc. Colour, too, is everywhere, even where it is not, seemingly, to our eyes, and even colour is often made sensual and sexual by some strange suggestion or allusion. Viewing merit as the due of conscious, honourable, unselfish, and dutiful effort, Hearn's sole merit rises from his heroic pursuit of an ideal of workmanship. Like glorious bursts of illuminating sunshine through the fogs and clouds of a murky atmosphere shine such sentences as these:-- What you want, and what we all want, who possess devotion to any noble idea, who hide any artistic idol in a niche of our heart, is that independence which gives us at least the time to worship the holiness of beauty,--be it in harmonies of sound, of form, or of colour. What you say about the disinclination to work for years upon a theme for pure love's sake, without hope of reward, touches me,--because I have felt that despair so long and so often. And yet I believe that all the world's art-work--all that which is eternal--was thus wrought. And I also believe that no work made perfect for the pure love of art, can perish, save by strange and rare accident.... Yet the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this sacrifice to art,--this trampling of self under foot! It is the supreme test for admittance into the ranks of the eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless sacrifice which the artist's soul is bound to make,--as in certain antique cities maidens were compelled to give their virginity to a god of stone! But without the sacrifice, can we hope for the grace of Heaven? What is the reward? The consciousness of inspiration only! I think art gives a new faith. I think--all jesting aside--that could I create something I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal purpose; and I should know the pride of the prophet that had seen God face to face. * * * * Never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocation for any other occupation, however lucrative,--not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshippers. So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labours at aught that is not of art, he robs the divinity of what belongs to her. And the greatest of our satisfactions with Hearn's personality is that these were not mere words, but that he consistently, resolutely, and persistently practised his preaching. This was the only religion or ethics he had, and praise God, he had it! That alone binds us to him in any feeling of brotherhood, that only makes us grateful to him. Style has been too frequently and too long confounded with content. There is the matter, the thing to be said, the story to be told; and quite apart from this there is the method of telling it, which, properly viewed, is style. So long as the teller of the tale has only borrowed his message or story from others, there cannot be raised much question of originality, or discussion of the datum, except in so far as pertains to the _choice_ of material. And so long as the stylist fingers etymological dictionaries for "startling words," so long will his style remain of the lower kind and etymologically unstylish. When the technique becomes unconscious and perfect, there is style, or the art, merged into the content, and then, _le style c'est l'homme_, or, as Hearn translated it, style becomes the artist's personality. In the best Japanese works Hearn accomplished this, and with his consummate choice of material there was the consummate art-work. Subject, method, cunning handiwork, psychologic analysis, generous and loyal sympathy, colour (not form)--all were fused to a unity almost beyond disassociation, and challenging admiration. But it is not beyond our perfect enjoying. It is true that Hearn has ignored, necessarily and wisely ignored, the objective and material side of Japanese existence. Mechanics, nationalism, economy, the materialism of his material, had obviously to be untouched in his interpretation, or in his "Interpretation." It would have been absurd for him to have attempted any presentation or valuable phasing of this important aspect. That for him was in a double sense _ultra vires_. Such work will not want for experts. But what Hearn has done was almost wholly impossible to any other. His personal heredity, history, and physiology, highly exceptional, seem to have conspired to outfit him for this remarkable task. There is still another reason, at first sight a contradicting one, for both Hearn's fitness and his success in giving us a literary incarnation of the spirit or soul of Japan in the subjective sense: To his readers it must have appeared an insoluble enigma why this superlatively subjective and psychical "sensitive" should have been such an unrecking, _outré_, and enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, or that part of it given in the "First Principles." It is told of an English wit that when asked if he was willing to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, he promptly replied, "Oh, yes, forty of them if you wish." Hearn was similarly minded--minus the fun,--and most unphilosophically he went into utter captivity, seemingly, to the unphilosophic philosopher. And yet the spirit of Spencer's "First Principles" was in reality as different from that of Hearn as was the spirit of St. Francis from that, for instance, of Cecil Rhodes. The contradiction and ludicrousness of this mismating is so easy of explanation that the incongruity is missed. The forest is not seen because of the trees. Hearn did not have true scientific instinct, animus, or ability. Neither had Herbert Spencer--so far as his "First Principles" is concerned, and as regards an improved inductive method as shown in the "Psychology," "Biology," etc., Hearn, according to a letter, found he could not interest himself enough to read one of these later works. The clear and well-drilled scientific intellect admits that if Spencer had not published his "First Principles," but had gathered the facts of his later works before publishing an epitomizing Last Principles, the matter would have been as differently phased as night and day. Spencer cared infinitely more for the systematization than he did for the facts systematized. Reduced to its last analysis, the "First Principles" was the reverse of a close induction from the facts of nature and life. It presented the glitter of generalization without the logic. The reverberating echoes of its illogic, sweeping sonorously over the universe with an indiscriminate ignoring of the world-wide difference between matter and life, caught the fancy of the imprisoned poet soul; he thoughtlessly yielded a homage which, from his standpoint, was unjustified, and which objectively was an unscrutinizing lip-service. Subjectively Spencerism gave Hearn warrant for an inborn atheism and materialism which had been heightened immoderately by the bitter teachings of experience into a pessimism so horrid that one shuddered when looking into the man's soul depths. _Morne_ was a favourite word with Hearn, and Spencer's was a fateful philosophy for one whose birth and education were desolation, and whose sight of the world was more than _morne_, was the abomination of desolation, was in truth the sheer awfulness of despair. Blindness were vastly preferable to Hearn's affliction, but if that splendid poet St. Francis had been so cursed, his face and his soul would have been ecstatic with smiles, with joy, with faith, with hope, and with love. So strange is the unaccountable allotment of Fate in her endowments, gifts, and orderings. There is and there can be no blame--only a pity wholly beyond expression. The aloofness, far-awayness, the inapproachable distance and detachment of Hearn's spirit is one of the characteristics felt in reading his best pages. Everything is infinitely beyond our senses. To him everything was distant: the near was far, the far was at infinity. He thus truly became the poet of the _au delà_. His voice, itself an echo, comes to us as from the hush of an eerie height above the beat and wreck of the waves of our noisy shore. His personality as revealed in his writings is an echo, a memory, almost the memory of a memory, the thrill of the day-dream of a soul retreating from sense. Each day the quiet grew more still Within his soul, more shrank the will Beyond the jar of sense, serene, Behind the hurt of world or ill, Where sleep hushed silences unseen. He ever insists on a haunting glimpse of the pain and the renunciation of others, of wasted and long-dead faces and loves, always shrinking from our gaze, pallid in the darkling light of the setting moon, of vanishing loves, grievous story, forgotten myth, and ruined religion. And yet, and yet, all that works to make Hearn immortal in literature is, at last, not art _per se_. One might quote freely showing that his "filing of the line," like that of Flaubert, led to nothing, if the thought and feeling to be put into the lines were not there. They were not there with his masters, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, and others, and so these men will not inherit literary immortality. They had no soul, and only the soul, the spirit, can be immortalized. Hearn's good fortune is that unconsciously, even almost against his will, he was more than they, more than an artist as such. He had something else to do. If it had not been for his poverty, the necessity to sell what he wrote, he would surely have gone the same road to Avernus as his masters. Then, too, he had no original message to write, because he had no real soul, only a borrowed one. Japan gave him her soul to rematerialize and recolour with literary life. Without his Japanese work Hearn would have died as _littérateur_ in the year he died as a physical body. To tell her "ghostly" stories was his great office and function. When these were told his work was done. His old gloating over the clotted villainies of mediæval horror had been much outgrown, and it had no chance to be used in Japan. The Japanese character would not tolerate such things. The ghastly was transformed into the ghostly, and his Oriental fancy was luckily turned to better duties and pleasures. This more than Flaubert was something not to be got from modern atheistic French "Art for Art's sake," nor from modern Levantine nonentity of character. How marvellous is his sympathy with his subject, loyalty to his literary duty, and to his literary ideal! His despised Irish father perhaps had slipped into the otherwise invisible and limp threads of his Fates a little mesh of spiritual reality, which, dormant, unrecognized, and even scorned by him, came finally to give him all his valour and worth. He could dower the insubstantial sigh of a long dead soul or people with the wingéd word. It was a word of colour, only,--and colour has no objective existence,--the rainbow is not out there. And because it is spiritual, not objective, the most beautiful, if the most evanescent of all earthly things, is colour. The hearers of soundless music, and the lovers of "the light that never was on sea or shore" will understand what is meant. For them Hearn really wrote: they are few, and scattered far, but Hearn will magnificently multiply the number. His amazing merit is that while without the great qualities which make the greatest writers, he wrought such miracles of winning grace and persuading beauty. That he wrought against his will, and by the overcoming of a seemingly cruel Fate, puts him almost outside of our personal gratitude. We take the gift from a divinity he did not recognize, one that used the rebellious hand and the almost blind eye as a writing instrument. The lover of the gruesome, the Spencerian scientist, the man himself, must have wondered at the message when he came out from under the influence of the pitiless inspiration. One of Hearn's dangers was discursiveness, or want of conciseness and intensity. "Chita" showed it, and the West Indian work lost in value because of it. It is the danger of all those writers who lack creative ability, and who depend upon "local colour," and "style" for their effect. The story's the thing, after all! In Hearn's translations, and especially in "Stray Leaves," he for the moment caught the view of the value of the content, saw how the fact, dramatic, intense, and passionate is the all-desirable; the art of its presentation is the art of letting it flash forth upon the reader with few, apt, and flamelike words, which reveal and not conceal the life and soul of the act and of the actor. He tended to forget this. In "Karma," besides, or rather by reason of, the moral,--his newly got psyche,--he returned to a reliance upon essentials, upon the datum of the spirit, and not upon its reflections, refractions, and chromatics. The beautiful spectrum was there refocused into white light, and the senses disappeared to reveal behind them the divinity of soul. That art-lesson was never forgotten by Hearn, and his Japanese work had a purity and a reality, a white heat, which make his previous stories and sketches seem pale and weak. Questions of style and form sometimes run inevitably into those of content and of logic. Essentially wanting the rigorous training of form, without the content and method of the scientific intellect, all Hearn's work shows a lack of system, order, and subordination of parts. In any single one of the Japanese volumes the absence of logic is lamentably evident. He constantly repeats himself, and the warp of some of his themes is worn threadbare. His most ambitious work, "Japan," is, in truth, a regathering and a restatement in more objective style, of his previous imaginative studies. Almost the only added thought concerns the difference between Shintôism and ancestor-worship and the truism that Japan is to-day ruthlessly sacrificing the life of the individual to that of the nation. The lack of scholarship and of the scientific animus (even in a field, folk-lore, more nearly his own than any other) comes to view in his mistake of supposing Spencer an authority on the subject of the origin of religion, and in the blunder that assumed ancestor-worship to be original in Japanese history and religion. Ancestor-worship, according to Griffis, Knox, and other distinguished authorities, was unknown to the ancient writers of Nippon and was imported from China. How threadbare--and yet how deftly, even charmingly concealed!--was the wearing of his favourite themes, is shown by Hearn's fateful return to the gruesome, especially in the later books, "Kott" and "Kwaidan." These stories of the dead and of morbid necrophilism are witnesses of Hearn's primitive interest in the ghastly, impossible to be renounced or sloughed, not to be replaced by desire for the supersensual, or by resolve to transform the loathsome into the ghostly. Hearn should never have been seduced into the delusion that he could become the spokesman of any scientific animus, methods or results. Erudition, logic, systematization, were to him impossible. His function was another and of a different nature, and his peculiar ability was for other tasks. If we are adequately to appreciate the exquisiteness of the earlier Japanese works, we will forget the "Japan, an Interpretation." If we look upon Hearn as a painter, almost the sole colour of his palette was mummy brown, the powdered flesh of the ancient dead holding in solution their griefs, their hopes, their loves, their yearnings, which he found to sink always to pulselessness, and to end in eternal defeat! But the pallor and sadness for the brief moment of their resuscitation was divinely softened and atoningly beautified. Then they disappeared again in the waste and gloom from which love and poesy had evoked them. Felled in the struggle and defeat of the eternal battle with death, the vegetation of untold ages long ago drifted to an amorphous stratum of indistinguishable millionfold corpses. Compression, deferred combustion and over-shrouding transmuted and preserved it for a long-after-coming time, for our warming, lighting, and delighting. This has a perfect analogy in the history and use of tradition, myth, folk-lore, custom, and religion, those symbolic and concrete epitomes of man's long ancestral growths and strivings, those true black diamonds of humanity's experiences, its successes and failures, of its ideals and disappointments. Hearn's artistry consisted in catching up these gems, these extinguished souls washed from a world of graves to the threshold of his miracle-working imagination, and in making them flush for an instant with the semblance of life. With what exquisite skill and grace he was able to concentrate upon them the soft light-rays of a fancy as subtle and beautifying as ever has been given to mortal! CHAPTER XI.--SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION CONCERNING Hearn's outfitting of character by his parents little or nothing is known. It is of comparative unimportance because only a slight judicial familiarity with his works, especially those of the pre-Japanese periods, demonstrates that so far as concerns substratum and substance of character he had neither. There was an interior void, an absence of psychic reality, which mocked his friends and which likewise baulked at true creativeness. He never made a plot or blew the breath of life into a character; his datum was always provided from without and by another. He was a reflector only,--plus a colourist--but a colourist of unrivalled excellence and power. Form he knew not, had never seen, and that is also his second conditioning weakness as an artist. Even much of his philosophy was to justify the sensualism, sensualisticism, pessimism, and godlessness which are early manifest. But it was a product taken over from another, a hastily devoured meal without mastication, digestion, or assimilation. The interior emptiness was pathetically emphasized by the fact of a contentless experience which also worked to deprive his mind of spontaneous originality. He never loved, except in one sorry way, never suffered much, never lived much, for he was a hard worker, and he was always seeking the ever-postponed, ever-unsatisfying Paradise, so vainly hunted for, and which none ever finds except in himself. _Ihm fehlt die Liebe,_ was said of Heine,--how much truer is it of Hearn! Conspiring with a native lack of originality and want of normal experience, his enormous near-sightedness made his choice of material and method of handling it what we know. If anything was "inherited," it was a pseudo-Orientalism, a love of the monstrous and gruesome, an astonishing indifference to Occidental history and its conclusions as to sexual and social laws, a spontaneous faith in faithlessness, a belief in irreligion, and an almost hopeless trend toward fatalism and its inevitable consequent, pessimism. Improvidence, financial as well as moral, and disloyalty, to his friends as well as to his higher nature, were his life-long, crippling, and condemning sins. Two mysteries seem almost inexplainable. We know why others had to give him his themes, and whence and how he became a mirror, or an echo; and we understand how the echoing became also wondrously, even exaggeratedly, but beautifully, coloured. We can almost see why he was foolishly and absurdly disloyal to personal friends, often treating worst those who were the most kind to him; best, those who were sometimes most cunningly selfish. We may explain his ridiculous _Wanderlust_. But two attributes are beyond all analysis:--one was a thing illogical with his character, his cleaving to an ideal of literary workmanship at the cost of selfishness, friendships, and temporary success; and the other was his marvellous literary and psychologic sympathy with whatever mind, people, circumstance, story, or tradition, accident or choice brought before the echoing or mirroring mind. If it were faint, ghostly, and far away, he was a true thaumaturgist in loving it into life, and living it into love. This beautiful sympathy and literary loyalty made it possible for Hearn to use the words of faith and of religion, even of morality, as if they were his own, while with them he had no personal sympathy whatever. For instance, he could speak, as if from his heart out, of "a million astral lamps lighted in the vast and violet dome of God's everlasting mosque." He could praise as a sublime exhortation the command, "O ye that are about to sleep, commend your souls to Him who never sleeps!" It is, of course, true that in Hearn's mind, doubtless, the poorest heathen or savage virtue was sublimely virtuous, and any barbaric vice had more of virtue in it than of viciousness. Surely the most paltry Oriental excellence was far lovelier to him than any Occidental heroism or beauty, however splendid. We are thus helped to understand how his mind could seem to flush with religious or ethical enthusiasm, while the mosque of his real heart was only a chasm of gloomy negation or a chaos of hideous death. This was due to the fact that he had no constructive mind, and as only one kind of doing, writing, was possible to him, because of his near-sightedness, he must needs hate Occidentalism, and exalt with a somewhat ludicrous praise the vapid, and even pitiful childishness of semi-barbaric Orientalism. The illogicality reaches its acme when Hearn, atheistic, disloyal, and unethical, was compelled, as in some of his Japanese pages, to put a morality and a religion behind the acts and in the hearts of his characters, which with his and with their atheism, was, dramatically, so out of place that the incongruity would make us smile if it were not all done with such a sweet and haunting grace. The culmination of the contradictory trends is in "Karma." To put it bluntly, Hearn had no spark of practical sexual virtue, and yet praise one shall, marvel at one must, the literary and dramatic honour which could, as in "Karma," so sympathetically describe the almost unscalable summits of virtue,--there where in holy silence, Passion gazes with awe at her divine Master, Duty. A negative condition of this sympathy was the interior voidness of his character, the non-existence of reality within him, which thus allowed the positive loyalty to his subject free play; yet that which gave it leave to be, did not explain the genesis or quality of life of the being. But have a care! Do not ask the interest in any one subject to last for more than a fleeting moment! Early and always he possessed the rare, the wonderful gift of the instant, the iridescent, the wingéd word. At last was presented to him what he called a "soul," and that, in conjunction with his growth in artistic technique, in his handling of colours, and in procuring nobler data, helped to give the Japanese work a content and an enduring substance which distinguishes it from that of all others. This atones for all the hurt that precedes, and it is a benefaction and a delight to the entire world. In reward Literature will place upon his head one of her loveliest crowns. CHAPTER XII.--APPRECIATIONS AND EPITOMES TAKEN as a whole, the criticisms upon Hearn's work are complimentary. He has his warm admirers, and some who are not so enthusiastic; but those who criticize adversely do so with a gentleness,--I may say, almost a reluctance that is perhaps the reflection of the spirit of his work. And whatever else these may offer, all agree that his writings have a unique charm. Following are a few excerpts which should give an average of opinions:-- "One great secret of his success in interpreting the Japanese mind and temperament lay in his patience in seeking out and studying minutely the little things of a people said to be great in such. As Amenomori says of Hearn's mind, it 'called forth life and poetry out of dust.'" (327.)[20] [20] The numbers refer to the corresponding items in the Bibliography. "As an interpreter of the Japanese heart, mind, hand and soul, Mr. Hearn has no superior. But he will not convert those who in health of body and mind love the landmarks of the best faith of the race. It is very hard to make fog and miasmatic exhalations, even when made partly luminous with rhetoric, attractive to the intellect that loves headlands and mountain-tops. The product of despair can never compete in robust minds with the product of faith." (357.) "Sympathy and exquisiteness of touch are the characteristics of Mr. Hearn's genius. He is a chameleon, glowing with the hue of outer objects or of inward moods, or altogether iridescent. He becomes translucent and veined like a moth on a twig, or mottled as if with the protective golden browns of fallen leaves. We may not look for architectonic or even plastic powers. His is not the mind which constructs of inner necessity, which weaves plots and schemes, or thinks of its frame as it paints. He attempts no epic of history. The delver for sociologic or theologic spoil must seek deeper waters.... "In his later books the all-potent influence of Japanese restraint seems to have refined and subdued his wonderful style to more perfect harmonies.... "His chapters are long or short as are his moods. There is little organic unity in them; no scientific aim or philosophic grasp rounds them into form. Even his paragraphs have little cohesion. Speaking of the forming of his sentences, he himself has compared it to the focussing of an image, each added word being like the turn of a delicate screw." (306.) "The secret of the charm that we feel to such a marked degree in Mr. Lafcadio Hearn's volumes is that, in contrast to other writers, he does take the Japanese very seriously indeed." (316.) "To the details of life and thought in Japan Mr. Hearn's soul seems everywhere and at all times responsive. He catches in his eye and on his pen minute motes scarcely noticeable by the keen natives themselves." (367.) "He has written nothing on Japan equal in length to his tales of West Indian life. But while we deplore this reserve of a writer who possesses every quality of style, except humour, we have reason to be grateful for whatever he gives us." (307.) "The matchless prose and the sympathy of Mr. Hearn." (324.) "Mr. Hearn has the sympathetic temperament, the minute mental vision, the subdued style peculiar to all that is good in Japanese art and literature, needed for the accomplishment of a labour which to him has been a labour of love indeed. Here we have no mawkish sentimentality, no excessive laudation, on the one hand; on the other, no Occidental harshness, no Occidental ignorance of the sweet mystery of Eastern ways of life and modes of thought. What this most charming of writers on Far Eastern subjects has seen all may see, but only those can understand who are endowed with a like faculty of perception of unobtrusive beauty, and a like power, it must be added, of patient and prolonged study of common appearances and everyday events." (295.) "A man has just died, intelligent and generous, who had succeeded in reconciling in his heart, the clear, rational ideas of the West together with the obscure deep sense of Extreme--Asia: Lafcadio Hearn. In the hospitality of his recipient soul, high European civilization and high Japanese civilization found a meeting-place; harmonized; completed, one in the other.... "In English-speaking countries, especially in the United States, Lafcadio Hearn already enjoys a just reputation. The lovers of the exotic, esteem him as equal to Kipling or Stevenson. In France, the _Revue de Paris_ has begun to make him known, by publishing some of his best articles, elegantly and faithfully translated. His budding fame is destined to increase, as Europe takes a greater interest in the arts and the thoughts of the Extreme-Orient. His prose, exact and harmonious, will be admired as one of the finest since Ruskin wrote: his very personal style, at the same time subtle and powerful, will be noted: he will be especially admired for his delicate and profound intelligence of that Japanese civilization which, to us, remains so mysterious. What characterizes the talent of Lafcadio Hearn, that which gives it its precious originality, is the rare mixture of scientific precision and idealistic enthusiasm: his work might justly be entitled Truth and Poesy: 'In reading these essays,' says one of our best existing Japanese scholars, Professor Chamberlain, 'one feels the truth of Richard Wagner's statement: "_Alles verständniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe._" (All understanding comes to us only through Love.) If Lafcadio Hearn understands Japan best, and makes it better understood than any other writer, it is because he loves it best.' "Lafcadio Hearn describes with intelligence, with love all aspects of Japanese life: Nature and inhabitants; landscapes, animals and flowers; material life and life moral; classic Art and popular literature; philosophies, religions and superstitions. He awakens in us an exquisite feeling of old aristocratic and feudal Japan: he explains to us the prodigious revolution that modern Japan has created in thirty years.... "Hearn has consecrated to the study of Japanese art some of his most curious psychological analyses. "Lafcadio Hearn takes a deep interest in the religious life of the Japanese. He studies with the minutest exactness the ancient customs of Shintôism, high moral precepts of Buddhism, and also the popular superstitions that hold on, for instance, to the worship of foxes, and to the idea of pre-existence." (393.) "To a certain large class of his adopted countrymen, his hatred of Christianity, which was pronounced long before he went to Japan, and his fondness for Oriental cults of all kinds, was recommendation. But it is still an open question whether he did harm or good to the Japanese by his advocacy of their superstitions.... "Hearn's books are little known to the multitude. But they are familiar to an influential class the world over. In him Japan has lost a powerful and flattering advocate, and the English world one of its masters in style." (332.) "Mr. Hearn was not a philosopher or a judicial student of life. He was a gifted, born impressionist, with a style resembling that of the French Pierre Loti. His stories and descriptions are delicate or gorgeous word pictures of the subtler and more elusive qualities of Oriental life." (293.) "His art is the power of suggestion through perfect restraint.... He stands and proclaims his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the æsthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound.... In these essays and tales, whose substance is so strangely mingled together out of the austere dreams of India and the subtle beauty of Japan and the relentless science of Europe, I read vaguely of many things which hitherto were quite dark." (308.) "He brings to the study of all aspects of Japanese life, intelligence, and love; he also sets sail in his descriptions and analyses towards a general theory on life; he is a Japanizing psychologist: he is also a philosopher.... "At all events, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of recalling powerfully to the Europeans of Europe the importance, often misunderstood, of Eastern civilization. No one better than this Japanizing enthusiast to make us feel what there is of narrowness in our habitual conception of the world, in our individualistic literature, misunderstanding too much the influence of the Past in our anthropocentric art, neglecting Nature too often, penetrated too 'singly' in our classic philosophy with Greco-Latin and Christian influences. 'Till now,' says Lafcadio Hearn very forcibly, 'having lived only in one hemisphere, we have thought but half thoughts.' We should enlarge our hearts and our minds by taking into our circle of culture, all the art and all the thought of the extreme East. "From the philosophical view-point, Lafcadio Hearn has the merit of calling attention to the high value of Shintôism, and above all of Buddhism. His work deserves to exercise an influence on the religious ideas of the West. If religion can no longer occupy any place in the intellectual life of humanity, more and more invaded by science, she can subsist a long time yet, perhaps always, in her sentimental life." (392.) "For that rôle [as interpreter of Japan] he was eminently unfitted both by temperament and training. Indeed he was not slow to recognize his lack of the judicial faculty, and on one occasion acknowledged that he is a 'creature of extremes.' ... But Hearn often succeeds in reaching the heart of things by his faculty of sympathy, in virtue of which alone his books deserve perusal; when he fails it is because of a lack of the unimpassioned judicial faculty, a tendency to subordinate reason to feeling, an inclination to place sympathy in the position of judge rather than guide." (359.) "Lafcadio Hearn not only buried himself in the Japanese world, but gave his ashes to the soil so often devastated by earthquake, typhoon, tidal wave and famine, but ever fertile in blooms of fancy which lies under the River of Heaven. The air of Nippon, poor in ozone, is overpopulated by goblins. No writer has ever excelled this child of Greece and Ireland in interpreting the weird fancies of peasant and poet in the land of bamboo and cherry flowers.... Hearn's life seemed crushed under 'the horror of infinite Possibility.' Hence perhaps the weird fascination of his work and style." (348.) EPITOMES AVATAR (281).--It was during the Cincinnati period that Hearn made this--his first translation from the French. Writing of it in 1886, he says:-- I have a project on foot--to issue a series of translations of archæological and artistic French romance--Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint-Antoine"; De Nerval's "Voyage en Orient"; Gautier's "Avatar"; Loti's most extraordinary African and Polynesian novels; and Beaudelaire's "Petits Poemes en Prose." But three years later, he writes:-- The work of Gautier cited by you--"Avatar"--was my first translation from the French. I never could find a publisher for it, however, and threw the MS. away at last in disgust. It is certainly a wonderful story; but the self-styled Anglo-Saxon has so much--prudery that even this innocent phantasy seems to shock his sense of the "proper." LA TENTATION DE SAINT-ANTOINE (282) was probably translated at about the same time. Hearn failed to find a publisher who would take it, but the manuscript is still in my possession. Hearn's own complete _scenario_, together with a description of the manuscript, is given on another page. I quote from Hearn about this work:-- The original is certainly one of the most exotically strange pieces of writing in any language, and weird beyond description. Of his own translation, he writes:-- The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed. That serpent-scene, the crucified lions, the breaking of the chair of gold, the hideous battles about Carthage,--these pages contain pictures that ought not to remain entombed in a foreign museum. The winter of 1877, the year Hearn arrived in New Orleans, he corresponded with the Cincinnati _Commercial_ under the name of "Ozias Midwinter" (219). Excerpts from this series of letters are given in the chapter, "The New Orleans Period." ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS (20) was the first book to be published. The translations were made during the latter part of the Cincinnati period, but the volume did not appear until some years later, while Hearn was in New Orleans. It was prepared at the hour when his craving for the exotic and weird was at its height. From the opening word to the last the six stories are one long Dionysian revel of an Arabian Night's Dream, and within their pages it is not difficult to feel that "one is truly dead only when one is no longer loved." What an exotic group of names it is:--Cleopatra, "she that made the whole world's bale and bliss;" Clarimonde, "Who was famed in her lifetime As the fairest of women;" Arria Marcella; the Princess Hermonthis; Omphale; and the one "fairer than all daughters of men, lovelier than all fantasies realized in stone"--Nyssia. It is a tapestry woven of the lights and jewels and passion of an antique world. "You will find in Gautier," Hearn writes, "a perfection of melody, a warmth of word colouring, a voluptuous delicacy;" "Gautier could create mosaics of word jewellery without equals." Hearn's "pet stories" are "Clarimonde" and "Arria Marcella." Is it strange that he should delight in these beautiful vampires? In this work, and in the tales to follow, we already perceive that colour is to become a sort of a fetich to be worshipped. Here in the studio of another artist, he serves his first apprenticeship, and from the highly toned palette of Gautier he learns how to mix and lay on the colours that he himself is later to use so richly. In speaking of this book, a critic says:-- "His learning and his inspiration were wholly French in these productions, as also in what was his first and in some ways his best book, "One of Cleopatra's Nights," and other tales translated from Théophile Gautier. While Hearn was faithful to his original, he also improved upon it, and many a scholar who knows both French and English has confessed under the rose that Gautier is outdone." (332.) Of his work, Hearn writes:-- You asked me about Gautier. I have read and possess nearly all his works; and before I was really mature enough for such an undertaking I translated his six most remarkable short stories. The work contains, I regret to say, several shocking errors, and the publishers refused me the right to correct the plates. The book remains one of the sins of my literary youth, but I am sure my judgment of the value of the stories was correct. While preparing his next book, Hearn published in the _Century_, "The Scenes of Cable's Romances" (220). In this article he vivifies the quarters and dwellings that Mr. Cable in his delightful stories had already made famous. THE FIRST MUEZZIN, BILÂL (405), was written in the fall of 1883, during the New Orleans period. It is a beautiful, serious piece of work, and is written with the fine, sonorous quality that such a theme should inspire. That it was a labour of love is shown in Hearn's letters written at its inception to Mr. Krehbiel, who was an invaluable aid to him in compiling its musical part. "Bilâl" was probably published finally in the _Times-Democrat_, after being refused by _Harper's_, the _Century_, and some others. The traveller slumbering for the first time within the walls of an Oriental city, and in the vicinity of a minaret, can scarcely fail to be impressed by the solemn beauty of the Mohammedan Call to Prayer. If he have worthily prepared himself, by the study of book and of languages, for the experiences of Eastern travel, he will probably have learned by heart the words of the sacred summons, and will recognize their syllables in the sonorous chant of the Muezzin,--while the rose-coloured light of an Egyptian or Syrian dawn expands its flush to the stars. Four times more will he hear that voice ere morning again illuminates the east:--under the white blaze of noon; at the sunset hour, when the west is fervid with incandescent gold and vermilion; in the long after-glow of orange and emerald fires; and, still later, when a million astral lamps have been lighted in the vast and violet dome of God's everlasting mosque. In four parts Hearn tells the history of Bilâl, who was an African black, an Abyssinian,--famed for his fortitude as a confessor, for his zeal in the faith of the Prophet, and for the marvellous melody of his voice, whose echoes have been caught up and prolonged and multiplied by all the muezzins of Islam, through the passing of more than twelve hundred years.... And the words chanted by all the muezzins of the Moslem world,--whether from the barbaric brick structures which rise above "The Tunis of the Desert," or from the fairy minarets of the exquisite mosque at Agra,--are the words first sung by the mighty voice of Bilâl. Bilâl was the son of an Abyssinian slave-girl, and himself began life as a slave. The first preaching of Mahomet had deep effect upon the slaves of Mecca, and Bilâl was perhaps the earliest of these to become a convert. Even under the tortures of the persecutors, he could not be made to apostatize--always he would answer, "_Ahad! Ahad_:" "_One_, one only God!" Abu Bekr, the bosom friend of the great Prophet, observing Bilâl, bought him, and set him free. Then Bilâl became the devoted servant of Mahomet; and, in fulfilment of a dream, he was made the First Muezzin to sound the _Adzân_, the Call to Prayer. God is Great! God is Great! I bear witness there is no other God but God! I bear witness that Mahomet is the Prophet of God! Come unto Prayer! Come unto Salvation! God is Great! There is no other God but God! * * * * * After the death of Mahomet, Bilâl ceased to sing the _Adzân_:--the voice that had summoned the Prophet of God to the house of prayer ought not, he piously fancied, to be heard after the departure of his master. Yet, in his Syrian home, how often must he have prayed to chant the words as he first chanted them from the starlit housetop in the Holy City, and how often compelled to deny the petitions of those who revered him as a saint and would perhaps have sacrificed all their goods to have heard him but once lift up his voice in musical prayer!... But when Omar visited Damascus the chiefs of the people besought him that, as Commander of the Faithful, he should ask Bilâl to sing the Call in honour of the event; and the old man consented to do so for the last time.... To hear Bilâl must have seemed to many as sacred a privilege as to have heard the voice of the Prophet himself,--the proudest episode of a lifetime,--the one incident of all others to be related in long afteryears to children and to grandchildren. Some there may have been whom the occasion inspired with feelings no loftier than curiosity; but the large majority of those who thronged to listen in silent expectancy for the _Allah-hu-akbar!_ must have experienced emotions too deep to be ever forgotten. The records of the event, at least, fully justify this belief;--for when, after moments of tremulous waiting, the grand voice of the aged African rolled out amid the hush,--with the old beloved words,--the old familiar tones, still deep and clean,--Omar and all those about him wept aloud, and tears streamed down every warrior-face, and the last long notes of the chant were lost in a tempest of sobbing. STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE[21] (I) is the second book. It was written also during the period in New Orleans, many of the stories first appearing in the _Times-Democrat_, and the little volume is dedicated to its editor--Mr. Page M. Baker. [21] Copyright, 1884, by James R. Osgood and Company. These tales, as Hearn tells us in his Preface, are "reconstructions of what impressed me as most fantastically beautiful in the most exotic literature which I was able to obtain." In a letter he writes, "The language of 'Stray Leaves' is all my own, with the exception of the Italic texts and a few pages translated from the 'Kalewala.'" The tapestry he is weaving is of the same crimson threads as that of the earlier tales, but the colours of sunset are softening to the gentler hues of the after-glow, and interwoven sometimes are strands of pure moonlight. We read of the great Book of Thoth which contains a formula whosoever could recite might never know death, and we learn how the cunning magician Noferkephtah obtained the book, which caused the wrath of the gods to fall upon him; later, how Satni, of whom "there was not in all Egypt so wise a scribe," yearned for the book, and took it from the tomb of Noferkephtah, and of the magic wrought and the penance done. There is the exquisite tale of the Fountain Maiden, whom Aki caught in his own fish-net, and whom he grew to love more than his own life. The story lingers of the sea-bird which fell into the hunter's hand, and when he looked more closely he found it had become transformed into a beautiful girl, "slender ... like a young moon," and pity rose in the hunter's heart, and then love. One day, when their children had become strong and swift, and while they were all hunting together, the Bird-Wife called to the little ones to gather feathers: then she covered their arms and her own shoulders with the feathers, and far away they flew. Passing onward, we read of Tilottama, and that by reason of her beauty "the great gods once became multiple-faced and myriad-eyed"; and that this beauty brought punishment to the wicked Sounda and Oupasounda. There is Bakawali, for "whose history of love, human and superhuman, a parallel may not be found." For her great love of the mortal youth Taj-ulmuluk each night she sacrificed herself to the fiercest purification of fire. And then to appease the gods, she suffered herself to be turned for ten long years into marble from her waist to her feet. Her lover ministered to her and watched by her side through the terrible years until she was reincarnated for him. Then we see the statue of Natalika, who avenged the death of her people. And who shall answer the riddle of the Corpse Demon? And which one may not profit by the wisdom of the youth who knew nothing of science? Perhaps our hearts stir with a soft regret for the atonement of Pundari. And so we wander through a maze of colour and of magic, tarrying to listen to the voice of Kalewala, for-- As he sang the fair Sun paused in her course to hear him; the golden Moon stopped in her path to listen; the awful billows of the sea stood still; the icy rivers that devour the pines, that swallow up the firs, ceased to rage; the mighty cataracts hung motionless above their abysses; the waves of Juortana lifted high their heads to hear. "Slender she was as the tulip upon its stalk, and in walking her feet seemed kisses pressed upon the ground. But hadst thou beheld her face unveiled, and the whiteness of her teeth between her brown lips when she smiled!" Alas, she was a good Christian maiden and he a good Mussulman, and so in this Legend of Love each loyal heart dies pronouncing the faith of the other, lest they should not meet at the Day of Judgment. As we draw near the last figures on the tapestry, we find those two tender pictures of which Hearn himself speaks: "Your preference for Boutimar pleases me: Boutimar was my pet. There is a little Jewish legend in the collection--Esther--somewhat resembling it in pathos." These stories afford a glimpse into that gentle heart, which was later to respond to the exquisite faiths and loyalties of the Japanese. Now the Creator sent unto Solomon a cup which contained some of the waters of youth and of life without end. And Solomon was asked: "Wilt thou drink hereof and live divinely immortal through ages everlasting, or wilt thou rather remain within the prison of humanity?" And Solomon dreamed upon these words; and he assembled in council a representative of all those over whom he held dominion. Then Solomon asked Boutimar, the wild dove, most loving of all living creatures, whether he should drink of the magic waters, and thus learn the bliss of earthly immortality. When Boutimar, the wild dove, learned that the cup held only enough water for one person, he made answer in the language of birds:-- "O prophet of God! how couldst thou desire to be living alone, when each of thy friends and of thy counsellors and of thy children and of thy servants and of all who loved thee were counted with the dead? For all of these must surely drink the bitter waters of death, though thou shouldst drink the Water of Life. Wherefore desire everlasting youth, when the face of the world itself shall be wrinkled with age, and the eyes of the stars shall be closed by the black fingers of Azrael? When the love thou hast sung of shall have passed away like a smoke of frankincense, when the dust of the heart that beat against thine own shall have long been scattered by the four winds of heaven, when the eyes that looked for thy coming shall have become a memory, when the voices grateful to thine ear shall have been eternally stilled, when thy life shall be one oasis in a universal waste of death, and thine eternal existence but a recognition of eternal absence,--wilt thou indeed care to live, though the wild dove perish when its mate cometh not?" And Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond dew of the heart, which is tears. Esther, whose comeliness surpassed even that of Sarah, and her rich husband had lived together ten years, but there was no happiness in the soul of the good man, for "the sound of a child's voice had never made sunshine within his heart." So Esther and her husband sorrowed bitterly. And they brought the burden of their grief to Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, and when they had told him, a silence as of the Shechinah came upon the three, only the eyes of the Rabbi seemed to smile. And it was agreed that the twain should part; thus the Israelite could be known as a father in Israel. A feast then was laid at the house, and before all the guests her husband spoke lovingly to Esther, and in token of his affection and his grief bade her to take from the house "whatever thou desirest, whether it be gold or jewels beyond price." And the wine was passed, and the people made merry, and finally a deep sleep fell upon them all. Then Esther gave command that her husband sleeping should be carried to her father's house. In the morning her husband awakened, and confused he cried out, "Woman, what hast thou done?" Then, sweeter than the voice of doves among the fig-trees, came the voice of Esther: "Didst thou not bid me, husband, that I should choose and take away from thy house whatsoever I most desired? And I have chosen thee, and have brought thee hither, to my father's home ... loving thee more than all else in the world. Wilt thou drive me from thee now?" And he could not see her face for tears of love; yet he heard her voice speaking on,--speaking the golden words of Ruth, which are so old yet so young to the hearts of all that love: "Whithersoever thou shalt go, I will also go; and whithersoever thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. And the Angel of Death only may part us; for thou art all in all to me." ... And in the golden sunlight at the doorway suddenly stood, like a statue of Babylonian silver, the grand grey figure of Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, lifting his hands in benediction. "_Schmah Israel!_--the Lord our God, who is One, bless ye with everlasting benediction! May your hearts be welded by love, as gold with gold by the cunning of goldsmiths! May the Lord, who coupleth and setteth thee single in families, watch over ye! The Lord make this valiant woman even as Rachel and as Lia, who built up the house of Israel! And ye shall behold your children and your children's children in the House of the Lord!" Even so the Lord blessed them; and Esther became as the fruitful vine, and they saw their children's children in Israel. Forasmuch as it is written: "He will regard the prayer of the destitute." GOMBO ZHÈBES[22](2) followed in the New Orleans period. It is a compilation of 352 proverbs selected from six dialects. According to the indexes, there are 6 in the Creole of French Guyana; 28 in the Creole of Hayti; 51 in the Creole of New Orleans, Louisiana; 101 in the Creole of Martinique; 110 in the Creole of Mauritius; 52 in the Creole of Trinidad. Most of the proverbs are similar to our own, but are translated into the simple homely language of the Creole, reflecting its mode of thought. The same proverb often appears in the different dialects. Although a proverb is of European origin, "the character of Creole folk-lore is very different from European folk-lore in the matter of superstition." Many proverbs are direct from the African. Those in the Creole of Hayti are generally rough and coarse. The most popular subjects are, pot or kettle, rain, serpent or snake, of which there are six of each; devil, eggs, belly, horse, mothers, tail, of these there are seven of each; chicken, children, ox have eight of each; cat has nine; goat has eleven; talking has sixteen; monkey has seventeen; fine clothes has only four, idleness has five, and marriage has six. [22] Copyright, 1885, by Will H. Coleman. Hearn speaks of this book as a Dictionary of Proverbs. He made an extensive study of the subject and in later researches found it most helpful. "I have," he says, "quite a Creole library embracing the Creole dialects of both hemispheres." Following are a selection of the proverbs chosen from the different dialects:-- No. 23. _Bel tignon pas fait bel négresse. (Le beau tignon ne fait pas la belle négresse.)_ "It isn't the fine head-dress that makes the fine negress." (_Louisiana._) _Tignon_ or _tiyon_, the true Creole word, "is the famously picturesque handkerchief which in old days all slave-women twisted about their heads." No. 44. _Ça qui boudé manze boudin. (Celui qui boude mange du boudin.)_ "He who sulks eats his own belly." That is to say, spites himself. The pun is untranslatable. (_Mauritius_.) _Boudin_ in French signifies a pudding, in Creole it also signifies the belly. Thus there is a double pun in the patois. No. 256. _Quand diabe alle lamesse li caciétte so laquée. (Quand le diable va à la messe, il cache sa queue.)_ "When the Devil goes to mass he hides his tail." (_Mauritius._) No. 352. _Zozo paillenqui crié là-haut, coudevent vini. (Le paille-en-cul crie la-haut, le coup de vent vient.)_ "When the tropic-bird screams overhead, a storm-wind is coming." (_Mauritius._) No. 267. _Quand milatt tini yon vié chouvral yo dit nègress pas manman yo. (Quand les mulâtres ont un vieux cheval ils disent que les négresses ne sont pas leur mères.)_ "As soon as a mulatto is able to own an old horse, he will tell you that his mother wasn't a nigger." (_Martinique._) No. 324. _Toutt milett ni grand zaureilles. (Tout les mulets ont des grandes oreilles.)_ "All mules have big ears." Equivalent to our proverb: "Birds of a feather flock together." (_Martinique._) No. 291. _Si coulev oûlé viv, li pas pronminée grand-chemin. (Si la couleuvre veut vivre, elle ne se promène pas dans le grand chemin.)_ "If the snake cares to live, it doesn't journey upon the high-road." (_Guyana._) No. 292. _Si coulève pas té fonté, femmes sé pouend li fair ribans jipes. (Si la couleuvre n'était pas effrontée les femmes la prendraient pour en faire des rubans de jupes.)_ "If the snake wasn't spunky, women would use it for petticoat strings." (_Trinidad._) No. 100. _Complot plis fort passé ouanga.[23] (Le complot est plus fort que l'ouanga.)_ "Conspiracy is stronger than witchcraft." (_Hayti._) [23] _Di moin si to gagnin homme! Mo va fé ouanga pouli; Mo fé li tourné fantôme Si to vlé mo to mari...._ "Tell me if thou hast a man (a lover) I will make a _ouanga_ for him--I will change him into a ghost if thou wilt have me for thy husband." This word, of African origin, is applied to all things connected with the Voudooism of the negroes. In the song, "_Dipi mo voué, toué Adèle_," from which the above lines are taken, the wooer threatens to get rid of a rival by _ouanga_--to "turn him into a ghost." The victims of Voudooism are said to have gradually withered away, probably through the influence of secret poison. The word _grigri_, also of African origin, simply refers to a charm, which may be used for an innocent or innocuous purpose. Thus, in a Louisiana Creole song, we find a quadroon mother promising her daughter a charm to prevent the white lover from forsaking her: "_Pou tchombé li na fé grigri._" "We shall make a _grigri_ to keep him." Simultaneously with the publication of "Gombo Zhèbes," Hearn contributed a series of articles[24] to _Harper's Weekly._ (221-227, 230, 232.) These papers, which are commonplace newspaper work, tell of New Orleans, its Expositions, its Superstitions, Voudooism, and the Creole Patois. He feels that the Creole tongue must go, but while there is still time, he hopes that some one will rescue its dying legends and curious lyrics. [24] Copyright, 1884, 1885, 1886, by Harper and Brothers. The unedited Creole literature comprises songs, satires in rhymes, proverbs, fairy-tales--almost everything commonly included under the term folk-lore. The lyrical portion of it is opulent in oddities, in melancholy beauties. There are few of the younger generation of Creoles who do not converse in the French and English languages. Creole is the speech of motherhood, and "there is a strange naïve sorrow in their burdens as of children sobbing for lonesomeness in the night." There is an interesting account of Jean Montanet, "Voudoo John"--The Last of the Voudoos. He was said to be a son of a prince of Senegal. From a ship's cook he rose to own large estates. While he was a cotton-roller, it was noticed that he seemed to have some peculiar occult influence over the negroes under him. Voudoo John had the mysterious _obi_ power. Soon realizing his power, he commenced to tell fortunes, and thousands and thousands of people, white and black, flocked to him. Then he bought a house and began as well to practise Creole medicine. He could give receipts for everything and anything, and many a veiled lady stopped at his door. Once Jean received a fee of $50 for a potion. "It was water," he said to a Creole confidant, "with some common herbs boiled in it. I hurt nobody, but if folks want to give me fifty dollars, I take the fifty dollars every time!" It is said that Jean became worth at least $50,000. He had his horses and carriages, his fifteen wives, whom he considered, one and all, legitimate spouses. He was charitable too. But he did not know what to do with his money. Gradually, in one way or another, it was stolen from him, until at the last, with nothing left but his African shells, his elephant's tusk, and the sewing-machine upon which he used to tell fortunes even in his days of riches, he had to seek hospitality of his children. Hearn devotes several columns to Voudooism, telling of its witchcrafts and charms and fetiches which work for evil, and also of the superstitions regarding the common occurrences of daily life. In a paper on Mexican feather-work at the New Orleans Exposition, there is this paragraph which presages his later descriptions:-- As I write, the memory of a Mexican landscape scene in feather-work is especially vivid--a vast expanse of opulent wheat-fields, whereof the blonde immensity brightens or deepens its tint with the tremor of summer winds; distance makes violet the hills; a steel-bright river serpentines through the plain, reflecting the feminine grace of palms tossing their plumes against an azure sky. I remember also a vision of marshes--infinite stretches of reed-grown ooze, shuddering in gusts of sea-wind, and paling away into bluish vagueness as through a miasmatic haze. In conjunction with these articles, Hearn published in _Harper's Bazaar_ (228-229) two papers on the Curiosities to be found at the New Orleans Exposition. SOME CHINESE GHOSTS[25] (3) was the next book of the New Orleans period. The first publisher to whom it was submitted did not accept it, but Roberts Brothers finally brought it out. "There are only six little stories," writes Hearn, "but each of them cost months of hard work and study, and represents a much higher attempt than anything in the 'Stray Leaves.'" The book is dedicated to his friend Mr. Krehbiel, and the Dedication, which is given in the Bibliography, is as unique as the tales themselves. [25] Copyright, 1887, by Roberts Brothers. In the Preface Hearn says that while preparing these legends he sought for "weird beauty." The era of fierce passions and horror is waning, and in these six perfect tales there is a new-found restraint, a firmer handling of the brush in more normal colours. One of the earliest reviews of his work remarks:-- "In his treatment of the legend lore of the Celestial Empire, Mr. Hearn has, if possible, been even more delicate and charming than in the stories which go to make the previous volume, so much so, indeed, that one is persuaded to full belief in the beauty and witchery of the almond-eyed heroines of his pages." (322.) The opening story is of the beautiful Ko-Ngai, daughter of Kouan-Yu, whose divine loyalty to her father never faltered even at a hideous death. He was a great bellmaker, and the Mandarin ordered that he should make a bell of such size that it would be heard for one hundred _li_, and further that the bell "should be strengthened with brass, and deepened with gold, and sweetened with silver." But the metals refused to mingle. Again the bell was cast, but the result was even worse, and the Son of Heaven was very angry; and this word was sent to Kouan-Yu:-- "If thou fail a third time in fulfilling our command, thy head shall be severed from thy neck." When the lovely Ko-Ngai heard this, she sold her jewels, and paid a great price to an astrologer, and it was told to her:-- Gold and brass will never meet in wedlock, silver and iron never will embrace, until the flesh of a maiden be melted in the crucible; until the blood of a virgin be mingled with the metals in their fusion. Ko-Ngai told no one what she had heard. The awful hour for the heroic effort of the final casting arrived. All the workmen wrought their tasks in silence; there was no sound heard but the muttering of the fires. And the muttering deepened into a roar of typhoons approaching, and the blood-red lake of metal slowly brightened like the vermilion of a sunrise, and the vermilion was transmuted into a radiant glow of gold, and the gold whitened blindingly, like the silver face of a full moon. Then the workers ceased to feed the raving flame, and all fixed their eyes upon the eyes of Kouan-Yu; and Kouan-Yu prepared to give the signal to cast. But ere ever he lifted his finger, a cry caused him to turn his head; and all heard the voice of Ko-Ngai sounding sharply sweet as a bird's song above the great thunder of the fires,--"For thy sake, O my Father!" And even as she cried, she leaped into the white flood of metal; and the lava of the furnace roared to receive her, and spattered monstrous flakes of flame to the roof, and burst over the verge of the earthen crater, and cast up a whirling fountain of many-coloured fires, and subsided quakingly, with lightnings and with thunders and with mutterings. Of the lovely Ko-Ngai no trace remained save a little shoe, which was left in the hand of the faithful serving-woman who had striven to catch her as she leaped into the flame. And ever does the bell, whose tones are deeper and mellower and mightier than the tones of any other bell, utter the name of Ko-Ngai; and ever between the mighty strokes there is a low moaning heard, a sobbing of "_Hiai!_" and that they say is Ko-Ngai crying for her little shoe. The next tale tells of Ming-Y and how it was that he did not heed the counsel of the words of Lao-Tseu, and so it befell that he was loved by the beautiful Sië-Thao, whose tomb had many years ago crumbled to ruins. The Legend of Tchi-Niu is the queen flower of the nosegay of six. Tong's father died, and as they were very poor, the only way that Tong could obtain money to pay for the funeral expenses was to sell himself as a slave. The years passed, and he worked without rest or pay, but never a complaint did he utter. At length the fever of the ricefields seized him, and he was left alone in his sickness, for there was no one to wait on him. One noon he dreamed that a beautiful woman bent over him and touched his forehead with her hand. And Tong opened his eyes, and he saw the lovely person of whom he had dreamed. "I have come to restore thy strength and to be thy wife. Arise and worship with me." And reading his thoughts she said, "I will provide." "And together they worshipped Heaven and Earth. Thus she became his wife." But all that Tong knew of his wife was that her name was Tchi. And the fame of the weaving of Tchi spread far, and people came to see her beautiful work. One morning Tchi gave to her husband a document. It was his freedom that she had bought. Later the silk-loom remained untouched, for Tchi gave birth to a son. And the boy was not less wonderful than his mother. Now it came to the Period of the Eleventh Moon. Suddenly one night, Tchi led Tong to the cradle where their son slumbered, and as she did so a great fear and awe came over Tong, and the sweet tender voice breathed to him:-- "Lo! my beloved, the moment has come in which I must forsake thee; for I was never of mortal born, and the Invisible may incarnate themselves for a time only. Yet I leave with thee the pledge of our love,--this fair son, who shall ever be to thee as faithful and as fond as thou thyself hast been. Know, my beloved, that I was sent to thee even by the Master of Heaven, in reward of thy filial piety, and that I must now return to the glory of His house: I AM THE GODDESS TCHI-NIU." Even as she ceased to speak, the great glow faded, and Tong, reopening his eyes, knew that she had passed away for ever,--mysteriously as pass the winds of heaven, irrevocably as the light of a flame blown out. Yet all the doors were barred, all the windows unopened. Still the child slept, smiling in his sleep. Outside, the darkness was breaking; the sky was brightening swiftly; the night was past. With splendid majesty the East threw open high gates of gold for the coming of the sun; and, illuminated by the glory of his coming, the vapours of morning wrought themselves into marvellous shapes of shifting colour,--into forms weirdly beautiful as the silken dreams woven in the loom of Tchi-Niu. Another tale is that of Mara, who tempted in vain, for the Indian pilgrim conquered. And still, as a mist of incense, as a smoke of universal sacrifice, perpetually ascends to heaven from all the lands of earth the pleasant vapour TE, created for the refreshment of mankind by the power of a holy vow, the virtue of a pious atonement. Like unto the Tale of the Great Bell, Pu, convinced that a soul cannot be divided, entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for the soul of his Vase. And when the workmen came upon the tenth morning to take forth the porcelain marvel, even the bones of Pu had ceased to be; but lo! the Vase lived as they looked upon it: seeming to be flesh moved by the utterance of a Word, creeping to the titillation of a Thought. And whenever tapped by the finger, it uttered a voice and a name,--the voice of its maker, the name of its creator: PU. This same year, Hearn contributed to _Harpers Bazaar_ the valiant legend of "Rabyah's Last Ride"(234)--Rabyah upon whom no woman had ever called in vain, and who defended his women even after he was dead. This tale was copied in the _Times-Democrat_. CHITA[26] (4), although published after Hearn left New Orleans, properly belongs to that period. It first appeared in much shorter form in the _Times-Democrat_ under the title of "Torn Letters." This version met with many warm friends, and the author was urged to enlarge it. He did so, and Harpers accepted the story, publishing it first as a serial in their magazine. With this book came Hearn's first recognition, and because of its success, he was given a commission by Harpers for further studies in the tropics, which eventuated in the volume, "Two Years in the French West Indies." [26] Copyright, 1889, by Harper and Brothers. "Chita" is the first glimpse of what Mr. Hearn could write from out himself; for whereas, as always, the plot must be given to him, the thread here is so frail that what we admire and remember is the fabric itself which only Hearn could have woven. In "Chita" he recreates elemental nature. In "Karma" he becomes the conscience of a human being. Then, for the first time he realizes the spiritual forces which are stronger than life or death, and without which no beauty exists. A criticism of "Chita" at the time of its publication says:-- "By right of this single but profoundly remarkable book, Mr. Hearn may lay good claim to the title of the American Victor Hugo ... so living a book has scarcely been given to our generation." (342.) Concerning the story, Hearn himself writes as follows:-- "Chita" was founded on the fact of a child saved from the Lost Island disaster by some Louisiana fishing-folk, and brought up by them. Years after a Creole hunter recognized her, and reported her whereabouts to relatives. These, who were rich, determined to bring her up as young ladies are brought up in the South, and had her sent to a convent. But she had lived the free healthy life of the coast, and could not bear the convent; she ran away from it, married a fisherman, and lives somewhere down there now,--the mother of multitudinous children. This slight structure of plot gave Hearn the opportunity to paint a marvellous picture. Hundreds of quotations could be given. He is delighted with the rich glory of the tropics, and by his power of word imagery he so reproduces it that with him we too can see and feel it. In this glowing Nature the poisoned beauty of the Orient is forgotten. Take this description:-- The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendour of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of colour, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;--it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the [Greek: pneuma] indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the Great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,--save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift into delicious oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away for ever. So it is told that into this perfect peace one August day in 1856, a scarlet sun sank in a green sky, and a moonless night came. Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice moaning across the world hooting,--uttering nightmare sounds,--_Whoo!_--_whoo!_--_whoo!_--and with each stupendous owl-cry the mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through all the hours of darkness. Morning dawned with great rain: the steamer _Star_ was due that day. No one dared to think of it. "Great God!" some one shrieked,--"She is coming!" On she came, swaying, rocking, plunging,--with a great whiteness wrapping her about like a cloud, and moving with her moving,--a tempest-whirl of spray;--ghost-white and like a ghost she came, for her smoke-stacks exhaled no visible smoke--the wind devoured it. And still the storm grew fiercer. On shore the guests at the hotel danced with a feverish reckless gaiety. Again the _Star_ reeled, and shuddered, and turned, and began to drag away from the great building and its lights,--away from the voluptuous thunder of the grand piano,--even at that moment outpouring the great joy of Weber's melody orchestrated by Berlioz: _l'Invitatiòn à la Valse_,--with its marvellous musical swing. --"Waltzing!" cried the captain. "God help them!--God help us all now!... The Wind waltzes to-night, with the Sea for his partner." ... O the stupendous Valse-Tourbillon! O the mighty Dancer! One-two--three! From north-east to east, from east to south-east, from south-east to south: then from the south he came, whirling the Sea in his arms.... And so the hurricane passed, and the day reveals utter wreck and desolation. "There is plunder for all--birds and men." At a fishing village on the coast on this same night of the storm Carmen, the good wife of Feliu, dreamed--above the terrors of the tempest which shattered her sleep--once again the dream that kept returning of her little Concha, her first-born who slept far away in the old churchyard at Barcelona. And this night she dreamed that her waxen Virgin came and placed in her arms the little brown child with the Indian face, and the face became that of her dead Conchita. And Carmen wished to thank the Virgin for that priceless bliss, and lifted up her eyes; but the sickness of ghostly fear returned upon her when she looked; for now the Mother seemed as a woman long dead, and the smile was the smile of fleshlessness, and the places of the eyes were voids and darknesses.... And the sea sent up so vast a roar that the dwelling rocked. * * * * * Feliu and his men find the tide heavy with human dead and the sea filled with wreckage. Through this floatage Feliu detects a stir of life ... he swims to rescue a little baby fast in the clutch of her dead mother. To Carmen it is the meaning of her dream. The child has been sent by the Virgin. The tale leads on through the growing life of Chita. Finally one day Dr. La Brierre, whose wife and child had been lost in the famous storm, is summoned to Viosca's Point to the deathbed of his father's old friend, who is dying of the fever. It is Feliu who brings him. But before they can reach the Point the man has already died. The Doctor remains at Feliu's fishing smack. He feels the sickness of the fever coming over him. Then he sees Chita.... Hers is the face of his dead Adèle. Through the fury of the fever, which has now seized him, the past is mingled with the present. He re-lives the agony of that death-storm, re-lives all the horror of that scene, when all that he held dear was swept away--until his own soul passes out into the night. The description of Dr. La Brierre in the throes of the fever is terrible. It is so realistic that one shudders. TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES[27] (6) was the _pièce de résistance_ of the sojourn in the tropics. Some of the papers appeared first in _Harper's Magazine_. They are marvellous colour-pictures of the country, its people, its life, its customs, with many of the picturesque legends and the quaintnesses that creep into the heart. [27] Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers. "There is not a writer who could have so steeped himself in this languorous Creole life and then tell so well about it. Trollope and Froude give you the hard, gritty facts, and Lafcadio Hearn the sentiment and poetry of this beautiful island." (387.) More and more is Hearn realizing the necessity of finding new colour. "I hope to be able to take a trip to New Mexico in the summer just to obtain literary material, sun-paint, tropical colour, etc." It is always the intense that his fancy craves, and indeed _must_ have in order to work. "There are tropical lilies which are venomous, but they are more beautiful than the frail and icy white lilies of the North." "Whenever I receive a new and strong impression, even in a dream, I write it down, and afterwards develop it at leisure.... There are impressions of blue light and gold and green, correlated to old Spanish legend, which can be found only south of this line." "I will write you a little while I am gone,--if I can find a little strange bit of tropical colour to spread on the paper,--like the fine jewel-dust of scintillant moth-wings." "Next week I go away to hunt up some tropical or semi-tropical impressions." He is bewitched by St. Pierre--"I love this quaint, whimsical, wonderfully coloured little town." On opening the present volume we at once feel how thoroughly sympathetic this whole Nature is to him, how ravished his senses are with all that she portrays. From Pier 49, East River, New York, we travel with Hearn through days of colour and beauty to the glorious Caribbean Sea, where we sail on to Roseau and St. Pierre. Here the colour is becoming so intense that the eyes are blinded. The luminosities of tropic foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some great height, through which the colours come to his eye softened and subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing atmosphere. ... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of colour. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I see the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light. Over her memoried paths we wander with Josephine, and then we pause before the lovely statue which seems a living presence. She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumour has it that she spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet space of summer sea, through the vast splendour of azure light, she is looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive smile,--unutterably touching.... "Under a sky always deepening in beauty" we steam on to the level, burning, coral coast of Barbadoes. Then on past to Demerara. We pass through all the quaint beautiful old towns and islands. We see their wonders of sky and sea and flowers. We see their people and all that great race of the mixed blood. With dear old Jean-Marie we wait for the return of Les Porteuses, and we hear his call:-- "_Coument ou yé, chè? coument ou kallé?_" ... (How art thou, dear?--how goes it with thee?) And they mostly make answer, "_Toutt douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and thou?) But some, over-weary, cry to him, "_Ah! déchârgé moin vite, chè! moin lasse, lasse!_" (Unload me quickly, dear; for I am very, very weary.) Then he takes off their burdens, and fetches bread for them, and says foolish little things to make them laugh. And they are pleased and laugh, just like children, as they sit right down on the road there to munch their dry bread. Again we follow on: this time to La Grande Anse, where we see the powerful surf-swimmers. With the population we turn out to witness the procession of young girls to be confirmed; we see the dances and games; we hear the chants, and the strange music on strange instruments. At St. Pierre once more we listen to the history of Père Labat, who in twelve years made his order the richest and most powerful in the West Indies. "Eh, Père Labat!--what changes there have been since thy day!... And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colours of the perpetual hills; the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie; the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of a tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm, wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies, through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home.... '_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_'" Then we see the lights of the shrines that will protect us from the Zombi and the Moun-Mo, and all the terrible beings who are filled with witchcraft; and we listen to the tale of that Zombi who likes to take the shape of a lissome young negress. By this time it is Carnival Week with its dances and games and maskers. But a little later we are shuddering at the horrible pestilence Vérette that has seized the city. A gleam of the old love of horror is caught in the following quotation:-- She was the prettiest, assuredly, among the pretty shop-girls of the Grande Rue,--a rare type of _sang-mêlée_. So oddly pleasing, the young face, that once seen, you could never again dissociate the recollection of it from the memory of the street. But one who saw it last night before they poured quick-lime upon it could discern no features,--only a dark brown mass, like a fungus, too frightful to think about. At the beautiful Savane du Fort our eyes and hearts are gladdened by the quaint sight of the Blanchisseuses with their snowy linen spread out for miles along the river's bank. Their laughter echoes in our ears, and we try to catch the words of their little songs. One warm and starry, and to us unforgettable, September morning we make the ascent of Mt. Pelée by the way of Morne St. Martin, and on our way we come to know the country that lies all around. Let me quote our sensation as we reach the summit:-- At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new impressions: every face was radiant.... Now all look serious; none speaks.... Dominating all, I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is looking upon,--such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in that tremendous question of the Book of Job: "_Wast thou brought forth before the hills?_" And the blue multitudes of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,--telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath,--until something like the fulness of a grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and colour, will surely endure,--marvellous as now,--after we shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it. Another day we are laughing at the little _ti canotié_ who in the queerest tiny boats surround a steamer as soon as she drops anchor. These are the boys who dive for coins. A sad tale is told of Maximilien and Stréphane. Again our hearts are moved by the pathos and the tragedy of La Fille de Couleur; and in this chapter we find that characteristic description:-- I refer to the celebrated attire of the pet slaves and _belles affranchies_ of the old colonial days. A full costume,--including violet or crimson "petticoat" of silk or satin; chemise with half-sleeves, and much embroidery and lace; "trembling-pins" of gold (_zépingue tremblant_) to attach the folds of the brilliant Madras turban; the great necklace of three or four strings of gold beads bigger than peas (_collier-choux_); the ear-rings, immense but light as egg-shells (_zanneaux-à-clous_ or _zanneaux-chenilles_); the bracelets (_portes-bonheur_); the studs (_boutons-à-clous_); the brooches, not only for the turban, but for the chemise, below the folds of the showy silken foulard or shoulder-scarf,--would sometimes represent over five thousand francs' expenditure. This gorgeous attire is becoming less visible every year: it is now rarely worn except on very solemn occasions,--weddings, baptisms, first communions, confirmations. The _da_ (nurse) or "_porteuse-de-baptême_" who bears the baby to church, holds it at the baptismal font, and afterwards carries it from house to house in order that all the friends of the family may kiss it, is thus attired: but now-a-days, unless she be a professional (for there are professional _das_, hired only for such occasions), she usually borrows the jewellery. If tall, young, graceful, with a rich gold tone of skin, the effect of her costume is dazzling as that of a Byzantine Virgin. I saw one young _da_ who, thus garbed, scarcely seemed of the earth and earthly;--there was an Oriental something in her appearance difficult to describe,--something that made you think of the Queen at Sheba going to visit Solomon. She had brought a merchant's baby, just christened, to receive the caresses of the family at whose house I was visiting; and when it came to my turn to kiss it, I confess I could not notice the child: I saw only the beautiful dark face, coiffed with orange and purple, bending over it, in an illumination of antique gold. What a _da_!... She represented really the type of that _belle affranchie_ of other days, against whose fascination special sumptuary laws were made: romantically she imaged for me the supernatural godmothers and Cinderellas of the Creole fairy-tales. Still we have much to learn about the little creatures in the shapes of ants and scorpions and lizards. They form no small part of the population of Martinique. And still more about the fruits and the vegetables do we learn from good Cyrillia, Ma Bonne. One longs to have a housekeeper as loving and child-like and solicitous. We leave her gazing with love unutterable at the new photograph of her daughter, and wondering the while why they do not make a portrait talk so that she can talk to her beautiful daughter. And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you more;--day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature--delighting in furious colour--bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity of having to leave it all some day--the far-seen pain of bidding it farewell weighs upon you, even in dreams. But before we go, we must learn how Nature must treat those who are not born under her suns. Then at last reluctantly we board the _Guadeloupe_, and with Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes, who is leaving her country, perhaps for a very long time, to become a governess in New York, we realize that nowhere on this earth may there be brighter skies. Farewell, fair city,--sun-kissed city,--many-fountained city!--dear yellow-glimmering streets,--white pavements learned by heart,--and faces ever looked for,--and voices ever loved! Farewell, white towers with your golden-throated bells!--farewell, green steeps, bathed in the light of summer everlasting!--craters with your coronets of forests!--bright mountain paths upwinding 'neath pomp of fern and angelin and feathery bamboo!--and gracious palms that drowse above the dead! Farewell, soft-shadowing majesty of valleys unfolding to the sun,--green golden cane-fields ripening to the sea!... Dominica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Pelée--so they vanish behind us. Shall not we too become _Les Revenants_? YOUMA[28] (5) was written in Martinique, and also belongs to the New Orleans period. "I think you will like it better than 'Chita.' It is more mature and exotic by far,"--so Hearn wrote of the story in one of his letters. Later on, when living in Japan, he wrote:-- [28] Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers. It gave me no small pleasure to find that you like "Youma": you will not like it less knowing that the story is substantially true. You can see the ruins of the old house in the Quartier du Fort if you ever visit Saint-Pierre, and perhaps meet my old friend Arnoux, a survivor of the time. The girl really died under the heroic conditions described--refusing the help of the blacks and the ladder. Of course I may have idealized her, but not her act. The incident of the serpent occurred also; but the heroine was a different person,--a plantation girl, celebrated by the historian Rufz de Lavison. I wrote the story under wretched circumstances in Martinique, near the scenes described, and under the cross with the black Christ. An English notice says:-- "It is an admirable little tale, full of local characteristics with curious fragments of Creole French from Martinique, and abundance of wide human sympathy. It deserves reprinting for English readers more than three-fourths of the fiction which is wont to cross the Atlantic under similar circumstances." (294.) "Youma" is the tale of the exquisite devotion and loyalty of a _da_. (A _da_ is the foster-mother and nurse of a Creole child.) At the death of Aimée, Youma's playmate and rich foster-sister, little Mayotte, her child, becomes Youma's charge. An intimate description is given us of the Creole life of Mayotte and Youma. The love of this _da_ is very beautiful. Once with an extraordinary heroism Youma saves Mayotte from a serpent which has slipped into their room. With a still greater heroism she refuses to run away with Gabriel, who has opened the world to her,--Gabriel who has brought her love, and whom she can marry in no other way. No, above the pleadings of her lover, comes the voice of her dying mistress, begging, with such trust,-- "Youma, O Youma! you will love my child?--Youma, you will never leave her, whatever happens, while she is little? promise, dear Youma!" And she had--promised.... Then comes the final test of Youma's strength of devotion. There is an outbreak among the blacks, who have become inflamed by the dreams of coming freedom. The Desrivières with many other families are forced to flee for refuge in safer quarters. Under one roof all these people gather. Youma is urged to leave and save herself. But she will not forsake Mayotte or her master. The infuriated blacks surround the house, and horror follows. Presently the house is set on fire. Youma, with Mayotte in her arms, appears at an upper window. Gabriel, "daring the hell about him for her sake," puts up a ladder. Youma hands him Mayotte. "Can you save her?" she asks. "Gabriel could only shake his head;--the street sent up so frightful a cry.... "_Non!--non!--non!--pa lè yche-béké--janmain yche-béké!_" "Then you cannot save me!" cried Youma, clasping the child to her bosom,--"_janmain! janmain, mon ami._" "Youma, in the name of God...." "In the name of God, you ask me to be a coward!... Are you vile, Gabriel?--are you base?... Save myself and leave the child to burn?... Go!" "Leave the _béké's yche_!--leave it!--leave it, girl!" shouted a hundred voices. "_Moin!_" cried Youma, retreating beyond the reach of Gabriel's hand,--"_moin!_ ... Never shall I leave it, never! I shall go to God with it." "Burn with it, then!" howled the negroes ... "down with that ladder! down with it, down with it!" The ladder catches fire and burns. The walls quiver, and there are shrieks from the back of the house. Unmoved, with a perfect calm, Youma remains at the window. "There is now neither hate nor fear on her fine face." Softly she whispers to Mayotte, and caresses her with an infinite tenderness. Never to Gabriel had she seemed so beautiful. Another minute--and he saw her no more. The figure and the light vanished together, as beams and floor and roof all quaked down at once into darkness.... Only the skeleton of stone remained,--black-smoking to the stars. A stillness follows. The murderers are appalled by their crime. Then, from below, the flames wrestled out again,--crimsoning the smoke whirls, the naked masonry, the wreck of timbers. They wriggled upward, lengthening, lapping together,--lifted themselves erect,--grew taller, fiercer,--twined into one huge fluid spire of tongues that flapped and shivered high into the night.... The yellowing light swelled,--expanded from promontory to promontory,--palpitated over the harbour,--climbed the broken slopes of the dead volcano leagues through the gloom. The wooded mornes towered about the city in weird illumination,--seeming loftier than by day,--blanching and shadowing alternately with the soaring and sinking of the fire;--and at each huge pulsing of the glow, the white cross of their central summit stood revealed, with the strange passion of its black Christ. ... And at the same hour, from the other side of the world,--a ship was running before the sun, bearing the Republican gift of liberty and promise of universal suffrage to the slaves of Martinique. There are two little bits of description which are so characteristic that I quote them:-- Then she became aware of a face ... lighted by a light that came from nowhere,--that was only a memory of some long-dead morning. And through the dimness round about it a soft blue radiance grew,--the ghost of a day. Sunset yellowed the sky,--filled the horizon with flare of gold;--the sea changed its blue to lilac;--the mornes brightened their vivid green to a tone so luminous that they seemed turning phosphorescent. Rapidly the glow crimsoned,--shadows purpled; and night spread swiftly from the east,--black-violet and full of stars. KARMA[29] (242) was written during the Philadelphia period, but was not published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ until after Hearn had sailed for Japan. The story is concentrated, with its every word a shaft of light, and it seems a wrong to attempt to epitomize it. Except in its entirety no adequate conception can be formed of this marvellous revelation of the anguish that a human soul may suffer; nor of the artistic power with which Hearn has developed and perfected his study. Many quotations could be gleaned from his subsequent books which reflect the inspiration of "Karma." [29] Copyright, 1889, by Lafcadio Hearn; and, copyright, 1890 by J. B. Lippincott Company. Despite her unusual intellect, the heroine had a childlike simplicity and frankness which invited her lover's confidence, but he had never told her his admiration, for a dormant power beneath her girlishness made a compliment seem a rudeness. He was often alone with her, which is helpful to lovers, but her charm always confused him, and his embarrassment only deepened. One day she archly asked him to tell her about it. Is there one who does not know that moment when the woman beloved becomes the ideal, and the lover feels his utter unworthiness? Yet, if she is one of those rare souls, the illusion, however divine, is less perfect than is her worth. Do you know what she truly is--how she signifies "the whole history of love striving against hate, aspiration against pain, truth against ignorance, sympathy against pitilessness? She,--the soul of her! is the ripened passion-flower of the triumph. All the heroisms, the martyrdoms, the immolations of self,--all strong soarings of will through fire and blood to God since humanity began,--conspired to kindle the flame of her higher life." And then you question yourself with a thousand questions, and then there are as many more of your duty to her, to the future, and to the Supreme Father. She was not surprised when he told her his wish, but she was not confident that he really loved her, nor whether she should permit herself to like him. Finally she bade him go home and "as soon as you feel able to do it properly,--write out for me a short history of your life;--just write down everything you feel that you would not like me to know. Write it,--and send it.... And then I shall tell you whether I will marry you." How easy the task seemed, and his whole being was joyous; but the lightness lasted for only a moment, and gradually all that her command meant crept over him.... "_Everything you feel you would not like me to know._" Surely she had no realization of what she had asked. Did she imagine that men were good like women--how cruel to hurt her. Then for a period he was uplifted with the desire to meet her truthfulness, but his courage failed again after he had written down the record of his childhood and youth. It was no slight task to make this confession of his sins. And how pale and trivial they had seemed before. Was it possible that he had never before rightly looked at them? Yet why should he so falter? Surely she meant to pardon him. He must put everything down truthfully, and then recolour the whole for her gaze. But his face grew hot at the thought of certain passages. Hour after hour he sat at his desk until it was past midnight, but no skill could soften the stony facts. Finally he lay down to rest: his fevered brain tried to find excuses for his faults. He could forgive himself everything ... except--ah, how unutterably wicked he had been there. No, he could not tell her _that_: instead he must lose her for ever. And in losing her he would lose all the higher self which she had awakened. To lose her--when he of all men had found his ideal. "_Everything you feel you would not like me to know._" Perhaps when she had put this ban upon him, she suspected that there were incidents in his life which he dared not tell her. Could he not deceive her? No, he might write a lie, but he could never meet her fine sweet eyes with a lie. What was he to do? And why had he always been so humble before that slight girl? "Assuredly those fine grey eyes were never lowered before living gaze: she seemed as one who might look God in the face." Slowly his senses became more confused, and a darkness came, and a light in the darkness that shone on her; and he saw her bathed in a soft radiance, that seemed of some substance like ivory. And he knew that she was robing for her bridal with him. He was at her side: all around them was a gentle whispering of many friends, who were dead. Would they smile thus--_if they knew_? Then there arose something within him, and he knew that he must tell her all. He commenced to speak, and she became transfigured, and smiled at him with the tenderness of an angel; and the more he told the greater was her forgiveness. And he heard the voices of the others lauding him for his self-sacrifice and his sincerity. Yet as they praised a fear clutched him for one last avowal that he must make. And with the growing of this doubt all seemed maliciously to change, and even she no longer smiled. He then would have told her alone, but even as he tried to hush his voice, it seemed to pierce the quietude "with frightful audibility, like the sibilation of a possessing spirit." Then with a reckless despair he shouted it aloud, and everything vanished, and the darkness of night was about him. For many restless days and nights he harried himself with bitter self-analysis; and day by day he tore up a certain page; yet without that page his manuscript was worthless. As the days grew into weeks a new fear seized him that his silence had betrayed him, and that already she had decided against him. In the face of this danger he became terrified, and one morning he feverishly copied the memorable page, and, addressing the whole, dropped it in the first letter-box, before he might change his mind. Then an awful revelation of his act overcame him. Should he telegraph her to return the manuscript unopened. No, it was already too late. What was done--was done for ever. He now vaguely realized what he feared in her--"a penetrating dynamic moral power that he felt without comprehending." He tried to steel himself for the worst, but he knew with a premonition that behind his imagined worst there were depths beyond depths of worse. The single word "Come" which he received two days later confirmed his fears. When he reached the door of her apartment, she had already risen to take from a locked drawer an envelope which he knew was his. She proffered him no greeting, but asked in a cold voice if he wished her to burn the document. At his whispered _yes_, he met her eyes, and they seemed to strip him of the last remnant of his pride. "He stood before her as before God,--morally naked as a soul in painted dreams of the Judgment Day." The fire caught the paper, and he stood near, in fear of her next word, while she watched the flame. At last she asked if the woman was dead. He well knew to what she referred, and replied that almost five years had passed since her death. To the penetrating questions which followed he answered that the child--a boy--was well, and that his friend was still there--in the same place. She turned to him abruptly and coldly, angered that he could have believed that she would pardon such a crime. He must have had some hope, or he would not have sent the letter. Had he measured her by his own moral standard? Certainly he had placed her below the level of honest people. Would he dare to ask their judgment of his sin? Speechless, he writhed under the scorn of her words, and a knowledge of shame to which his former agony was as nothing burned within him. That in him which her inborn goodness had taught her, was now laid bare to himself. Again she spoke after a silence--perhaps he would think she was cruel; but she was not, nor was she unjust, for transcendent sin that denies "all the social wisdom gained by human experience" cannot be pardoned, it can only be atoned. And that sin was his; and God would exact his expiation. And that expiation she now demanded in God's name, and as her right. He must go to the friend whom he had wronged, and tell him the whole truth. He must ask for the child, and fulfil his whole duty; also he must place even his life at the man's will. And she would rather see him dead than believe that he could be a coward as well as a criminal. This she requested not as a favour, but as her right. At her words he grew pale as if to death, and for a moment she feared that he might refuse, and that she must despise him. No! his colour rushed back, and her heart leaped, as with a calm resolve he answered, "I will do it." "Then go!" she replied, betraying no gladness. A year went by. She knew that he had kept his promise. He wrote to her often, and passionately, but the letters were never answered. Did she doubt him still?--or was she afraid of her own heart? He could not know the truth, so he waited with hopes and fears, and the seasons passed. Then one day she was startled to receive a letter which told her that he was passing through her suburb, and he begged only to be permitted to see her. To his surprise the answer brought the happy words, "You may." From the shy, beautiful eyes of the child, whom he brought, there seemed to plead a woman's sorrow, until her own soul answered in forgiveness. And the boy and the father marvelled at the tenderness that had come upon her, and the father sobbed until her voice thrilled: that suffering was strength and knowledge, that always he must suffer for the evil he had wrought, but she would help him to bear the pain, and to endure his atonement. She would shield his frailty--she would love his boy. THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD (21) was translated in New York, while Hearn was finishing the proofs of "Two Years in the French West Indies." Of it he writes:-- As for the "Sylvestre Bonnard" I believe I told you that that was translated in about ten days and published in two weeks from the time of beginning it.... But the work suffers in consequence of haste. After his departure for the Orient, two articles on West Indian Society appeared in the _Cosmopolitan_ (243-244). They give a sympathetic study of the sad and pathetic tragedy of the race of the mixed blood. These articles bear a similarity to the chapter upon and the references to this subject, in "Two Years in the French West Indies." GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN[30] (7) is the first of the series of Japanese books. It was published after Hearn had been in Japan for four years; since 1891 six of the articles had appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (246-251). Also in 1890, an article, "A Winter Journey to Japan," was published in _Harper's Monthly_ (245). This was his initial paper on Japan. [30] Copyright, 1894, by Lafcadio Hearn; and published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.] In many ways the present book on Japan is his happiest, for the charm over everything is fresh and radiant. It is here that we learn the old graceful customs, the touching child-like ways, and the sacred appealing rites and beliefs that so endear to us the Japanese. Later we are to have studies more philosophical, more erudite, but none more penetrating in virtue of the very simplicity of subject. It is difficult to believe that the writer, bewitched with the warmth and colour of the tropics, giving his pen an unlicensed flow of word colour and enthusiasm, in a few years could have matured into this quiet, gentle thinker equally absorbed by the East. One finds scarcely a trace of the Hearn of the tropics: therein lies his unique genius; just so admirably as he reflected the West Indian life, does he now reflect that of the Japanese. It is the old Japan that Hearn loves, and the passing of which he mourns even at the first. In his Preface, he says, "My own conviction, and that of many impartial and more experienced observers of Japanese life, is that Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose." Also in one of his letters he writes, "I felt, as never before, how utterly dead old Japan is, and how ugly New Japan is becoming." It is old Japan that we find in the present volume. It is much as if we looked into a diary of his first days in the Orient, giving his impressions and conclusions, as well as portraying the pictures themselves. One of the reviews of the book contains the following:-- "If Japan is all that he says; if the Japanese are so compounded of all the virtues, and so innocent of the ugly failings that mar our Western civilization, then the poet's dream of a Golden Age has actually been realized in the remote East. Much as we should like to believe that such a land and such a people actually exist, we cannot altogether conquer our doubts, or avoid the suspicion that the author's feeling sometimes gets the better of his judgment." (379.) And another says:-- "In volume one he is still the outside observer, remote enough to be amused with the little pretty, bird-like glances of the Orient towards the Occident, pleased at the happy chance which makes a blind shampooer's cry musical as she taps her way down the street, instead of giving her a voice raucous as that which hurts and haunts the unwilling ears of wayfarers down Newgate Street and on Ludgate-Hill; or complimentary to the cunning fancy which paints a branch of flowering cherry in a cleft bamboo on a square of faintly-coloured paper and calls the cherry blossom 'beauty' and the bamboo 'long life.' He notices the shapely feet of the people: 'bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny, tiny _geta_, or feet of young girls in snowy _tabi_. The _tabi_, the white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect--the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness.' "A little further on the leaven of witchcraft is working, and he cannot write so airily. It is not as a mere spectator that he talks of his visit to the Buddhist cemetery, where the rotting wooden laths stand huddled about the graves, and one tomb bears an English name and a cross chiselled upon it. Here he made acquaintance with the god, who is the lover of little children, Jizô-Sama, about whose feet are little piles of stones heaped there by the hands of mothers of dead children. He is not quite as much in earnest as volume two will find him, or he could not call the gentle god 'that charming divinity'; but the sight-seer is dying in him nevertheless. It was with a friend's hand that he struck the great bell at Enoshima." (286.) But even here with a new world unfolding to his delighted eyes, it was colour that Hearn really wanted. I am not easy about my book, of which I now await the proofs. It lacks colour--it isn't like the West Indian book. But the world here is not forceful: it is all washed in faint blues and greys and greens. There are really _gamboge_, or saffron-coloured valleys,--and lilac fields; but these exist only in the early summer and the rape-plant season, and ordinarily Japan is chromatically spectral. The opening chapter is his first day in the Orient, "the first charm of Japan is intangible and volatile as a perfume." Everything seems to him elfish and diminutive. "Cha," his Kurumaya, takes him past the shops where it appears to him "that everything Japanese is delicate, exquisite, admirable--even a pair of common wooden chop-sticks in a paper bag with a little drawing upon it." The money itself is a thing of beauty. But one must not dare to look, for there is enchantment in these wares, and having looked, one must buy. In truth one wishes to buy everything, even to the whole land, "with its magical trees and luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and forty millions of the most lovable people." Before the steps leading to a temple he stops. I turn a moment to look back through the glorious light. Sea and sky mingle in the same beautiful pale clear blue. Below me the billowing of bluish roofs reaches to the verge of the unruffled bay on the right, and to the feet of the green wooded hills flanking the city on two sides. Beyond that semi-circle of green hills rises a lofty range of serrated mountains, indigo silhouettes. And enormously high above the line of them towers an apparition indescribably lovely,--one solitary snowy cone, so filmly exquisite, so spiritually white, that but for its immemorially familiar outline, one would surely deem it a shape of cloud. Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous heaven,--the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama. Passing to the temple garden he wonders why the trees are so lovely in Japan. Is it that the trees have been so long domesticated and caressed by man in this land of the gods, that they have acquired souls, and strive to show their gratitude, like women loved, by making themselves more beautiful for man's sake? Assuredly they have mastered men's hearts by their loveliness, like beautiful slaves. That is to say, Japanese hearts. Apparently there have been some foreign tourists of the brutal class in this place, since it has been deemed necessary to set up inscriptions in English announcing that "it is forbidden to injure the trees." Of Hearn's first visit to a Buddhist temple, I quote what one of his critics has to say:-- "The silence of centuries seems to descend upon your soul, you feel the thrill of something above and beyond the commonplace of this every-day world, even here, amidst the turmoil, the rush, the struggle of this monster city of the West, if you take up his 'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,' and turn to his description of his first visit to a Buddhist temple. Marvellous is his power of imparting the mystery of that strange land, of hidden meanings and allegories, of mists and legends. The bygone spirit of the race, the very essence of the heart of the people, that has lain sleeping in the temple gloom, in the shadows of the temple shrines, awakes and whispers in your ears. You feel the soft, cushioned matting beneath your feet, you smell the faint odour of the incense, you hear the shuffling of pilgrim feet, the priest sliding back screen after screen, pouring in light upon the gilded bronzes and inscriptions; and you look for the image of the Deity, of the presiding Spirit, between the altar groups of convoluted candelabra. And you see: Only a mirror, a round, pale disc of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this mockery of me a phantom of the far sea. Only a mirror! Symbolizing what? Illusion? Or that the Universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? Or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our own hearts? Perhaps some day I shall be able to find out. (350.) Many more temples are visited in the following chapter. What impresses him the most is the joyousness of the people's faith: everything is bright and cheerful, and the air is filled with the sound of children's voices as they play in the courts. He sees the many representations of Jizô, the loving divinity who cares for the souls of little children, who comforts them, and saves them from the demons. The face of Jizô is like that of a beautiful boy, and the countenance is made "heavenly by such a smile as only Buddhist art could have imagined, the smile of infinite lovingness and supremest gentleness." There is also Kwannon, "the goddess of mercy, the gentle divinity who refused the rest of Nirvâna to save the souls of men." Her face is golden, smiling with eternal youth and infinite tenderness. And he sees Emma Dai-Ô, the unpitying, tremendous one. He learns many things of many gods and goddesses. There is the temple of Kishibojin--the mother of Demons. For some former sin she was born a demon and devoured her own children. But through the teaching of Buddha she became a divine being, loving and protecting the little ones, and Japanese mothers pray to her, and wives pray for beautiful boys. At her shrine what impresses the visitor are hundreds of tiny dresses, mostly of poor material, stretched between tall poles of bamboos. These are the thank-offerings of poor simple country mothers whose prayers to her have been answered. In another chapter Hearn writes of the Festival of the Dead, for between the 13th and the 15th day of July the dead may come back again. Every small and great shrine is made beautiful with new mats of purest rice straw, and is decorated with lotus flowers, _shikimi_ (anise) and _misohagi_ (lespedeza). Food offerings, served on a tiny lacquered table--a _zen_--are placed before the altars. Every hour, tea daintily served in little cups is offered to the viewless visitors. At night beautiful special lanterns are hung at the entrances of homes. Those who have dead friends visit the cemeteries and make offerings there with prayers, and the sprinkling of water, and the burning of incense. On the evening of the 15th the ghosts of those, who in expiation of faults committed in a previous life are doomed to hunger, are fed. And also are fed the ghosts of those who have no friends. For three days everything is done to feast the dead, and on the last night there comes the touching ceremony of farewell, for the dead must then return. Everything has been prepared for them. In each home small boats made of barley straw closely woven have been freighted with supplies of choice food, with tiny lanterns, and written messages of faith and love. Seldom more than two feet in length are these boats; but the dead require little room. And the frail craft are launched on canal, lake, sea, or river,--each with a miniature lantern glowing at the prow, and incense burning at the stern. And if the night be fair, they voyage long. Down all the creeks and rivers and canals the phantom fleets go glimmering to the sea; and all the sea sparkles to the horizon with the lights of the dead, and the sea wind is fragrant with incense. But alas! it is now forbidden in the great seaports to launch the _shôryôbune_, "the boats of the blessed ghosts." In Kami-Ichi, in the land of Hôki, there is a glimpse into ancient Japan, for there the Bon-odori, the Dance of the Festival of the Dead, is still maintained. No longer is it danced in the cities. In the temple court, in the shadow of the tomb, with the moonlight as a guide, long processions of young girls dance a slow ghostly dance while the vast audience of spectators keeps a perfect stillness. A deep male chant is heard, and the women respond. Many songs follow, until the night is waning. Then this seeming witchcraft ends, and with merry laughter and soft chatting all disperse. Hearn spends a long happy day at Matsue, the chief city of the Province of the Gods, where he gathers legends and impressions. Of course it has its temples. The temple is the best place to see the life of the people. There it is that the children play all day long. In the summer evening, the young artisans and labourers prove their strength in wrestling-matches. The sacred dances are held there; and on holidays it is also the place where toys are sold. Often at night your attention will be drawn to a large, silent, admiring group of people standing before some little booth. They will be looking at a few vases of sprays of flowers--an exhibition of skill in their arrangement. Returning homeward, there is seen a poor woman scattering some white papers into a stream of water, and, as she throws each one in, murmuring something sweet in a low voice. She is praying for her little dead child, and these are little prayers that she has written to Jizô. Kitzuki is the most ancient shrine in Japan, and it is the living centre of Shintô. There the ancient faith burns as brightly as ever it did in the unknown past. Buddhism may be doomed to pass away, but Shintô "unchanging and vitally unchanged remains dominant, and appears but to gain in power and dignity." Many of the wisest scholars have tried to define Shintô. But the reality of Shintô lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic, there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shintô is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive. At Kaka is the Cave of the Children's Ghosts. No evil person may enter the Shin-Kukedo, for if he does, a large stone will detach itself and fall down upon him. Here in this great vault, lifting forty feet above the water, and with walls thirty feet apart, is a white rock out of which drips a water apparently as white as the rock itself. This is the Fountain of Jizô, which gives milk to the souls of little dead children. And mothers suffering from want of milk come hither to pray that milk may be given unto them; and their prayer is heard. And mothers having more milk than their infants need come hither also, and pray to Jizô that so much as they can give may be taken for the dead children; and their prayer is heard and their milk diminishes. At least thus the peasants of Izumo say. In another cavern are countless little piles of stones and pebbles, which must have been made by long and patient labour. It is the work of the dead children. One must step carefully, for the sake of these little ones, for if any work is spoiled, they will cry. In the sand are prints of little naked feet, "_the footprints of the infant ghosts_." Strewn here and there on the rocks are tiny straw sandals, pilgrims' offerings to keep the baby feet from being bruised by the stones. In the temple of Hojinji of the Zen sect at Mionoseki, there is an altar which bears many images of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Before the altar, and hung from the carven ceiling, is a bright coloured mass of embroidered purses, patterns of silk-weaving and of cotton-weaving, also balls of threads and worsted and silk. These are the first offerings of little girls. As soon as a baby girl learns how to sew or knit or embroider, she brings to the Maid-Mother of all grace and sweetness and pity, the first piece that she has made successfully. Even the infants of the Japanese kindergarten bring their first work here,--pretty paper-cuttings, scissored out and plaited into divers patterns by their own tiny flower-soft hands. Among the many Notes on Kitzuki which interest, is the annual festival of the Divine Scribe, the Tenjin-Matsuri, to which every school-boy sends a specimen of his best writing. The texts are in Chinese characters, and are generally drawn from the works of Confucius or Mencius. And Hearn remarks that the children of other countries can never excel in the art of Japanese writing. The inner ancestral tendencies will not let them catch the secret of the stroke with the brush. It is the fingers of the dead that move the brush of the Japanese boy. At every temple festival in Japan there is a sale of toys. And every mother, however poor, buys her child a toy. They are not costly, and are charming. Many of these toys would seem odd to a little English child. There is a tiny drum, a model of the drum used in the temples; or a miniature sambo table, upon which offerings are presented to the gods. There is a bunch of bells fastened to a wooden handle. It resembles a rattle, but it is a model of the sacred _suzu_ which the virgin priestess uses in her dance before the gods. Then there are tiny images of priests and gods and goddesses. There is little of grimness in the faiths of the Far East; their gods smile. "Why religion should be considered too awful a subject for children to amuse themselves decently with never occurs to the common Japanese mind." Besides these, there are pretty toys illustrating some fairy-tale or superstition and many other playthings of clever devices, and the little doll, O-Hina-San (Honourable Miss Hina), which is a type of Japanese girl beauty. The doll in Japan is a sacred part of the household. There is a belief that if it is treasured long enough it becomes alive. Such a doll is treated like a real child: it is supposed to possess supernatural powers. One had such rare powers that childless couples used to borrow it. They would minister to it, and would give it a new outfit of clothes before returning it to its owners. All who did this became parents. To the Japanese a new doll is only a doll; but a doll that has received the love of many generations acquires a soul. A little Japanese girl was asked, "How can a doll live?" "Why," was the lovely answer, "_if you love it enough_, it will live!" Never is the corpse of a doll thrown away. When it has become so worn out that it must be considered quite dead, it is either burned or cast in running water, or it is dedicated to the God Kôjin. In almost every temple ground there is planted a tree called _enoki_, which is sacred to Kôjin. Before the tree will be a little shrine, and either there or at the foot of the sacred tree, the sad little remains will be laid. Seldom during the lifetime of its owner is a doll given to Kôjin. When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman--the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and of her mother's mother. There is a sad and awful tradition in the history of the Kengyôs, the oldest of the noble families of Izumo. Seven generations ago the Daimyô of Izumo made his first official visit to the temples of Hinomisaki, and was entertained royally by the Kengyô. As was the custom, the young wife served the royal visitor. Her simple beauty unfortunately enchanted him, and he demanded that she leave her husband and go with him. Terrified, but like a brave loving wife and mother, she answered that sooner than desert her husband and child she would kill herself. The Lord of Izumo went away, but the little household well knew the evil that now shadowed it. And shortly the Kengyô was suddenly taken from his family; tried at once for some unknown offence, and banished to the islands of Oki, where he died. The Daimyô was exultant, for no obstacle was in the way of his desire. The wife of the dead Kengyô was the daughter of his own minister, whose name was Kamiya. Kamiya was summoned before the Daimyô, who told him that there was no longer any reason why Kamiya's daughter should not enter his household, and bade Kamiya bring her to him. The next day Kamiya returned, and with the utmost ceremony announced that the command had been fulfilled--the victim had arrived. Smiling for pleasure, the Matsudaira ordered that she should be brought at once into his presence. The Karô prostrated himself, retired, and presently returned, placed before his master a _kubi-oke_ upon which lay the freshly-severed head of a beautiful woman,--the head of the young wife of the dead Kengyô,--with the simple utterance: "This is my daughter." Dead by her own brave will,--but never dishonoured. "None love life more than the Japanese; none fear death less." So it is that when two lovers find that they can never wed, they keep the love death together, which is _jôshi_ or _shinjû_. By dying they believe that they will at once be united in another world. They always pray that they may be buried together. (In other books are written additional stories illustrating the touching custom.) At the temple of Yaegaki at Sakusa, are the Deities of Wedlock and of Love, and thither go all youths and maidens who are in love. Hundreds of strips of soft white paper are knotted to the gratings of the doors of the shrine. These are the prayers of love. Also there are tresses of girls' hair, love-sacrifices, and offerings of sea-water and of sea-weed. In the soil around the foundation of the shrine are planted quantities of small paper flags. All over Japan there are little Shintô shrines before which are images in stone of foxes. The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods,--whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about most of them, even those whose noses have been broken off. Moreover, these ancient foxes have certain natural beauties which their modern Tôkyô kindred cannot show. Time has bestowed upon them divers speckled coats of beautiful colours while they have been sitting on their pedestals, listening to the ebbing and flowing of the centuries and snickering weirdly at mankind. Their backs are clad with finest green velvet of old mosses; their limbs are spotted and their tails are tipped with the dead gold or the dead silver of delicate fungi. And the places they most haunt are the loveliest,--high shadowy groves where the _uguisu_ sings in green twilight, above some voiceless shrine with its lamps and its lions of stone so mossed as to seem things born of the soil--like mushrooms. It is difficult to define the Fox superstition, chiefly because it has sprung from so many elements. The origin is Chinese, and in Japan it has become mixed with the worship of a Shintô deity, and further enlarged by the Buddhist belief of thaumaturgy and magic. The peasants worship foxes because they fear them. But there are good foxes and bad ones. The country holds legend after legend of goblin foxes and ghost foxes, and foxes that take the form of human beings. Every Japanese child knows some of them. Seldom is a Japanese garden a flower-garden: it may not contain a flower. It is a landscape garden, and its artistic purpose is to give the impression of a real scene. Besides, it is supposed to express "a mood in the soul." Such abstract ideas as Chastity, Faith, Connubial Bliss were expressed by the old Buddhist monks who first brought the art into Japan. Little hills, and slopes of green, tiny river-banks, and little islands, together with trees, and stones, and flowering shrubs are combined by the artist. All these things have their poetry and legend, and sometimes have a special name signifying their position and rank in the whole design. In the ponds little creatures such as the frog and water-beetle live, and they too have their legends. The children make all of these creatures and the insects their playmates. Then there are the _semi_, which are musicians, and lovely dragon-flies which skim over the ponds; and back on the hill above the garden are many birds. It is not necessary to have a garden outdoors, for there are indoor gardens too which can even be put into a _koniwa_, the size of a fruit-dish. The dead are never dead with the Japanese; they become even more important members of the family, for the spirits of the dead control the lives of the living. Each day there is some ceremony in memory of these blessed dead; and no home is so poor but it has its household shrine. And Shintô, ancestor-worship, signifies character in the higher sense,--courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things loyalty. The spirit of Shintô is the spirit of filial piety, the zest of duty, the readiness to surrender life for a principle without a thought of wherefore. It is the docility of the child; it is the sweetness of the Japanese woman. It is conservatism likewise; the wholesome check upon the national tendency to cast away the worth of the entire past in rash eagerness to assimilate too much of the foreign present. It is religion,--but religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse,--religion transmuted into ethical instinct. It is the whole emotional life of the race,--the Soul of Japan. Self-sacrifice, loyalty, the deepest spirit of Shintô, is born with the child. If you ask any Japanese student what his dearest wish is he will surely answer,--"To die for His Majesty, our Emperor." It is impossible in this limited space to give an adequate idea of all that Shintôism implies. The dressing of the hair is a very important part of a Japanese woman's toilet. It is dressed once in every three days, and the task takes probably two hours. The elaborateness of the coiffure changes with the growing age of the maiden. But when she is twenty-eight, she is no longer young, and so thereafter only one style is left, that worn by old women. Of course, there are many superstitions about women's hair. It is the Japanese woman's dearest possession, and she will undergo any suffering not to lose it. At one time it was considered a fitting vengeance to shear the hair of an erring wife, and then turn her away. Only the greatest faith or the deepest love can prompt a woman to the voluntary sacrifice of her entire _chevelure_, though partial sacrifices, offerings of one or two long thick cuttings, may be seen suspended before many an Izumo shrine. What faith can do in the way of such sacrifice, he best knows who has seen the great cables, woven of women's hair, that hang in the vast Hongwanji temple at Kyôto. And love is stronger than faith, though much less demonstrative. According to an ancient custom a wife bereaved sacrifices a portion of her hair to be placed in the coffin of her husband, and buried with him. The quantity is not fixed: in the majority of cases it is very small, so that the appearance of the coiffure is thereby no wise affected. But she who resolves to remain for ever faithful to the memory of the lost yields up all. With her own hand she cuts off her hair, and lays the whole glossy sacrifice--emblem of her youth and beauty--upon the knees of the dead. It is never suffered to grow again. The "Diary of a Teacher" gives a careful picture of the school-life in Japan as Hearn finds it. At the Normal School, which is a state institute, the young man student has no expenses. In return for these kindnesses, when he graduates he serves as a teacher for five years. Discipline is severe, and deportment is a demand. "A spirit of manliness is cultivated, which excludes roughness but develops self-reliance and self-control." The silence of study hours is perfect, and without permission no head is ever raised from a book. The female department is in a separate building. Girls are taught the European sciences, and are trained in all the Japanese arts, such as embroidery, decoration, painting; and of course that most delicate of arts--the arranging of flowers. Drawing is taught in all the schools. By fifty per cent. do Japanese students excel the English students in drawing. There is also a large elementary school for little boys and girls connected with the Normal School. These are taught by the students in the graduating classes. Noteworthy is the spirit of peace prevailing at the recesses that occur for ten minutes between each lesson. The boys romp and shout and race, but never quarrel. Hearn says that among the 800 scholars whom he has taught, he has never even heard of a fight, nor of any serious quarrel. The girls sing or play some gentle game, and the teachers are kind and watchful of the smaller scholars. If a dress is torn or soiled the child is cared for as carefully as if she were a younger sister. No teacher would ever think of striking a scholar. If he did so he would at once have to give up his position. In fact, punishments are unknown. "The spirit is rather reversed. In the Occident the master expels the pupil. In Japan it happens quite as often that the pupil expels the master." It takes the Japanese student seven years to acquire the triple system of ideographs, which is the alphabet of his native literature. He must also be versed in the written and the spoken literature. He must study foreign history, geography, arithmetic, astronomy, physics, geometry, natural history, agriculture, chemistry, drawing. Worst of all he must learn English,--a language of which the difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by any one unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue,--a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought. And he studies all this upon the slimmest of diets, clad in thin clothes in cold rooms. No wonder many fall by the way. The students have been trained to find a moral in all things. If the theme given to them for a composition is a native one, they will never fail to find it. For instance,--a peony is very beautiful, but it has a disagreeable odour; hence we should remember that "To be attracted by beauty only may lead us into fearful and fatal misfortune." The sting of the mosquito is useful, for "then we shall be bringed back to study." There is nothing distinctive about the Japanese countenance, but there is an intangible pleasantness that is common to all. Contrasted with Occidental faces they seem "half-sketched." The outlines are very soft, there is "neither aggressiveness nor shyness, neither eccentricity nor sympathy, neither curiosity nor indifference.... But all are equally characterized by a singular placidity,--expressing neither love nor hate, nor anything save perfect repose and gentleness,--like the dreamy placidity of Buddhist images." Later, these faces become individualized. In another chapter Hearn tells of Two Festivals: one the festival of the New Year; and the other, the Festival of Setsubun, which is the time for the casting out of devils. On the eve of this latter festival, the Yaku-otoshi, who is the caster-out of the demons, goes around, to any houses that may desire his services, and performs his exorcism, for which he receives a little fee. The rites consist of the recitation of certain prayers, and the rattling of a _shakujô_. The _shakujô_ is an odd-shaped staff. There is a tradition that it was first used by Buddhist pilgrims to warn little creatures and insects to get out of the way. I quote from a French review for the description of one of Hearn's stories:-- "But the most beautiful of all, 'A Dancing Girl,' is drawn from the chronicles of that far-off past, from which, say what one may, he is certainly wise in drawing his inspirations. It is the story of a courtesan in love. "At the height of her celebrity, this idol of a capital disappears from public life, and nobody knows why. Leaving fortune behind, she flies with a poor youth who loves her. They build for themselves a little house in the mountains, and there exist apart from the world, one for the other. But the lover dies one cold winter, and she remains alone, with no other consolation than to dance for him every evening in the deserted house. For he loved to see her dance, and he must still take pleasure in it. Therefore, daily, she places on the memorial altar the accustomed offerings, and at night she dances decked out in the same finery as when she was the delight of a large city. And the day comes, when old, decrepit, dying, reduced to beggary, she carries her superb costume faded with time, to a painter who had seen her in the days of her beauty, that he may accept it in exchange for a portrait made from memory, which shall be placed before the altar always bearing offerings, that her beloved may ever see her young, the most beautiful of the _shirabyashi_, and that he may forgive her for not being able to dance any more. "This _shirabyashi_, from the distance of time, appears to us here, clothed with I know not what of hieratical dignity, such as the modern _geisha_ could never possess. Lafcadio Hearn in no wise pretends in the pages he devotes to these latter, to idealize them beyond measure. They appear under his pen as pretty animals somewhat dangerous; but is it not their calling to be so? Whatever be the rank of the Japanese woman, he only speaks of her with an extreme discretion, and with a caution that one would look for in vain in the portrait of _Mme. Chrysanthème_. The subtle voluptuousness of his style is never extended to the scenes he reproduces; it is a style immaterial to a rare degree; he knows how to make us understand what he means, without one word to infringe those proprieties that are dear to the Japanese, even more than virtue itself. And to believe him, the young, well-brought-up girl, the honest wife, are in Japan the most perfect types of femininity that he has ever met in any part of the world;--he, who has travelled so much. Opinions formed superficially by globe-trotters on this subject that he scarcely glances at because of respect, arouse as much indignation in him as could they in the Japanese themselves. Evidently he has penetrated into their inner life, into the mystery of their thoughts, into their hidden springs of action, to the point of participating in their feelings." (390.) From Hôki to Oki there is much to learn about the landscapes of Western and Central Japan; and Hearn gives many legends, and many more impressions and intimate glimpses. As there are only walls of thin paper separating the lives of these Japanese people, no privacy can exist. Really everything is done in public, even your thoughts must be known. And it never occurs to a Japanese that there should be any reason for living unobserved. This must show a rare moral condition, and is understood only by those who appreciate the charm of the Japanese character, its goodness, and its politeness. No one endeavours to expand his own individuality by belittling his fellow; no one tries to make himself appear a superior being: any such attempt would be vain in a community where the weaknesses of each are known to all, where nothing can be concealed or disguised, and where affectation could only be regarded as a mild form of insanity. Hearn speaks of the strange public curiosity which his presence aroused at Urago. It was not a rude curiosity; in fact, one so gentle that he could not wish the gazers rebuked. But so insistent did it become that he had to close his doors and windows to prevent his being watched while he was asleep. Kinjurô, the ancient gardener, knows a great many things about souls. "No one is by the gods permitted to have more souls than nine." Kinjurô also knows legends about ghosts and goblins. An essay penetrating the very heart of the Japanese, is the chapter on the "Japanese Smile." It crowns Hearn's work as a superb interpretation of Japanese soul-life. This smile is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace of self-sacrifice. It is metaphysically and psychologically exquisite. It is an etiquette which for generations has been cultivated. It was a smile, _in origin_, however, demanded by hard heathen gods of the victims they sacrificed; and, in history, it was demanded of the subject race by the early conquerors. If refused, then off came their heads! The smile is born with the Japanese child, and is nurtured through all the growing years. The smile is taught like the bow; like the prostration; like that little sibilant sucking-in of the breath which follows, as a token of pleasure, the salutation to a superior; like all the elaborate and beautiful etiquette of the old courtesy. The Japanese believe that one should always turn one's happiest face to people. It is a wrong to cause them to share your sorrow or misfortune, and so hurt or sadden them. One should never look serious. It is not only unkind but extremely rude to show one's personal griefs or anger: these feelings should always be hidden. Even though it is death one must face, it is a duty to smile bravely. It was with such a smile that the dying boy Shida wrote and pasted upon the wall over his bed:-- Thou, my Lord-Soul, dost govern me. Thou knowest that I cannot now govern myself. Deign, I pray thee, to let me be cured speedily. Do not suffer me to speak much. Make me to obey in all things the command of the physician. This ninth day of the eleventh month of the twenty-fourth year of Meiji. From the sick body of Shida to his Soul. The key to the mystery of the most unaccountable smiles is Japanese politeness. The servant sentenced to dismissal for a fault prostrates himself, and asks for pardon with a smile. That smile indicates the very reverse of callousness or insolence: "Be assured that I am satisfied with the great justice of your honourable sentence, and that I am aware of the gravity of my fault. Yet my sorrow and my necessity have caused me to indulge the unreasonable hope that I may be forgiven for my great rudeness in asking pardon." The youth or girl beyond the age of childish tears when punished for some error, receives the punishment with a smile which means: "No evil feeling arises in my heart; much worse than this my fault has deserved." This quality, which has become as natural to the Japanese as the very breath of his body, is the sweet tonic-note of his whole character. _Sayônara!_ Across the waters echoes the cry, _Manzai, Manzai!_ (Ten thousand years to you! ten thousand years!). Hearn is leaving. He is going far away. His pupils write expressing their sorrow and regret. He sends them a letter thanking them for their gift of a beautiful sword, and in a loving farewell says:-- May you always keep fresh within your hearts those impulses of generosity and kindliness and loyalty which I have learned to know so well, and of which your gift will ever remain for me the graceful symbol! And a symbol not only of your affection and loyalty as students to teachers, but of that other beautiful sense of duty expressed, when so many of you wrote down for me, as your dearest wish, the desire to die for His Imperial Majesty, your Emperor. That wish is holy: it means perhaps more than you know, or can know, until you shall have become much older and wiser. This is an era of great and rapid change; and it is probable that many of you, as you grow up, will not be able to believe everything that your fathers believed before you, though I sincerely trust you will at least continue always to respect the faith, even as you still respect the memory, of your ancestors. But however much the life of New Japan may change about you, however much your own thoughts may change with the times, never suffer that noble wish you expressed to me to pass away from your souls. Keep it burning there, clear and pure as the flame of the little lamp that glows before your household shrine. OUT OF THE EAST[31] (8), followed "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." The charm of the first impression is waning. [31] Copyright, 1895, by Lafcadio Hearn; and published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. In a letter Hearn writes:-- Every day, it strikes me more and more how little I shall ever know of the Japanese. I have been working hard at a new book, which is now half finished, and consists of philosophical sketches chiefly. It will be a very different book from the "Glimpses," and will show you how much the Japanese world has changed for me. I imagine that sympathy and friendship are almost impossible for any foreigner to obtain,--because of the amazing difference in the psychology of the two races. We only guess at each other without understanding. In another letter, speaking of the title for this book, he continues:-- It was suggested only by the motto of the Oriental Society, "_Ex Oriente lux._" ... The simpler the title, and the vaguer--in my case--the better: the vagueness touches curiosity. Besides, the book is a vague thing. The _Academy_, writing of "Out of the East," says:-- "Each book marks a longer step towards the Buddhist mysticism, wherein we have lost our poet. 'The Stone Buddha,' in the first mentioned book, is a dreamy dialogue between the wisdom of the West; Science, with her theories of evolution, revolution and dissolution; Buddhism, with its re-birth on re-rebirth; and Nirvâna at the end. This thing also is vanity. As there can be no end, so there can be no beginning; even Time is an illusion, and there is nothing new beneath a hundred million suns." (286.) The old charm of word colour sparkles in "The Dream of a Summer Day." Mile after mile I rolled along that shore, looking into the infinite light. All was steeped in blue,--a marvellous blue, like that which comes and goes in the heart of a great shell. Glowing blue sea met hollow blue sky in a brightness of electric fusion; and vast blue apparitions--the mountains of Higo--angled up through the blaze, like masses of amethyst. What a blue transparency! The universal colour was broken only by the dazzling white of a few high summer clouds, motionlessly curled above one phantom peak in the offing. They threw down upon the water snowy tremulous lights. Midges or ships creeping far away seemed to pull long threads after them,--the only sharp lines in all that hazy glory. But what divine clouds! White purified spirits of clouds, resting on their way to the beatitude of Nirvâna? Or perhaps the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago? The gnat of the soul of me flitted out into that dream of blue, 'twixt sea and sun,--hummed back to the shore of Suminoyé through the luminous ghosts of fourteen hundred summers. And Hearn tells with charm why "the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago," and also of the old, old woman who drank too deeply of the magical waters of youth. Reviewing the present volume, the _Spectator_ remarks:-- "The main drift of his books, however, is to bring into view not so much the glories of Japanese sunlight or the charms of animate or inanimate Nature, on which it falls, as the prevalence, at any rate in extensive sections of Japanese society, of modes of thought and standards of conduct which, though often widely apart from our own, demand the respect of every candid Englishman. And certainly in this endeavour he meets with a large measure of success. His account of the essays written and the questions asked by the members of his class in English language and literature at the Government college, or Higher Middle School, of Kyûshû, discloses not only what must be regarded as a very good development of general intelligence among those young men, but a moral tone which in many respects is quite as high, though with interesting differences in point of view, as would be expected among English boys or young men in the upper forms of our great public-schools or at the Universities. Of course, what boys or young men write for or say to their masters and tutors cannot by any means always be taken as sure evidence of their inner feelings or of the character of their daily life. But, so far as one can judge, Hearn's pupils appear to have given him their confidence, and what he tells us of them may therefore reasonably be taken without much discount. It certainly illustrates an attractive simplicity of character and thought, not untouched by poetic imagination, together with a high development of family affection and strong sense of family duty, and also a remarkably high level of patriotic feeling. This spirit is apparently inherited from the old military class of the island of Kyûshû, and it is not surprising to hear that rich men at a distance are keen to give their sons the opportunity of acquiring the Kyûshû 'tone.' Towards the close of his book Mr. Hearn gives an extremely interesting account of a farewell visit paid him in the autumn of 1894 by an old pupil who had entered the army after leaving college, and had been placed, at his own request, in one of the divisions ordered for service in Corea:-- "And now I am so glad," he exclaimed, his face radiant with a soldier's joy, "we go to-morrow." Then he blushed again, as if ashamed of having uttered his frank delight. I thought of Carlyle's deep saying, that never pleasures, but only suffering; and death are the lures that draw true hearts. I thought also--what I could not say to any Japanese--that the joy in the lad's eyes was like nothing I had ever seen before, except the caress in the eyes of a lover on the morning of his bridal. "A beautiful thought, the reader will agree; but why could it not be uttered to a Japanese? A good deal will be found on this subject in Mr. Hearn's book, and, as we have indicated, we do not think it all holds together. His class of students, we learn, professed to think it 'very, very strange' that there should be so much in English novels about love and marrying; and then he tells us that-- Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the authors of one's being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of the parents by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves ... appears, to the Japanese student of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos. "Now, of course, it is known here that in Japan, as in other Oriental countries, it is a rule for marriages to be family arrangements, as regards which it is expected that the young persons will conform to the wishes of their respective parents. * * * * * "But of course some inconsistencies are to be expected from an author enamoured of the whole country. He is very Buddhist, and is anxious to show that Buddhists have always held, in matters of faith, something very like the doctrines of modern science with regard to the perpetual sequence of evolution and dissolution. On this subject he argues cleverly and effectively; but when, by implication or expressly, he compares Buddhism with Christianity, it is evident that the latter faith has not received any very close study from him. None the less is his book, though dominated by a somewhat uncritical enthusiasm, full of interest and instruction as to the difference between the gifts, the motives, and the mental and moral attitude of the Japanese and the peoples of the West, ourselves in particular. It is well worth while to study that remarkable people as they are seen by one who is so much captivated by them, and believes in them so strongly, as Mr. Lafcadio Hearn." (380.) The _Athenæum_ does not speak so cordially, and a review in the _Atlantic Monthly_ says:-- "Mr. Hearn is not at his best as a metaphysician.... But we can forgive him in that he stands forth a staunch champion, defying the West from the heart of the Japanese people. He does this most clearly in his finest essay, 'Jiujutsu.' Here the very meaning of the martial exercise, to 'conquer by yielding' is taken as text to explain the phenomena or national awakening which foreign cities have denounced as a 'reversal.' Japan has borrowed weapons of force from the West, in order successfully to resist its insidious influence. True progress is from within. Mr. Hearn writes:-- However psychologists may theorize on the absence or the limitations of personal individuality among the Japanese, there can be no question at all that, as a nation, Japan possesses an individuality stronger than our own." (306.) Hearn further brings out in a conversation with a young Japanese the fact that Japan, in order to keep pace with the competition of other nations, must adopt the methods which are in direct variance to her old morality, and all that which has made the Japanese what he is. Japan's future depends upon her industrial development, and the fine old qualities of self-sacrifice, simplicity, filial piety, the contentment with little, are not the weapons for the modern struggle. In a postscript to this essay, written two years later, after the war with China, Hearn adds that "Japan has proved herself able to hold her own against the world.... _Japan has won in her jiujutsu._" Japan holds infinite legends of ghostly significance, and it is no wonder that Hearn found so much that was sympathetic. Every new town or new temple reveals some aspect of the odd. In this second book the joyousness is gone; he is now a philosopher, and his philosophy reflects much of the ghostly. The gruesome has been buried, but it is not dead: it will return reincarnated, not of the ghastly of real life, but of the dim, far-away, always more distant ghostly in the lives of the dead. A revelation of the Nirvâna into which Hearn is being slowly drawn appears in "At Hakata." He has been telling the story of the sacred mirror that a mother in dying gave to her daughter, bidding her to look into it every morning and evening and there see her mother. And the girl looked and "having the heart of meeting her mother every day," knew not that the shadow in the mirror was her own face. One are we all,--and yet many, because each is a world of ghosts. Surely that girl saw and spoke to her mother's very soul, while seeing the fair shadow of her own young eyes and lips, uttering love! And with this thought, the strange display in the old temple court takes a new meaning,--becomes the symbolism of a sublime expectation. Each of us is truly a mirror, imaging something of the universe,--reflecting also the reflection of ourselves in that universe; and perhaps the destiny of all is to be molten by that mighty Image-maker, Death, into some great sweet passionless unity. How the vast work shall be wrought, only those to come after us may know. We of the present West do not know: we merely dream. But the ancient East believes Here is the simple imagery of her faith. All forms must vanish at last to blend with that Being whose smile is immutable Rest,--whose knowledge is Infinite Vision. "The Red Bridal" is a story of _jôshi_--the joint suicide for love. These two young people had been playmates since their early school-days, and were deeply attached to each other. The girl's father, under the influence of an evil stepmother, agrees to sell his daughter to the richest and also the most disreputable man in the village. Hearing this awful command, the maiden only smiles the brave smile--inheritance of her Samurai blood. She knows what she must do.... Together she and her lover quietly meet the Tôkyô express. As its low roar draws nearer, they "wound their arms about each other, and lay down cheek to cheek, very softly and quietly, straight across the inside rail." We close the book with the memory of Yuko, heroic little Yuko, who, even as noble Asakachi, who had his beautiful wish to die for his country fulfilled, proves that the Japanese spirit of loyalty is far greater than our word implies. With all her country, Yuko, a humble little serving-maid, whose name signifies "valiant," is sorrowing because of a Japanese attack upon the Czarevitch of the Russians. Her soul burns with the desire to give something that will soften the sorrow of the August One; for the heart of the girl, being that of a true Japanese, grieves not alone for what has happened, but with a deeper sense of the grief caused to the August One. The cry goes from Yuko asking how she, who has nothing, can give; and from the lips of the dead within her comes the answer: "Give thyself. To give life for the August One is the highest duty, the highest joy." "And in what place?" she asks. "Saikyô," answer the silent voices; "in the gateway of those who by ancient custom should have died." Does she falter? No. For her the future holds no blackness. Always she will see the rising of the holy Sun above the peaks, the smile of the Lady-Moon upon the waters, the eternal magic of the Seasons. She will haunt the places of beauty, beyond the folding of the mists, in the sleep of the cedar-shadows, through circling of innumerable years. She will know a subtler life, in the faint winds that stir the snow of the flowers of the cherry, in the laughter of playing waters, in every happy whisper of the vast green silences. But first she will greet her kindred, somewhere in shadowy halls awaiting her coming to say to her: "Thou hast done well,--like a daughter of Samurai. Enter, child! because of thee to-night we sup with the Gods!" It is daylight when Yuko enters Kyotô. She finds a lodging, and then goes to a skilful female hairdresser. Her little razor is made very sharp. Returning to her room, she writes a letter of farewell to her brother, and an appeal to the officials asking that the Tenshi-Sama may be begged to cease from suffering "seeing that a young life, even though unworthy, has been given in voluntary expiation of the wrong." At the dark hour before dawn she slips to the gate of the Government edifice. Whispering a prayer, she kneels. Then with her long under-girdle of silk she binds her robes tightly about her knees, for the daughter of a Samurai must always be found in death with limbs decently composed. Then, with steady precision, she makes in her throat a gash, out of which the blood leaps in a pulsing jet.... At sunrise the police find her, quite cold, and the two letters, and a poor little purse containing five _yen_ and a few _sen_ (enough, she had hoped, for her burial); and they take her and all her small belongings away. KOKORO[32] (9), the next book, could well be a continuation of "Out of the East." Hearn speaks of it as "terribly radical," and "rather crazy"; and he fears that his views, which are greatly opposed in the West, may not be well received. [32] Copyright, 1896, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. "The fifteen chapters of which the book is composed," says a German review, "do not contain the results of any research into the domain of politics, art or religion. They are rather fragments from Japanese life, and so clear is the language that the pictures given are brought home to us with wonderful effect. Lafcadio Hearn is a journalist in the best sense of the word. He is a writer who has something striking and original to say upon the events of the day, upon the conditions and institutions of a land, upon the possibilities of development in a people, upon deep philosophical, social and religious problems, upon the 'Idea of Pre-existence,' upon Buddhism and Shintôism, upon the difference between Occidental and Oriental culture, and who judges all things, all conditions that he sees, from lofty heights. He is besides a character, a man of great ideals; he has a fine artistic feeling and is, moreover, able to render in wonderfully sympathetic language tender moods which come to him at the sight of a landscape, a work of art. Extraordinarily capable of assimilation, he, to whom Japan has become a second home, has entirely fitted himself into the Japanese life. He is so delighted with the customs, with the political and social conditions, with the simple family life, with the religion, the ceremonies, the ancestor-worship, and with the business intercourse carried on among themselves--which he assures us is characterized by exceptional probity--in short, he is so delighted with all the activities of this people that he thinks them the best possible because they spring from the inmost life of an ethical and never intellectual temperament. Therefore he takes sides with them passionately against the modern tendencies of Europe." (395.) In the opening story, which I think will be found one of his best, is portrayed the manner of a Japanese crowd in dealing with a criminal; and how this criminal was brought to atonement by the gaze of a little child, the son of the man he murdered, while the little one was yet in his mother's womb. The next chapter is a discussion of Japanese Civilization. In 1903 Hearn wrote:-- "The Genius of Japanese Civilization" is a failure. I thought that it was true when I wrote it; but already Japan has become considerably changed, and a later study of ancient social conditions has proved to me that I made some very serious sociological errors in that paper. He shows that in the wonderful development of Japanese power, there is vitally no self-transformation. All that Japan is, she always has been. Nor is there any outward change. "The strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs little material display: both exist where the deepest real power of any great peoples exists,--in the Race Ghost." He contrasts the noise and confusion and vastness of Western cities. The construction of the West is endurance; of Japan impermanency. The very land is a land of impermanence. But in this impermanency Hearn finds the greatest excellence. He contrasts how little impedimenta the Japanese have--by that means alone how independent they are. He shows with what a quiet simplicity Japan has become a great commercial centre. He fears the new Western spirit which threatens her:-- I confess to being one of those who believe that the human heart, even in the history of a race, may be worth infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner or later prove itself infinitely better able to answer all the cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life.--I still believe that the old Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than intellectual beauty. It is the old spirit which found infinite meaning-- in the flushed splendour of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming and the going of the cicadæ, in the dying crimson of autumn foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of wave or cloud. The beautiful voice of a blind peasant woman fills Hearn with gentle memories and an exquisite delight. He muses upon what the meaning of this charm can be; and he realizes that it is the old sorrows and loving impulses of forgotten generations. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains,--to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of some voice that recalls their past. The lovely spirit of showing only one's happiest face to the world is charmingly brought out in the little incident that, when in a railway carriage, a Japanese woman finds herself becoming drowsy, before she nods she covers her face with her long kimono sleeve. Sometimes one may recall the dead, and speak with them. So it happened that O-Tayo heard once again the voice of her little child who begged her not to weep any more, for when mothers weep, the flood of the River of Tears rises so high that the soul cannot pass, and must wander and wander. O-Tayo never wept again, but softly she herself became as a little child. Her good parents built a tiny temple and fitted it with miniature ornaments, and here all day long children came to play games with her. And when at last she died, the children still played there, for as a little girl of nine said, "We shall still play in the Court of Amida. She is buried there. She will hear us and be happy." The pathetic tale of Haru gives an interesting picture of the relation in Japan between man and wife; of the exquisite submission of the wife under the saddest conditions, even to the moment when the little grieved heart, which has never murmured, has the dying strength to utter only the single word, "_Anata_." (Thou.) "A Glimpse of Tendencies" analyzes many conditions in Japan, with various predictions for her future, and speaks of her lack of sympathy for her foreign teachers. In "A Conservative" Hearn gives a searching study of how the evils of our civilization appear to a Japanese youth. "In the chapter, 'The Idea of Pre-existence,' Hearn makes the interesting attempt of bringing the teachings of the Buddhistic religion and the conclusions of modern science into accord. The idea which differentiates the Oriental mode of thinking from our own, which more than any other permeates the whole mental being of the Far-East--'it is universal as the wash of air; it colours every emotion; it influences, directly or indirectly, almost every act'--which inspires the utterances of the people, their proverbs, their pious and profane exclamations, that is the idea of pre-existence. The expression, '_Ingwa_,' which signifies the Karma as inevitable retribution, serves as explanation for all suffering, all pain, all evil. The culprit says: 'That which I did I knew to be wicked when doing; but my _ingwa_ was stronger than my heart,' _Ingwa_ means predestination, determinism, necessity." (395.) In his chapter on "Ancestor-Worship" it is further proved how important a part of the household are the dead. Another delightful study is "Kimiko,"--the story of one who turns dancing-girl out of filial piety. In the height of her fame she falls in love with a rich young man, and he with her. Kimiko is so good a woman at heart, that the man's friends do not object to his marrying her. She refuses, however, for her life has made her unworthy to be wife or mother. The man hopes to change her, but one day she disappears and is utterly lost to sight. Years pass and he marries. At last Kimiko returns as a wandering nun, looks at her lover's little son, whispers a message for the father in his ear, and is gone once more. The grace with which the story is told is inimitable, and the sickly sentimentality that revolts us in the _Dame aux Camelias_ is absent. (381.) GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS[33] (10) is the third book of the Japanese period, and was written at Kobé. In this volume of essays, intermingled with sketches in lighter vein, Hearn continues his philosophical studies. There are the unmistakable signs that even this ardour is losing zest. The charm of Japan is going fast; and after this volume, until his final interpretation, which is a summary of all that has gone before, is reached, we find him seeking material in fairy-tales, legends, and even returning to old thoughts about the West Indian life. [33] Copyright, 1897, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Many of his critics feel that Hearn is becoming too subjective to be quite trustworthy; others feel that he is still too charmed by Japan to render a faithful picture. A review in _Public Opinion_ says:-- "But, this feature of almost pardonable exaggeration pointed out, there is little for the critic to carp at in the majority of the eleven essays that compose the book. The opening paper, 'A Living God,' is a perfect specimen of the author's style, and evinces in a marked degree the influence of Oriental environment on a sensitive mind. It treats of the temples, shrines, and worship of the people, and tells by legend how even a living individual may come to be worshipped as a god by his friends.... "The essay, however, that betrays most strongly the bent of the author's mental metamorphosis, and one, we venture to say, that will be generally challenged is that on 'Faces in Japanese Art.' The contention it embodies, which he boldly fathers, is a flat denial of the truth and worth of our accepted schools of art,--of drawing especially." (376.) Criticizing the chapters on Buddhism in the present book, the _Athenæum_ says:-- "They are finely written, but the Buddhism is the Buddhism of Mr. Hearn, not of China or Japan, or of anywhere else. Nevertheless, we think them the most attractive of these gleanings. Laputa is placed not very far from Japan; to a quasi-Laputa Mr. Hearn has gone, and his Laputian experiences are more interesting than any ordinary terrestrial experiences could have been." (298.) The _Spectator_ says:-- "His chapter on Nirvâna, which he describes as 'a study in synthetic Buddhism,' will be read with very great interest by all who care for the problems involved. There have been plenty of studies of the doctrine of Nirvâna more elaborate and complete, but few more suggestive and more taking.... Mr. Hearn begins by combating the popular Western notion that the idea of Nirvâna signifies to Buddhist minds complete annihilation. The notion is, he declares, erroneous because it contains only half the truth, and a half of the truth which is of no value or interest or intelligibility except when joined to the other half. According to Mr. Hearn, and, indeed, according to 'the better opinion' generally, Nirvâna means not absolute nothingness or complete annihilation, but only the annihilation of what constitutes individualism and personality,--'the annihilation of everything that can be included under the term "I".'" (382.) Hearn makes an elaborate study of the varying stages of births and heavens that one must generally pass through before one rises into the "infinite bliss" of Nirvâna. The chapter closes with this significant sentence:-- The only reality is One;--all that we have taken for Substance is only Shadow;--the physical is the unreal:--_and the outer-man is the ghost_. There are two short chapters devoted to the Japanese Songs. The first songs, "Out of the Street," are, as Manyemon, who would not have the Western people deceived, tells us, the vulgar songs, or those sung by the washermen, carpenters, and bamboo-weavers, etc. The theme always holds some glint of love. Hearn has arranged certain ones in three groups forming a little shadow romance. To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going; Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain. Things never changed since the Time of the Gods: The flowing of water, the Way of Love. The second chapter is devoted to Folk-Songs with Buddhist allusions. Nearly all the arts and the greater number of the industries show the influence of Buddhism. A typical song is:-- Even the knot of the rope tying our boats together Knotted was long ago by some love in a former birth. Another:-- Even while praying together in front of the tablets ancestral, Lovers find chance to murmur prayers never meant for the dead. On the "Trip to Kyôto" there is more to be learned about poor little Yuko, who gave her life for her nation. To the Japanese all the small details of her story are of the greatest importance, and are carefully treasured. Hearn thinks that the Western "refined feeling" might not care for the poor little blood-stained trifles; if so it is to be regretted. In "Dust," with a dainty touch, he teaches again that we are but millions upon billions of dead people; that the cells and the souls are themselves recombinations of old welding of forces--forces of which we know nothing save that they belong "to the Shadow-Makers of universes." You are an individual--but also you are a population! This leads on to the end that In whatsoever time all human minds accord in thought and will with the mind of the Teacher, there shall not remain even one particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood. The last chapter, "Within the Circle," is of a philosophy so impermanent that it seems but Shadow-play, and one may not behold a visible form, for--like all that which it symbolizes--it is but an illusion. EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES[34] (11) faithfully followed the ensuing year. The effort to write is manifest; even to himself Hearn is admitting that the _frisson_ which Japan gave him is passing. He is beginning to make copy; and the subjects are becoming more vague, vapoury, and ghostly. [34] Copyright, 1898, by Little, Brown and Company. I must eat some humble pie. My work during the past ten months has been rather poor. Why, I cannot quite understand--because it costs me more effort. Anyhow, I have had to rewrite ten essays: they greatly improved under the process. I am trying now to get a Buddhist commentary for them--mostly to be composed of texts dealing with pre-existence and memory of former lives. I took for subjects the following:--Beauty is Memory--why beautiful things bring sadness;--the Riddle of Touch--_i. e._ the thrill that a touch gives;--the Perfume of Youth;--the Reason of the Pleasure of the Feeling Evoked by Bright Blue;--the Pain Caused by Certain Kinds of Red;--Mystery of Certain Musical Effects;--Fear of Darkness and the Feeling of Dreams. Queer subjects, are they not? I think of calling the collection "Retrospectives. The _Athenæum_, that wise critic, feels that in this book Hearn "shows himself at his best. He is more subdued," it says, "than is his wont, and indulges less freely in excessive laudation and needless disparagement. The chapters on 'Insect Musicians,' on the 'Literature of the Dead,' and--oddly as it may sound to us--on 'Frogs,' are among the most delightful of all his writings. The keynote of all is struck in the pretty stanza that heads the first of the three:-- _Mushi, yo mushi, Naïté ingwa ga Tsukuru nara?_ (Insect, O insect! Singing fulfil you Your fire-life and all life!) "The translation is ours. The fondness of the Japanese for many kinds of chirping insects, which they keep in little bamboo-cages, is one of the prettiest of the surviving echoes of the past. The plaintive little cry satisfies the curious melancholy that characterizes the reflective moods of the lieges of Mutsu. In the long series of changes that is to end in perfect Buddha-forms, there is hope always, but always tinged with the sadness of vague memories of past pains, and the resigned dread of sorrows to come, one knows not how oft to be repeated ere in 'Nirvâna' all earthly moods are lost. There is a regular trade in these tiny songsters, of the history of which Mr. Hearn tells the pleasant story." (299.) Hearn leads us to a cemetery in a quaint lonesome garden, and teaches us something about the wonderful texts and inscriptions that are chiselled into the stone of the tombs, or painted on the wooden _sotoba_, and go to form the important literature of the dead. A suggestive _sotoba_-text is:-- The Amida-Kyô says: "All who enter into that country enter likewise into that state of virtue from which there can be no turning back." From the Kaimyô which is engraved on the tomb, we may select:-- _Koji_-- (Bright-Sun-on-the-Way-of-the-Wise, in the Mansion of Luminous Mind.) _Koji_-- (Effective-Benevolence-Hearing-with-Pure-Heart-the-Supplications -of-the-Poor,--dwelling in the Mansion of the Virtue of Pity.) The frog is another favourite of the Japanese. There is one special variety called the Kajika, or true singing-frog of Japan, which is kept as a pet in a little cage. For over a hundred years the frog has been the subject of numerous poems. Many of these little verses are love-poems, for the lovers' trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is at its height. Here is a quotation from the Anthology called "Kokinshû," compiled A.D. 905, by the poet Ki-no-Tsurayuki:-- The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart, and thence has grown into a multiform utterance. Man in this world, having a thousand million of things to undertake and to complete, has been moved to express his thoughts and his feelings concerning all that he sees and hears. When we hear the _uguisu_ singing among flowers, and the voice of the _kawazu_ which inhabits the waters, what mortal (_lit. "who among the living that lives"_) does not compose poems? A charming frog poem is:-- _Té wo tsuité Uta moshi-aguru, Kawazu kana!_ (With hand resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!) And another:-- _Tamagawa no Hito wo mo yogizu Naku kawazu, Kono yû kikéba Oshiku ya wa aranu?_ (Hearing to-night the frogs of the Jewel River--or Tamagawa, that sing without fear of man, how can I help loving the passing moment?) A vivid chapter is Hearn's description of his ascent of Fuji-no-Yama. Here he may once again use his palette of many colours, but certainly not with the old _abandon_. Brighter and brighter glows the gold. Shadows come from the west,--shadows flung by cloud-pile over cloud-pile; and these, like evening shadows upon snow, are violaceous blue.... Then orange-tones appear in the horizon; then smouldering crimson. And now the greater part of the Fleece of Gold has changed to cotton again,--white cotton mixed with pink.... Stars thrill out. The cloud-waste uniformly whitens;--thickening and packing to the horizon. The west glooms. Night rises; and all things darken except that wondrous unbroken world-round of white,--the Sea of Cotton. A lurking of the gruesome flashes out when the snow-patches against the miles of black soot and ashes on the mountain make him think "of a gleam of white teeth I once saw in a skull,--a woman's skull,--otherwise burnt to a sooty crisp." "Retrospectives" is a group of gentle reveries, where we may muse with Hearn on such elusive themes as the "Sadness in Beauty," for beauty has no real existence, it is the emotion of the dead within us. Or there is the analysis of that favourite word _frisson_, "the touch that makes a thrill within you is a touch that you have felt before,--sense-echo of forgotten intimacies in many unremembered lives." "Azure Psychology" and "A Red Sunset" recall Hearn's earlier criticisms on colour. IN GHOSTLY JAPAN[35] (12) followed. The title is revelatory of the Japan that is to people this book and those which are to come. In the opening chapter Hearn crystallizes in a powerful sketch the sum of Buddhist lore. Of this the _Academy_ writes:-- [35] Copyright, 1899, by Little, Brown and Company. "Of Nirvâna one carries away this one picture, painted in words curiously colourless and intangible--the picture of a mountain up whose steep side toil two creatures--the soul and his guide--toiling, stumbling upwards over a brittle and friable chaos of skulls. Skulls crumbled into powder and skulls crumbling mark out the road; 'and every skull,' says the guide, 'is yours, and has been yours in some past incarnation; and the dust that rises round your present body is the dust of your past and deserted bodies that have served you well or ill as may be in your past lives.' In the fine and bewildering haze of this thought we lose our poet, and henceforward he is not a face nor a voice, but an echo of a living man's voice. We hear the echo, but the voice we do not hear. And we grudge the voice, even to Nirvâna where all silences are merged in one." (286.) In a beautiful chapter Hearn outlines all that might be written about the important subject of incense. He tells a good deal about its religious, luxurious, and ghostly uses. There is also a charming custom of giving parties where dainty games are played with it. Sometimes there can be love between the living and the dead, or so it appears in the ghostly story of "A Passional Karma," or O-Tsuyu, who died of love of Shinzaburô and returns to be his bride. Every night, by the light of their Peony Lanterns, she, accompanied by her maid, comes to keep the ghostly tryst. Shinzaburô does not know that O-Tsuyu is dead, but his servant Tomozô, overhearing voices, gazes through a chink, and sees-- the face of a woman long dead,--and the fingers caressing were fingers of naked bone,--and of the body below the waist there was not anything: it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow. Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the eyes of the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death. Now he whose bride is a ghost cannot live. No matter what force flows in his blood he must certainly perish. Shinzaburô is warned and an amulet to protect him from the dead is given to him, but treachery is played, and the amulet is stolen; so one morning Tomozô finds his master hideously dead;--and the face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear;--and lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast about his neck. The gentle heart of the Japanese shines in the chapter on "Bits of Poetry." You might find yourself, Hearn says, in a community so poor that you could not even buy a cup of real tea, but no place could you discover "where there is nobody capable of making a poem." Poems are written on all occasions and for all occasions. Poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil;--for example, upon braziers, iron-kettles, vases, wooden-trays, lacquer-ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,--even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women's crêpe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco-pouches. A Japanese artist would not think of elaborating a sketch, and a poem to be perfect must also only stir one's fancy. _Ittakkiri_, meaning "entirely vanished" in the sense of "all told," is a term applied contemptuously to him who expresses all his thought. Japan is rich in proverbs. Hearn has translated one hundred examples of Buddhist proverbs. _Karu-toki no Jizô-gao; nasu-toki no Emma-gao._ (Borrowing-time, the face of Jizô; repaying-time, the face of Emma.) _Sodé no furi-awasé mo tashô no en._ (Even the touching of sleeves in passing is caused by some relation in a former life.) A powerful relic of the old clinging love of the gruesome is the story of _Ingwa-banashi_. The _daimyô's_ wife knew that she was dying; and she thought of many things, especially of her husband's favourite, the Lady Yukiko, who was nineteen years old. She begged her husband to send for the Lady Yukiko, whom, she said, she loved as a sister. After the dying wife had told Lady Yukiko it was her wish that she should become the wife of their dear lord, she begged that Yukiko would carry her on her back to see the cherry-bloom. As a nurse turns her back to a child, that the child may cling to it, Yukiko offered her shoulders to the wife, and said:-- "Lady, I am ready: please tell me how I best can help you." "Why, this way!" responded the dying woman, lifting herself with an almost superhuman effort by clinging to Yukiko's shoulders. But as she stood erect, she quickly slipped her thin hands down over the shoulders, under the robe, and clutched the breasts of the girl, and burst into a wicked laugh. "I have my wish!" she cried--"I have my wish for the cherry-bloom, but not the cherry-bloom of the garden!... I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it!--oh, what a delight!" And with these words she fell forward upon the crouching girl, and died. When the attendants tried to lift the body from Yukiko's shoulders, they found that the hands of the dead had grown into the quick flesh of the breasts of the girl. And they could not be removed. A skilful physician was called, and he decided that the hands could be amputated only at the wrists, and so this was done. But the hands still clung to the breasts; and there they soon darkened and dried up like the hands of a person long dead. Yet this was only the beginning of the horror. Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir--stealthily, like great grey spiders. And nightly thereafter,--beginning always at the Hour of the Ox,--they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease. Yukiko cut off her hair, and became a mendicant-nun. Every day she prayed to the dead for pardon, and every night the torture was renewed. This continued for more than seventeen years until Yukiko was heard of no more. SHADOWINGS[36] (13) appeared the next year, 1900. Of this volume the _Bookman_ says:-- [36] Copyright, 1900, by Little, Brown and Company. "He gives us several essays upon matters Japanesque, which obviously involve no small amount of erudition and patient research. Such are his papers upon the various species of _Sémi_, or Japanese singing-locusts, and on the complicated etiquette of Japanese female names. But the distinctive feature of this volume is the first half, which is given up to a collection of curious tales by native writers, weird, uncanny, little stories, most of them, of ghouls and wraiths, and vampires, or at least the nearest Japanese equivalents for such Occidental spectres." (316.) The _Athenæum_ does not find "Shadowings" equal to the volume "Exotics." It thinks that Hearn is "perilously near exhausting his repertory of _Kokin_ [one-stringed fiddle] themes." "The stories with which the present volume opens have no particular merit: they have lost their chief and real advantage--their local colour--in Hearnesque translation, and seem to be little more than suggestions or drafts of 'nouvelles,' out of which skilful hands might perhaps have made something much better. A good example is the story of the Screen Maiden, which is a most lame presentment of a charming motif. The chapters on female names, on _sémi_, couplets and 'Old Japanese Songs' are more interesting, but only to those who possess a considerable knowledge of old Japanese life and literature.... Of the 'Old Japanese Songs'--where is the proof of their antiquity?--much the best is the dance-ballad of the dragon-maid, who bewitched a _yamabushi_, and chased him over moor and hill and river, until the temple of Dojo was reached, under the great bell of which the trembling hill-warrior or outlaw (_yamabushi_ were such originally in all probability) hid himself, whereupon the dragon-maid wrapped her body round the bell once and again and the third time the bell melted and flowed away like boiling water. And with it, according to the legend, flowed away the ashes of the unwilling object of the dragon-maid's affections, consumed not through love, but through disdain." (300.) Strange things happen in the group of tales, and not the least is the tale of the maiden in the screen whose loveliness so bewitches a youth that he becomes sick unto death. Then an old scholar tells him that the person whom the picture represents is dead, but since the painter painted her mind as well as her form, her spirit lives in the picture and he may yet win her. So every day, Tokkei, following out the old scholar's injunctions, sits before the portrait calling softly the maiden's name. And finally after many days the maiden answered, "_Hai!_" And stepping down from out the screen, she kneels to take the cup of wine (which was to be so), whispering charmingly, "How could you love me so much?" Also there is the tale of the Corpse Rider, in which the husband had to ride for one whole night, so far that he could not know the distance, the dead body of his divorced wife; and this was to save him from her vengeance. The gruesome gleams here, and again in the tale of "The Reconciliation," when the repentant husband found that the wife he was holding in his arms is "a corpse so wasted that little remained save the bones, and the long black tangled hair." There is no small amount of etiquette in the prefixes and suffixes of the Japanese female names. The majority of the _Yobina_, or personal names, are not æsthetic. Some are called after the flowers, and there are also place names, as for instance _Miné_ (Peak) _Hama_ (Shore); but the large proportion express moral or mental attributes. Tenderness, kindness, deftness, cleverness, are frequently represented by _yobina;_ but appellations implying physical charm, or suggesting æsthetic ideas only, are comparatively uncommon. One reason for the fact may be that very æsthetic names are given to _geisha_ and to _jôro_, and consequently vulgarized. But the chief reason certainly is that the domestic virtues still occupy in the Japanese moral estimate a place not less important than that accorded to religious faith in the life of our own Middle Ages. Not in theory only, but in every-day practice, moral beauty is placed far above physical beauty; and girls are usually selected as wives, not for their good looks, but for their domestic qualities. I give a few names gleaned from Hearn's lists:--_O-Jun_--"Faithful-to-death"; _O-Tamé_--"For-the-sake-of,"--a name suggesting unselfishness; _O-Chika_--"Closely Dear"; _O-Suki_--"The Beloved"--_Aimée_; _O-Taë_--"The Exquisite"; _Tokiwa_--"Eternally Constant." From the "Fantasies," we read of the Mystery of Crowds, and the horrors of Gothic Architecture, the joys of levitation while one is asleep--with a moral attached; of Noctilucæ. Also, as we gaze with the adolescent youth into a pair of eyes we come to know that The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning-star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,--a ghost-light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust. Thus, and only thus, the depth of that gaze is the depth of the Sea of Death and Birth, and its mystery is the World-Soul's vision, watching us out of the silent vast of the Abyss of Being. Thus, and only thus, do truth and illusion mingle in the magic of eyes,--the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present;--and the sudden splendour in the soul of the Seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet-lightning of the Infinite Memory. A JAPANESE MISCELLANY[37] (14) was the next book. What does the memory hold of these stories and sketches? Surely that picture of Old Japan with its charming sentiment for Dragon-flies, to which such delicate poems were written. [37] Copyright, 1901, by Little, Brown and Company. _Tombô no Ha-ura ni sabishi,-- Aki-shiguré._ (Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under-side of the leaf--Ah! the autumn-rains!) And that verse by the mother poet, who seeing many children playing their favourite pastime of chasing butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:-- _Tombô-tsuri!-- Kyô wa doko madé Itta yara!_ (Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where _he_ has gone to-day!) Then there are the children's songs about Nature and her tiny creatures, and all their little songs for their plays; the songs which tell a story, and the sweet mother songs that lull the babies to sleep. How we pity poor misguided O-Dai, who forgot loyalty to her ancestors to follow the teachings of the Western faith. At its bidding even the sacred tablets and the scroll were cast away. And when she had forsaken everything, and had become as an outcast with her own people, the good missionaries found they needed a more capable assistant. Poor little weak O-Dai, without the courage to fill her sleeves with stones and then slip into the river, longing for the sunlight, and so "flung into the furnace of a city's lust." We hear the gruesome tinkle of the dead wife's warning bell, and we certainly shudder before the vision of her robed in her grave-shroud:-- "Eyeless she came--because she had long been dead;--and her loosened hair streamed down about her face;--and she looked without eyes through the tangle of it; and spake without a tongue." Then the hideous horror of the evil crime, as this dead wife in her jealousy tore off the head of the sleeping young wife. The terrified husband following the trail of blood found a nightmare-thing that chippered like a bat: the figure of the long-buried woman erect before her tomb,--in one hand clutching a bell, in the other the dripping head.... For a minute the three stood numbed. Then one of the men-at-arms, uttering a Buddhist invocation, drew, and struck at the shape. Instantly it crumbled down upon the soil,--an empty scattering of grave-rags, bones, and hair;--and the bell rolled clanking out of the ruin. But the fleshless right hand, though parted from the wrist, still writhed; and its fingers still gripped at the bleeding head--and tore, and mangled,--as the claws of the yellow crab fast to a fallen fruit. Who but Hearn would have chosen this ghastly scene, and described it with such terrible reality? With the parents we have unravelled the mystery of Kinumé, whose spirit belonged to one family, and whose body was the child of the other. Perhaps we still see the famous picture of Kwashin Koji, which had a soul, for "it is well known that some sparrows, painted upon a sliding screen (_fusuma_) by Hôgen Yenshin, once flew away, leaving blank the spaces which they had occupied upon the surface. Also it is well known that a horse painted upon a certain Kakémono, used to go out at night to eat grass." So the water in the picture on the screen of Kwashin overflowed into the room, and the boat thereon glided forth, but not a ripple from the oar was heard. Then Kwashin Koji climbed into the boat, and it receded into the picture, and the water dried in the room. Over the painted water slipped the painted vessel until all disappeared, and Kwashin was heard of no more. And we remember too the strange brave way that Umétsu Chûbei won the gift of great strength for his children, and their children's children. The _Athenæum_ finds the story of Kwashin the best of this collection. Speaking of the study, "On a Bridge," it says:-- "The author narrates a personal experience of a _riksha_ man who drew him across an old bridge near Kumamoto. It was in the time of the Satsuma _muhon_ (rebellion), some twenty-two years earlier, that the _Kurumaya_ (_riksha_ man) was stopped on the bridge by three men, who were dressed as peasants, but had very long swords under their raincoats. After a time a cavalry officer came along from the city. The moment the horse got on the bridge the three men turned and leaped:--and one caught the horse's bridle; and another gripped the officer's arm; and the third cut off his head--all in a moment.... I never saw anything done so quickly. "The seeming peasants then waited, and presently another cavalry officer came and was murdered in like manner. Then came a third, who met a similar fate. Lastly, the peasants went away, having thrown the bodies into the river, but taking the heads with them. The man had never mentioned the matter till long after the war--why? 'Because it would have been ungrateful.' "No doubt this is a true story." (301.) It was probably during the ensuing year that Hearn contributed to the Japanese Fairy Tale Series (15), published in Tôkyô, his renditions of four of these stories. KOTTÔ[38] (16) followed. Says the _Athenæum_:-- "The gem of this volume is 'A Woman's Diary,' purporting to be 'the history of a woman's married life recorded by herself, found in a small _haribako_ (work-box) which had belonged to her.' It is an ordinary story, not in the least sensational, yet pitiful and even touching in its record of poverty and suffering, showing the hardships and small enjoyment--according to our notions, at least--of the colourless existence led by the bulk of the Japanese poorer classes upon a total family wage of twelve pounds a year or less." (302.) [38] Copyright, 1902, by the Macmillan Company. Except for "A Woman's Diary" and "Fireflies" the tales in "Kottô" are fragmentary. Some are gruesome as the history of the Gaki; or as the story of O-Katsu-San, who was so bold as to go by night to Yurei-Daki, and who to win her bet brought back the little money-box of the gods. But when she came to give her baby his milk,-- Out of the wrappings unfastened there fell to the floor a blood-soaked bundle of baby clothes that left exposed two very small brown feet, and two very small brown hands--nothing more. The child's head had been torn off! There is also the story of O-Kamé, who returned each night to haunt her husband; of Chûgorô, who was bewitched by a beautiful woman whom he married beneath the waters. But he sickened and died, for his blood had been drained by his Circe, who was "simply a Frog,--a great and ugly Frog!" The literature and the significance of the fire-flies holds an important place with the Japanese, and for more than a thousand years the poets have been making verses about these little creatures. A sketch in which Hearn is most fortunate is "Pathological," where Tama, the mother-cat, dreams of her dead kittens-- coos to them, and catches for them small shadowy things,--perhaps even brings to them, through some dim window ofmemory, a sandal of ghostly straw.... Beautiful is the "Revery of Mother-Love":-- Yet those countless solar fires, with their viewless millions of living planets, must somehow reappear: again the wondrous Cosmos, self-born as self-consumed, must resume its sidereal whirl over the deeps of the eternities. And the love that strives for ever with death shall rise again, through fresh infinitudes of pain, to renew the everlasting battle. The light of the mother's smile will survive our sun;--the thrill of her kiss will last beyond the thrilling of stars;--the sweetness of her lullaby will endure in the cradle-songs of worlds yet unevolved;--the tenderness of her faith will quicken the fervour of prayers to be made to the hosts of another heaven,--to the gods of a time beyond Time. And the nectar of her breasts can never fail: that snowy stream will still flow on, to nourish the life of some humanity more perfect than our own, when the Milky Way that spans our night shall have vanished for ever out of Space. Like unto the Soul is a Drop of Dew for Your personality signifies, in the eternal order, just as much as the especial motion of molecules in the shivering of any single drop. Perhaps in no other drop will the thrilling and the picturing be ever exactly the same; but the dews will continue to gather and to fall, and there will always be quivering pictures.... The very delusion of delusions is the idea of death as loss. KWAIDAN[39] (17) was the book before "Japan," which was published after Hearn's death. It is a collection of old stories, many of them of the gruesome, and of careful studies of ants, mosquitoes, and butterflies. Striking is the tale of Yuki-Onna, the snow-woman, as is also the incident of Riki-Baka. One bewitched by the dead is Mimi-Nashi-Hôïchi, whose ears were torn off because the holy texts which were written everywhere else upon his body were there forgotten. Sonjô, the hunter, killed the mate of a female _oshidori_, who after appearing to him in a dream as a beautiful woman, who rebukes him the following day as a bird, tears open her body, and dies before his eyes. O-Tei is reborn in the shape of a woman that she may wed years later her promised husband--Nagao Chôsei of Echigo. So loyal is the love of O-Sodé, the milk-nurse, that the cherry-tree which is planted in commemoration of her, on the anniversary of her death, blossoms in a wonderful way. Because of his selfish wickedness in thinking only of the gains in his profession, a priest was made to be reborn into the state of a _jikininki_, who had to devour the corpses of people who died in his district. Other devourers of human flesh are the Rokuro-Kubi. The head of a Rokuro-Kubi separates itself from its body. [39] Copyright, 1904, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. JAPAN[40] (18): AN ATTEMPT AT INTERPRETATION is the last book that Hearn published. He was reading its proofs at the time of his death. Although a posthumous volume appeared, this may rightly be termed his final word. It is the crystallization and the summary of all that has been said before. It contains a group of twenty-one lectures, which Hearn had expected at first to deliver at Cornell University. His own words will best reveal their import:-- [40] Copyright, 1904, by the Macmillan Company. They will form a book explaining Japan from the standpoint of ancestor-worship. They are suited only to a cultivated audience. The substantial idea of the lectures is that Japanese society represents the condition of ancient Greek society a thousand years before Christ. I am treating of religious Japan,--not of artistic or economical Japan except by way of illustration. "The history of Japan is really the history of her religion," is the key to the book. The _Academy_ remarks:-- "No one who wishes to understand the possibilities of the future of Japan can afford to neglect the past, and no one who would grasp the meaning of the past can afford to neglect Mr. Hearn's fine and thoughtful work." (288.) In a review Mr. Griffis says:-- "They felt that he had done his best and was degenerating. Yet here is a work which is a classic in science, a wonder of interpretation. It is the product of long years of thought, of keenest perception, or marvellous comprehension. "One cannot quote, one must read this work. It shows the Japanese under his armour, modern science. The Japanese, outwardly, are ruled by treaties, diplomacy, governments, codes, Imperial Diet, armies and battleships--all modern and external. Inwardly they--that is, forty-nine millions of them--are governed by ghosts. The graveyard is the true dictator. It is ever their 'illustrious ancestors' who achieve victories. They, as a nation, are superbly organized for war. There is no originality, no personality, no individuality worth speaking of in the island empire. It is all done by the government, the community. In social evolution the Japanese are even yet far behind the Romans, and much as the pre-Homeric Greeks. "In a word, Lafcadio Hearn outdoes the missionaries in dogmatism, exceeds even the hostile propagandist in telling the naked truth. Devoted friend of Japan, he excels the sworn enemies of her religions in laying bare, though with admiration, the realities.... Lafcadio Hearn turns the white and searching beams on the ship and man.... His book is a re-reading of all Japanese history, a sociological appraisement of the value of Japanese civilization, and a warning against intolerant propaganda of any sort whatever. This book is destined to live, and to cause searchings of heart among those who imagine that the Japanese soul has been changed in fifty years." (326.) From the _Spectator_ I quote:-- "Both the prose and poetry of Japanese life are infused into Mr. Hearn's charming pages. Nobody, so far as we know, has given a better description of the fascination which Japanese life has at first for such as enter into its true spirit, and of its gradual disappearance.... Of course it must be remembered that this charm of Japan was something more than a beautiful mirage. 'Old Japan,' in the opinion of Mr. Hearn, 'came nearer to the achievement of the highest moral ideal than our far more evolved societies can hope to do for many a hundred years. Curiously enough, it was under the shadow of the sword that the fascinating life of Japan matured; universal politeness was nurtured by the knowledge that any act of rudeness might, and probably would, cause a painful and immediate death. This supremacy of the sword, governed by the noble rule of _bushi-do_, hardened the Japanese temper into the wonderful spirit of self-sacrifice and patriotism which is now making itself apparent in the stress of war. All this is admirably portrayed in Mr. Hearn's pages,--the swan-song of a very striking writer." (383.) In _The American Journal of Sociology_ there is a review of this book, by Edmund Buckley of the University of Chicago, which is so admirable and inclusive that I have obtained Professor Buckley's kind permission to quote it in its entirety. This review leaves small margin for further comment. But it is to be regretted that space will not permit citations of Hearn's tributes to the Japanese home, woman and character. "On p. 160 of W. E. Griffis' 'The Mikado's Empire,' is textual evidence that, so late as 1876, intelligent men, and theologians at that--rather, in sooth, because they are theologians--could harbour such atrocious notions about Shintôism, the ethnic faith of the Japanese, as the following: 'Shintô is in no proper sense of the term a religion.... In its lower forms it is blind obedience to governmental and priestly dictates.' The present reviewer bears these Christian apologists and heathen defamers 'witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.' They wrote in the days when hierology (comparative religion) was still inchoate, for C. P. Ticle's 'Elements' did not appear in its English dress until 1877; and when Japan's abasement before the 'Christian' powers was complete, and therefore everything Japanese assumed to be worthless. But the reaction came, of course, and is now pretty well completed. Japan's novel yet glorious art conquered the world; Japan's new yet ever-victorious army has conquered Russia's imposing array; and now Mr. Hearn completely routs the contemners of a people's sincere faith. The consensus of hierologists that no people was ever found without a religion had already been given; and the creed, cult, and ethics of Shintôism had been correctly described; but it remained for Mr. Hearn to give a more complete and intimate account than had previously been done of the ancestorism in Shintô and of its profound influence upon politics and morality. "It will surprise no one to learn that Mr. Hearn overdid his contention, just because such excess is the well-nigh inevitable reaction from the underestimate that he found current and sought to correct. As he states the case on p. 4: 'Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has been written of chiefly by the sworn enemies of that religion; by others it has been almost entirely ignored.' But now that 'see-saw' has followed 'see,' we may hope to win a final equilibrium of correct appreciation. To this end several corrections are called for; but, before they are made, clearness will be secured by a concise analysis of the treatise; for in its course religion, politics, and morality are interwoven on a historic warp. The entire fabric runs about as follows: (Chap. 3.) The real religion of the Japanese is ancestorism, which showed in three cults--the domestic, the communal, and the state. The domestic arose first, but the primitive family might include hundreds of households. Ancestorism in Japan confirms Spencer's exposition of religious origins. The greater gods were all evolved from ghost-cults. Good men made good gods; bad men, bad ones. (Chap. 4.) The domestic cult began in offerings of food and drink made at the grave; then, under Chinese influence, was transferred to the home before tablets; where it was maintained until this present by Buddhism. Thin tablets of white wood, inscribed with the names of the dead, are placed in a miniature wooden shrine, which is kept upon a shelf in some inner chamber. Tiny offerings of food, accompanied with brief prayer, must be made each day by some member of the household in behalf of all; for the blessed dead still need sustenance, and in return can guard the house. The Buddhist rite, however, made prayer, not _to_, but _for_ these dead. The Japanese scholar Hirata is correct when he declares the worship of ancestors to be the mainspring of all virtues. (Chap. 5.) The family was united only by religion. The father--not the mother--was supposed to be the life-giver, and was therefore responsible for the cult. Hence the inferior position of woman. The ancestral ghost of an _uji_, or family of several households, became later the _ujigami_, or local tutelar god. Subordination of young to old, of females to males, and of the whole family to its chief, who was at once ruler and priest, shows that the family organization was religious and not marital. Both monogamy and the practice of parents selecting their child's spouse arose because best accordant with religion. Later custom makes the decision, not of the father alone, but of the household and kindred, determinative of any important step. "(Chap. 6.) The communal cult of the district ruled the family in all its relations to the outer world. The _ujigami_, or clan-god, was the spirit rather of a former ruler than of a common ancestor. Hochiman was a ruler, but Kasuga an ancestor. Beside the _uji_ temple of a district, there may be a more important one dedicated to some higher deity. Every _ujiko_ or parishioner is taken to the _ujigami_ when one month old and dedicated to him. Thereafter he attends the temple festivals, which combine fun with piety; and he makes the temple groves his playground. Grown up, he brings his children here; and, if he leaves home, pays his respects to the god on leaving and returning. Thus the social bond of each community was identical with the religious bond, and the cult of the _ujigami_ embodied the moral experience of the community. The individual of such a community enjoyed only a narrowly restricted liberty. Shintôism had no moral code, because at this stage of ancestor-cult religion and ethics coincide. "(Chap. 7.) The great gods of nature were developed from ancestor-worship, though their real history has been long forgotten. (Chap. 8.) Rites of worship and of purification were many. (Chap. 9.) The rule of the dead extended to moral conduct and even to sumptuary matters, language, and amusements. (Chap. 10.) Buddhism absorbed the native ancestor-cult, but prescribed that prayers be said for them, not to them. In accordance with its principle, 'First observe the person, then preach the law'--that is, accommodate instruction to the hearer's capacity--Buddhism taught the masses metempsychosis instead of palingenesis, and the paradise of Amida instead of the nirvâna of Buddha. Buddhism rendered its greatest service to Japan by education in the learning and arts of China. (Chap. 11.) The higher Buddhism is a kind of monism. "(Chap. 12.) Japanese society was simply an amplification of the patriarchal family, and its clan-groups never united into a coherent body until 1871. At first the bulk of the people were slaves or serfs, but from the seventh century a large class of freedmen--farmers and artisans--came into existence. The first period of Japanese social evolution was based on a national head, the Mikado, and a national cult, Shintôism; it began in this seventh century, but developed to the limit of its type only under the Tokugawa shoguns, in the seventeenth century. "Next to the priest-emperor at the head came the _kugé_, or ancient nobility, from whose ranks most of the latter regents and shoguns were drawn. Next ranked the _buké_ or _samurai_, which was the professional military class, and was ruled by nearly three hundred _daimyô_, or feudal lords of varying importance. Next came the commonalty, _heimin_, with three classes--farmers, artisans, and tradesmen, the last being despised by the _samurai_, who also could cut down any disrespectful _heimin_ with impunity. Lowest of all came the _chori_--pariahs, who were not counted Japanese at all, but _mono_-'things.' But even among them distinctions arose according to occupation. The close care taken of the native religion by the government precluded rise of a church. Nor was Buddhism, divided into hostile sects and opposed by the _samurai_, ever able to establish a hierarchy independent of the government. Personal freedom was suppressed, as it would be now under Socialism, which is simply a reversion to an overcome type. "(Chap. 13.) The second period of Japanese social evolution lasted from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, and was marked by dominance over the mikadoate of successive dynasties of shoguns. The permanence of this mikadoate amid all perturbations of the shogunate was owing to its religious nature. (Chap. 14.) Following the lord in death, suicide, and vendetta were customs based on loyalty, and they involved the noblest self-sacrifice. (Chap. 15.) Catholic missions were suppressed lest they should lead to the political conquest of Japan. (Chap. 16.) The Tokugawa shoguns exercised iron discipline, and now were brought to perfection those exquisite arts and manners of the Japanese. (Chap. 17.) A revival of learning, begun in the eighteenth century, slowly led to a new nationalist support of the Mikado; and when by 1891 the shogun had resigned and the daimiates been abolished, the third period in Japan's social evolution began. (Chap. 18.) In spite of outward seeming, the ancient social conditions and ancestor-cult still control every action. (Chap. 19.) The individual is still restrained by the conventions of the masses, by communistic guilds of craftsmen, and by the government's practice of taking loyal service in all its departments without giving adequate pecuniary reward. (Chap. 20.) The educational system still maintains the old communism by training, not for individual ability, but for co-operative action. This is favoured, too, by the universal practice of rich men meeting the personal expenses of promising students. (Chap. 21.) Japanese loyalty and courage will support her army and navy, but industrial competition with other peoples calls for individual freedom. (Chap. 22.) The Japanese are not indifferent to religion, and can be understood only by a study of their religious and social evolution. Future changes will be social, but ancestor-cult will persist, and offers an insuperable obstacle to the spread of Christianity. "The critical reader will not have failed to meet in this summary many positions that challenge his previous knowledge, and whether these be correct or not can be determined only by an examination of the full text, which it eminently deserves. The reviewer, however, will confine himself to certain matters that seem to him the dominating errors of the whole. Probably three greater errors were never compressed into a single sentence than in this from p. 27: 'The real religion of Japan, the religion still professed in one form or another by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilized religion and of all civilized society--ancestor-worship.' That ancestor-worship is still professed by the entire nation is negatived by all we know from other sources as well as all we should expect. The ancestor-worship native to Japan had been appropriated by Buddhism; and, since the revolution of 1868 with its disestablishment of that church, the Butsudan, where the tablets were kept, has been largely sold as an art object or has been simply disused. The _mitamaya_ mentioned on p. 50, as if in extensive use for ancestor-worship, is found only in a few purist families, and is known to the mass of Japanese only as the rear apartment or structure of a Shintôist shrine. "That ancestor-worship is 'the real religion of Japan' and 'has been the foundation of all civilized religion' are errors that Mr. Hearn owes to Herbert Spencer's influence, which is confessed here, and indeed is evident throughout the work. Perhaps nothing has brought Spencer into more discredit than the lengths he went to prove this basic nature of ancestorism in his 'Principles of Sociology,' and the reader of pp. 121-24 of Mr. Hearn's work will readily see how futile also is the attempt to show that the nature-deities of Shintôism were only 'transfigured ghosts.' No, indeed, God did not make man and leave ghosts to make him religious. The heaven and the earth were here before ghosts, and man could personify them just as soon as he knew himself as a person, which he must have done long before he analyzed himself into a ghost-soul and a body. Had Mr. Hearn not ignored Réville, Max Müller, Pfleiderer, and Saussaye, while steeping himself in Spencer, he might have observed, what is plainly visible in Shintôism as elsewhere: that religion has _two_ tap roots, ancestorism indeed, but also naturism. "Again, Mr. Hearn's sentence declares that ancestor-worship is 'the foundation of all civilized society.' This is the prevailing view throughout the work; for example, on pp. 23, 57, 86, 99, 175, and 320. But other passages imply the saner view that religion and morality are coordinate functions of one man. Thus at p. 511, Mr. Hearn attributes Japan's power to 'her old religious and social training.' The many and strong cases of influence of religion upon conduct that can really be shown in Japan amount only to influence, of course, and not to 'foundation' or 'origination,' A quite transparent case of Mr. Hearn's error is where (p. 152) he attributes the exceptional cleanliness of the Japanese to their religion, which here, as usual, he sums up as ancestor-worship. One wonders, however, why this world-wide phenomenon of religion should determine a Japanese cleanliness; why ancestor-worshippers are not always clean; as for example the Chinese, who bathe most rarely. It seems saner to seek a cause for the unique daily bath of the Japanese in their also uniquely numerous thermal springs, which occur in no less than 388 different localities. Symbolism did indeed in Japan, as elsewhere, lead to religious bathing in rivers; but bathing in rivers, as in ocean, was never popular in Japan until recently learned from the foreigner; whereas the thermal springs are crowded, and the daily baths at home are always taken exceedingly hot after the thermal pattern, for these have been found not only cleansing, but curing and warming, the last quality being a great merit where winters are cold and houses unheated. "Finally, the reader need not expect to meet here any adequate reference to those vices that have been fostered by religion in Japan. The concubinage, confirmed by ancestorism, is once mentioned; and the harlotry, promoted by phallicism (the phallos was frequently found in a brothel, though not exclusively there, of course), is relegated to a simple footnote. But such matters can be learned elsewhere, whereas the close and frequent points of influence which religion exercised upon politics and morality in Japan can nowhere else be so well studied as here." (292.) THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY[41] (19) is Hearn's posthumous book. The last memories are of the "Weaving Lady of the Milky Way"; of "Goblin Poetry"; of "Ultimate Questions," which are called forth by the essay of that name written by the author of the "Synthetic Philosophy"; of the "Mirror Maiden" whom Matsumura, the priest, saved from the well, and who repaid him by good-fortune. Moreover, of the alluring maiden in the dream of Itô Norisuké--if one is to choose a ghost for a bride, who would not seek Himégimi-Sama? As a finale there is the picture of Admiral Tôgô sending to Tôkyô "for some flowering-trees in pots--inasmuch as his responsibilities allowed him no chance of seeing the cherry-flowers and the plum-blossoms in their season." [41] Copyright, 1905, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. BIBLIOGRAPHY I AMERICAN AND ENGLISH EDITIONS[42] ORIGINAL WORKS (Nos. 1-19) [42] For the English Editions, the English Catalogue of Books has been followed. No. 1. 1884. STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE. Stories reconstructed from the Anvari-Soheïli, Baitál, Pachísí, Mahabharata, Pantchatantra, Gulistan, Talmud, Kalewala, etc. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1884, 16mo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo. No. 2. 1885. GOMBO ZHÈBES. Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, selected from six Creole dialects. Translated into French and into English, with notes, complete index to subjects and some brief remarks upon the Creole idioms of Louisiana. New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885, 8vo. No. 3. 1887. SOME CHINESE GHOSTS. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887, 16mo. New Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1906, 12mo. No. 4. 1889. CHITA: A Memory of Last Island. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889, 12mo. No. 5. 1890. YOUMA, The Story of a West-Indian Slave. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 12mo. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1890, 8vo. No. 6. 1890. TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo. The Same. London: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo. New Edition. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1900, 8vo. No. 7. 1894. GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894, 2 vols., 8vo. The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1894, 2 vols., 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 2 vols., Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, 2 vols., Cr. 8vo. No. 8. 1895. "OUT OF THE EAST." Reveries and Studies in New Japan. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895, 16mo. The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1895, 16mo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo. No. 9. 1896. KOKORO: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896, 16mo. The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1896, 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1903, 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1905, 8vo. No. 10. 1897. GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS, Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897, 12mo. The Same. London: Constable and Company, 1897, 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, 8vo. No. 11. 1898. EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1898, 16mo. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1898, 16mo. New Edition. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1899, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, 8vo. No. 12. 1899. IN GHOSTLY JAPAN. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1899, 16mo. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1899, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. No. 13. 1900. SHADOWINGS. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900, 12mo. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1900, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. No. 14. 1901. A JAPANESE MISCELLANY. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1901, 12mo. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1901, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. No. 15. 1902. JAPANESE FAIRY TALES. Tôkyô, Japan: T. Hasegawa (4 vols.), 16mo. No. 16. 1902. KOTTÔ. Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs. New York: The Macmillan Company (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd.), 1902, 8vo. Reprinted, April, 1903. No. 17. 1904. KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904, 12mo. The Same. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1904, 12mo. No. 18. 1904. JAPAN: An Attempt at Interpretation. New York: The Macmillan Company (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd.), 1904, 8vo. No. 19. 1905. THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY, and other Studies and Stories. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905, 12mo. The Same. London: Constable and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. TRANSLATIONS (Nos. 20-21) No. 20. 1882. ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS, and other Fantastic Romances. By Théophile Gautier. Faithfully translated by Lafcadio Hearn. New York: R. Worthington, 1882, 8vo. New Edition. New York: Brentano's, 1899, 12mo. New Edition. New York: Brentano's, 1906, 12mo. CLARIMONDE. New York: Brentano's, 1899, 16mo. No. 21. 1890. THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD (Member of the Institute). By Anatole France. The Translation and Introduction by Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo. II FOREIGN EDITIONS (Nos. 22-30) DANISH No. 22. 1902. FRA SKYGGERNES VERDEN ("From the World of the Shadows"). Complete and translated by Johanne Münther. 178 pages, one portrait. Gyldendalske book-trade, Copenhagen, 1902, 8vo. FRENCH No. 23. 1904. LE JAPON INCONNU. (esquisses psychologiques). Par Lafcadio Hearn. Traduit de l'anglais avec l'autorisation de l'auteur, par Mme. Léon Raynal. In 18 jésus, 111-354 p. Mayenne, impr. Colin, Paris, lib. Dujarric, 1904. (Selections from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.") GERMAN No. 24. 1905. KOKORO. Von Lafcadio Hearn. Einzig autorisierte Übersetzung aus dem Englischen von Berta Franzos. Mit vorwort von Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Buchschmuck von Emil Orlik. Frankfurt a Main: Rütten und Loening, 1905, 8vo. No. 25. 1906. LOTUS. Blicke in das unbekannte Japan. Einzig autorisierte Übersetzung aus dem Englischen von Berta Franzos. Mit vorwort von Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Buchschmuck von Emil Orlik. Frankfurt a Main: Rütten und Loening, 1905, 8vo. (Selections from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.") No. 26. 1907. Lafcadio Hearn's Werke über Japan in künstlerischer Buchausstattung von Emil Orlik. Band I. Kokoro. Band II. Lotus. Band III. Izumo. Frankfurt a Main: Rütten und Loening, 1907. SWEDISH No. 27. 1903. EXOTICA. Noveller och studier från Japan, af Lafcadio Hearn. Bemyndigad öfversättning af Karin Hirn; med några notiser om författaren af Yrjö Hirn. Tredje Upplagen. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1903, 16mo., 2 end pages, pp. 227, decorated paper. (Selections from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," "Out of the East," "Kokoro," "Exotics and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings.") Reprint 1905. No. 28. 1903. EXOTICA. Noveller och studier från Japan, af Lafcadio Hearn. Ny samling. Bemyndigad öfversättning af Karin Hirn. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1903, 16mo., 2 p. l., pp. 248, decorated paper. (Selections from "Out of the East," "Kokoro," "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," "Exotics and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," "A Japanese Miscellany," "Kottô.") No. 29. 1904. SPÖKEN OCH DRÖMMAR FRÅN JAPAN. (Exotica. Tredje Samlingen) af Lafcadio Hearn. Bemyndigad öfversättning från Engelskan af Karin Hirn. Wahlström & Widstrands, Förlag, Stockholm, MCMIV., 16mo., 1 end page, pp. 218, decorated paper. (Selections from "Shadowings," "A Japanese Miscellany," "Kottô," "Kwaidan.") No. 30. 1905. NATALIKA. ("Stray Leaves from Strange Literature") af Lafcadio Hearn. Bemyndigad öfversättning af Karin Hirn. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 16mo., pp. 189, decorated paper. ("Runes from the Kalewala" omitted.) III LIST, WITH DESCRIPTION, OF SEPARATE PUBLISHED WORKS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER (Nos. 1-21) ORIGINAL WORKS No. 1. 1884. STRAY LEAVES FROM STRANGE LITERATURE. Stories reconstructed from the Anvari-Soheïli, Baitál Pachísí, Mahabharata, Pantchatantra, Gulistan, Talmud, Kalewala, etc. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Publisher's Monogram.) Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1884. 16mo., pp. (16) 225, green cloth, black lettering, and decorations. (5) Dedication:-- To my Friend PAGE M. BAKER Editor of the New Orleans Times-Democrat (7-11) Explanatory (_Extract_). While engaged upon this little mosaic work of legend and fable, I felt much like one of those merchants told of in Sindbad's Second Voyage, who were obliged to content themselves with gathering the small jewels adhering to certain meat which eagles brought up from the Valley of Diamonds. I have had to depend altogether upon the labour of translators for my acquisitions; and these seemed too small to deserve separate literary setting. By cutting my little gems according to one pattern, I have doubtless reduced the beauty of some; yet it seemed to me their colours were so weird, their luminosity so elfish, that their intrinsic value could not be wholly destroyed even by so clumsy an artificer as I. In short, these fables, legends, parables, etc., are simply reconstructions of what impressed me as most fantastically beautiful in the most exotic literature which I was able to obtain. With few exceptions, the plans of the original narratives have been preserved.... This little collection has no claim upon the consideration of scholars. It is simply an attempt to share with the public some of those novel delights I experienced while trying to familiarize myself with some very strange and beautiful literatures. ... My gems were few and small: the monstrous and splendid await the coming of Sindbad, or some mighty lapidary by whom they may be wrought into jewel bouquets exquisite as those bunches of topaz blossoms and ruby buds laid upon the tomb of Nourmahal. New Orleans, 1884. (13-14) Bibliography. (15-16) Contents:-- Stray Leaves The Book of Thoth. _From an Egyptian Papyrus._ The Fountain Maiden. _A Legend of the South Pacific._ The Bird Wife. _An Esquimaux Tradition._ Tales retold from Indian and Buddhist Literature The Making of Tilottama The Brahman and his Brahmani Bakawali Natalika The Corpse-Demon The Lion The Legend of the Monster Misfortune A Parable Buddhistic Pundari Yamaraja The Lotos of Faith Runes from the Kalewala The Magical Words The First Musician The Healing of Wainamoinen Stories of Moslem Lands Boutimar, the Dove The Son of a Robber A Legend of Love The King's Justice Traditions retold from the Talmud A Legend of Rabba The Mockers Esther's Choice The Dispute in the Halacha Rabbi Yochanan ben Zachai A Tradition of Titus New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Crown 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- Charles W. Coleman, Jr., _Harper's Monthly_, May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855. No. 2. 1885. GOMBO ZHÈBES. Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, selected from six Creole dialects. Translated into French and into English, with notes, complete index to subjects and some brief remarks upon the Creole idioms of Louisiana. By Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Will H. Coleman, Publisher, No. 70, Business Quarter, Astor House, 1885. 8vo., 6 p. l., pp. 42, brown cloth, design on cover. (3-4) Introduction (_Extract_). Any one who has ever paid a flying visit to New Orleans probably knows something about those various culinary preparations whose generic name is "Gombo"--compounded of many odds and ends, with the okra-plant, or true gombo for a basis, but also comprising occasionally "losé, zepinard, laitie," and the other vegetables sold in bunches in the French market. At all events, any person who has remained in the city for a season must have become familiar with the nature of "gombo filé," "gombo févi," and "gombo aux herbes," or as our coloured cook calls it "gombo zhèbes"--for she belongs to the older generation of Creole _cuisinières_, and speaks the patois in its primitive purity, without using a single "r." Her daughter, who has been to school, would pronounce it _gombo zhairbes_:--the modern patois is becoming more and more Frenchified, and will soon be altogether forgotten, not only throughout Louisiana, but even in the Antilles. It still, however, retains originality enough to be understood with difficulty by persons thoroughly familiar with French; and even those who know nothing of any language but English, readily recognize it by the peculiar rapid syllabification and musical intonation. Such English-speaking residents of New Orleans seldom speak of it as "Creole": they call it _gombo_, for some mysterious reason which I have never been able to explain satisfactorily. The coloured Creoles of the city have themselves begun to use the term to characterize the patois spoken by the survivors of slavery days. Turiault tells us that in the town of Martinique, where the Creole is gradually changing into French, the _Bitacos_, or country negroes who still speak the patois nearly pure, are much ridiculed by their municipal brethren:--_Ça ou ka palé là, chè, c'est nèg;--Ça pas Créole!_ ("What you talk is 'nigger,' my dear:--that isn't Creole!") In like manner a young Creole negro or negress of New Orleans might tell an aged member of his race: _Ça qui to parlé ça pas Créole; ça c'est gombo!_ I have sometimes heard the pure and primitive Creole also called "Congo" by coloured folks of the new generation. The literature of "gombo" has perhaps even more varieties than there are preparations of the esculents above referred to;--the patois has certainly its gombo févi, its gombo filé, its "gombo zhèbes"--both written and unwritten. A work like Marbot's "Bambous" would deserve to be classed with the pure "févi";--the treatises of Turiault, Baissac, St. Quentin, Thomas, rather resemble that fully prepared dish, in which crabs seem to struggle with fragments of many well-stewed meats, all strongly seasoned with pepper. The present essay at Creole folklore, can only be classed as "gombo zhèbes"--(_Zhèbes çé feuil-chou, cresson, laitie, bettrav, losé, zepinard_); the true okra is not the basis of our preparation;--it is a Creole dish, if you please, but a salmagundi of inferior quality. * * * * * Needless to say, this collection is far from perfect;--the most I can hope for is that it may constitute the nucleus of a more exhaustive publication to appear in course of time. No one person could hope to make a really complete collection of Creole proverbs--even with all the advantages of linguistic knowledge, leisure, wealth, and travel. Only a society of folklorists might bring such an undertaking to a successful issue;--but as no systematic effort is being made in this direction, I have had no hesitation in attempting--not indeed to fill a want--but to set an example. _Gouïe passé, difil sivré_:--let the needle but pass, the thread will follow. L. H. (6) Creole Bibliography. Pages 40-42 Indexes. Articles and Reviews:-- _Nation, The_, April 23, 1885, vol. 40, p. 349. No. 3. 1887. SOME CHINESE GHOSTS. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Chinese Characters.) Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887. 16mo., p. (8) 185, brown cloth with Chinese mask on cover, red top. Facing Title-page:-- _If ye desire to witness prodigies and to behold marvels, be not concerned as to whether the mountains are distant or the rivers far away._ Kin-Kou-Ki-Koan. (2) Dedication:-- To my Friend, HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL The Musician, who, speaking the speech of melody unto the children of Tien-hia,-- unto the wandering Tsing-jin, whose skins have the colour of gold,-- moved them to make strange sounds upon the serpent-bellied San-hien; persuaded them to play for me upon the shrieking Ya-hien; prevailed on them to sing me a song of their native land,-- the song of Mohlí-hwa, the song of the jasmine-flower. (Sketch of Chinaman's head.) (Reverse) Chinese Character. (3-4) Preface. I think that my best apology for the insignificant size of this volume is the very character of the material composing it. In preparing the legends I sought especially for _weird beauty_; and I could not forget this striking observation in Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad": "The supernatural, though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, _a spring which is peculiarly apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon_." Those desirous to familiarize themselves with Chinese literature as a whole have had the way made smooth for them by the labours of linguists like Julien, Pavie, Rémusat, De Rosny, Schlegel, Legge, Hervey-Saint-Denys, Williams, Biot, Giles, Wylie, Beal, and many other Sinologists. To such great explorers indeed, the realm of Cathayan story belongs by right of discovery and conquest; yet the humbler traveller who follows wonderingly after them into the vast and mysterious pleasure-grounds of Chinese fancy may surely be permitted to cull a few of the marvellous flowers there growing,--a self-luminous _hwa-wang_, a black lily, a phosphoric rose or two,--as souvenirs of his curious voyage. L. H. New Orleans, March 15, 1886. (5) Contents:-- The Soul of the Great Bell The Story of Ming-Y The Legend of Tchi-Niu The Return of Yen Tchin-King The Tradition of the Tea-Plant The Tale of the Porcelain God Appendix:-- Notes. Glossary. New Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1906, 12mo. Articles and Reviews:-- Charles W. Coleman, Jr., _Harper's Monthly_, May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855. _Nation, The_, May 26, 1887, vol. 44, p. 456. No. 4. 1889. CHITA: a Memory of Last Island. By Lafcadio Hearn "_But Nature whistled with all her winds, Did as she pleased, and went her way._" --Emerson. New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1889. 12mo., 3 p. l., pp. 204, terra-cotta cloth, decorated. (Published first in _Harper's Monthly_, April, 1888.) (1) Dedication:-- To my Friend DR. RODOLFO MATAS of New Orleans (2) Contents:-- Part I The Legend of L'île Dernière Part II Out of the Sea's Strength Part III The Shadow of the Tide (Reverse) _Je suis la vaste mêlée,-- Reptile, étant l onde; ailée, Étant le vent,-- Force et fuite, haine et vie, Houle immense, poursuivie Et poursuivant._ --Victor Hugo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Boston Evening Transcript, The_, November 2, 1889. Hutson, Charles Woodward, _Poet-Lore_, Spring, 1905, vol. 16, p. 53. No. 5. 1890. YOUMA. The Story of a West-Indian Slave. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Publisher's Vignette.) New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1890. 12mo., 1 p. l., pp. 193, frontispiece illustration, red cloth. (Published first in _Harper's Monthly_, January-February, 1890.) (1) Dedication:-- To my friend JOSEPH S. TUNISON. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1890, 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, August 30, 1890, p. 284. _Nation, The_, May 7, 1891, vol. 52, p. 385. No. 6. 1890. TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES. By Lafcadio Hearn. Illustrated. (Publisher's Vignette.) New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1890. 8vo., pp. (12) 431, 38 full-page illustrations, 6 illustrations in the text, green cloth ornamental. (Reverse) "_La facon d'être du pays est si agréable, la température si bonne, et l'on y vit dans une liberté si honnête, que je n'aye pas vu un seul homme, ny une seule femme, qui en soient revenus, en qui je n'aye remarqué une grande passion d'y retourner._"--Le Père Dutertre (1667). (3) Dedication:-- À mon cher ami LEOPOLD ARNOUX Notaire à Saint Pierre, Martinique. _Souvenir de nos promenades,--de nos voyages,--de nos causeries,--des sympathies échangées,--de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et inoubliable,--de tout ce qui parle à l'âme au doux Pays des Revenants._ (5-6) Preface (_Extract_). The introductory paper, entitled "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics" consists for the most part of notes taken upon a voyage of nearly three thousand miles, accomplished in less than two months. During such hasty journeying it is scarcely possible for a writer to attempt anything more serious than a mere reflection of the personal experiences undergone; and, in spite of sundry justifiable departures from simple note-making, this paper is offered only as an effort to record the visual and emotional impressions of the moment. My thanks are due to Mr. William Lawless, British Consul at St. Pierre, for several beautiful photographs, taken by himself, which have been used in the preparation of the illustrations. L. H. Philadelphia, 1889. (7) Contents:-- A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics (_Harper's Monthly_, July-September, 1888) Martinique Sketches:-- I. Les Porteuses (_Harper's Monthly_, July, 1889) II. La Grande Anse (_Harper's Monthly_, November, 1889) III. Un Revenant IV. La Guiablesse V. La Vérette (_Harper's Monthly_, October, 1888) VI. Les Blanchisseusses VII. La Pelée VIII. 'Ti Canotié IX. La Fille de Couleur X. Bête-ni-Pié XI. Ma Bonne XII. "Pa combiné, chè!" XIII. Yé XIV. Lys. XV. Appendix: Some Creole Melodies (9-10) Illustrations:-- The Same. London: Harper and Brothers, 1890, 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _New York Times, The_, September 1, 1890. No. 7. 1894. GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN. By Lafcadio Hearn. In two volumes. (Vignette.) Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (The Riverside Press, Cambridge), 1894. 8vo., 2 vols. pp. (x) 699, dull green cloth, silver lettering and design, gilt top. (1) Dedication:-- To the Friends whose kindness alone rendered possible my sojourn in the Orient,-- to PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U. S. N. and BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ. _Emeritus Professor of Philology and Japanese in the Imperial University of Tôkyô_ I dedicate these volumes in token of Affection and Gratitude. (V-X) Preface (_Extract_). But the rare charm of Japanese life, so different from that of all other lands, is not to be found in its Europeanized circles. It is to be found among the great common people, who represent in Japan, as in all countries, the national virtues, and who still cling to their delightful old customs, their picturesque dresses, their Buddhist images, their household shrines, their beautiful and touching worship of ancestors. This is the life of which a foreign observer can never weary, if fortunate and sympathetic enough to enter into it,--the life that forces him sometimes to doubt whether the course of our boasted Western progress is really in the direction of moral development. Each day, while the years pass, there will be revealed to him some strange and unsuspected beauty in it. Like other life, it has its darker side; yet even this is brightness compared with the darker side of Western existence. It has its foibles, its follies, its vices, its cruelties; yet the more one sees of it, the more one marvels at its extraordinary goodness, its miraculous patience, its never-failing courtesy, its simplicity of heart, its intuitive charity. And to our own larger Occidental comprehension, its commonest superstitions, however contemned at Tôkyô, have rarest value as fragments of the unwritten literature of its hopes, its fears, its experience with right and wrong,--its primitive efforts to find solutions for the riddle of the Unseen. Contents:-- Volume I. I. My First Day in the Orient II. The Writing of Kôbôdaishi III. Jizô IV. A Pilgrimage to Enoshima V. At the Market of the Dead (_Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1891) VI. Bon-Odori VII. The Chief City of the Province of the Gods (_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1891) VIII. Kitzuki: The Most Ancient Shrine in Japan (_Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1891) IX. In the Cave of the Children's Ghosts X. At Mionoseki XI. Notes on Kitzuki XII. At Hinomisaki XIII. Shinjû XIV. Yaegaki-Jinja XV. Kitsune Volume II. XVI. In a Japanese Garden (_Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1892) XVII. The Household Shrine XVIII. Of Women's Hair XIX. From the Diary of an English Teacher XX. Two Strange Festivals XXI. By the Japanese Sea XXII. Of a Dancing Girl (_Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1893) XXIII. From Hôki to Oki XXIV. Of Souls XXV. Of Ghosts and Goblins XXVI. The Japanese Smile (_Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1893) XXVII. Sayônara! Pages 695-99 Index. The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1894, 2 vols., 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, 2 vols., Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, 2 vols., Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- Bentzon, Th., _Revue des Deux Mondes_, June 1, 1904, vol. 21, p. 556. Brandt, M. von, _Deutsche Rundschau_, October, 1900, vol. 27, p. 68. Challayé, Félicien, _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1903, vol. 11, p. 338. Challayê, Félicien, _Revue de Paris_, December 1, 1904 vol. 6, p. 655. _Literary World, The_, October 20, 1894, vol. 25, p. 347. Scott, Mrs. M. McN., _Atlantic Monthly_, June, 1895, vol. 75, p. 830. _Spectator, The_, November 17, 1894, vol. 73, p. 698. No. 8. 1895. "OUT OF THE EAST." Reveries and Studies in New Japan. By Lafcadio Hearn. "_As far as the east is from the west_"-- (Publisher's Vignette.) Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (The Riverside Press, Cambridge), 1895. 16mo., 2 p. 1., pp. 341, yellow cloth, silver lettering, yellow top. (1) Dedication:-- To NISHIDA SENTARÔ in dear remembrance of Izumo days (2) Contents:-- I. The Dream of a Summer Day II. With Kyûshû Students III. At Hakata (_Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1894) IV. Of the Eternal Feminine (_Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1893) V. Bits of Life and Death VI. The Stone Buddha VII. Jiujutsu VIII. The Red Bridal (_Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1894) IX. A Wish Fulfilled (_Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1895) X. In Yokohama XI. Yuko: a Reminiscence "The Dream of a Summer Day" first appeared in the _Japan Daily Mail_. The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1895, 16mo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, August 24, 1895, p. 249. Brandt, M. von, _Deutsche Rundschau_, October, 1900, vol. 105, p. 68. Challayé Félicien, _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1903, vol. 11, p. 338. Challayé, Félicien, _Revue de Paris_, December 1, 1904, vol. 6, p. 655. _Literary World, The_, April 20, 1895, vol. 26, p. 123. Scott, Mrs. M. McN., _Atlantic Monthly_, June, 1895, vol. 75, p. 830. _Spectator, The_, October 12, 1895, vol. 75, p. 459. No. 9. 1896. KOKORO: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life. By Lafcadio Hearn. (Top of page "Kokoro" in Japanese.) (Sketch of Japanese Head.) Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (The Riverside Press, Cambridge), 1896. 16 mo., 3 p. l., pp. 388, green cloth, gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Dedication:-- To my Friend AMÉNOMORI NOBUSHIGÉ poet, scholar, and patriot (2) Note:-- (Japanese character) The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title, "Kokoro" (heart). Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning,--just as we say in English, "the heart of things." Kobé, September 15, 1895. (3) Contents:-- I. At a Railway Station II. The Genius of Japanese Civilization (_Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1895) III. A Street Singer IV. From a Travelling Diary (_Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1895) V. The Nun of the Temple of Amida VI. After the War (_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1895) VII. Haru VIII. A Glimpse of Tendencies IX. By Force of Karma X. A Conservative XI. In the Twilight of the Gods (_Atlantic Monthly_, June, 1895) XII. The Idea of Preëxistence XIII. In Cholera-Time XIV. Some Thoughts about Ancestor-Worship XV. Kimiko Appendix. Three Popular Ballads The Same. London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1896, 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1903, Cr. 8vo. Popular Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1905, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, August 8, 1896, p. 185. Bentzon, Th., _Revue de Deux Mondes_, June 1, 1904, vol. 21, p. 556. Brandt, M. von, _Deutsche Rundschau_, October, 1900, vol. 105, p. 68. Challayé Félicien, _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1903, vol. 11, p. 338. Challayé Félicien, _Revue de Paris_, December 1, 1904, vol. 6, p. 655. Cockerill, Col. John A., _Current Literature_, June, 1896, vol. 19, p. 476. Herzog, Wilhelm, _Die Nation_, January 6, 1906, vol. 23, p. 217. _Literary World, The_, April 18, 1896, vol. 27, p. 116. _Nation, The_, July 9, 1896, vol. 63, p. 35. _Spectator, The_, May 23, 1896, vol. 76, p. 739. Takayanagi, Tozo, _The Book Buyer_, May, 1896, vol. 13, p. 229. No. 10. 1897. GLEANINGS IN BUDDHA-FIELDS, Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East. By Lafcadio Hearn. Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Japan. (Publisher's Vignette.) Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. (The Riverside Press, Cambridge.) 12mo., pp. 296, blue cloth, gold lettering, gilt top. Contents:-- I. A Living God (_Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1896) II. Out of the Street (_Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1896) III. Notes of a Trip to Kyôto (_Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1896) IV. Dust (_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1896) V. About Faces in Japanese Art (Atlantic Monthly, August, 1896) VI. Ningyô-no-Haka VII. In Ôsaka VIII. Buddhist Allusions in Japanese Folk-Song IX. Nirvâna X. The Rebirth of Katsugorô XI. Within the Circle The Same. London: Constable and Company, 1897, 8vo. New Edition. London: Gay and Bird's, 1902, Cr. 8vo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1903, 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Academy, The_, November 13, 1897, vol. 52, p. 395. _Athenæum, The_, November 13, 1897, p. 664. Challayé, Félicien, _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1903, vol. 11, p. 338 _Critic, The_, April 9, 1898, vol. 29, p. 248. _Independent, The_, November 24, 1898, vol. 50, p. 1508. _Literary World, The_, November 13, 1897, vol. 28, p. 389. _Nation, The_, February 3, 1898, vol. 66, p. 97. _Outlook, The_, October 16, 1897, vol. 57, p. 435. _Public Opinion_, November 25, 1897, vol. 23, p. 694. _Spectator, The_, November 20, 1897, vol. 79, p. 736. Wagner, John Harrison, _The Book Buyer_, June, 1898, vol. 16, p. 437. No. 11. 1898. EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES. By Lafcadio Hearn. Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University, Tôkyô. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, MDCCCXCIX. 16mo., 4 p. l., pp. 299, 4 full-page illustrations, 13 illustrations in the text. Green cloth, decorated, gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Dedication:-- To Dr. C. H. H. Hall, of Yokohama (late U. S. Navy) _In Constant Friendship_ (2) (Prefatory Note) All but one of the papers composing this volume appear for the first time. The little essays, or rather fantasies, forming the second part of the book, deal with experiences in two hemispheres; but their general title should explain why they have been arranged independently of that fact. To any really scientific imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of evolutional psychology and certain teachings of Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my cluster of "Retrospectives." These are offered merely as intimations of a truth incomparably less difficult to recognize than to define. Tôkyô, Japan, L. H. February 15, 1898. (3) Contents:-- Exotics: I. Fuji-no-Yama II. Insect-Musicians III. A Question in the Zen Texts IV. The Literature of the Dead V. Frogs VI. Of Moon-Desire Retrospectives: I. First Impressions II. Beauty is Memory III. Sadness in Beauty IV. Parfum de Jeunesse V. Azure Psychology (_Teikoku Bungaku_, Yokohama) VI. A Serenade VII. A Red Sunset VIII. Frisson IX. Vespertina Cognitio X. The Eternal Haunter (4) List of Illustrations. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1898, 16mo. New Edition. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1899, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, January 6, 1900, p. 11. Bentzon, Th., _Revue des Deux Mondes_, June 1, 1904, vol. 21, p. 556. _Dial, The_, July 16, 1899, vol. 27, p. 52. _International Studio, The_, 1905, vol. 25, p. XL. _Nation, The_, January 26, 1905, vol. 80, p. 68. No. 12. 1899. IN GHOSTLY JAPAN. By Lafcadio Hearn. Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University, Tôkyô. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, MDCCCXCIX. 16mo., 5 p. l., pp. 241, 4 full-page illustrations, 5 illustrations in the text. Blue cloth, ornamented with white cherry-blossoms, gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Dedication:-- To Mrs. Alice Von Behrens _For Auld Lang Syne_ (2) In Ghostly Japan _Yoru bakari Miru mono nari to Omou-nayo! Hiru saë yumé no Ukiyo nari-kéri._ _Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of this world of pain appears to us even by day_. Japanese Poem. (3) Contents:-- Fragment Furisodé Incense A Story of Divination Silkworms A Passional Karma Footprints of the Buddha Ululation Bits of Poetry Japanese Buddhist Proverbs Suggestion Ingwa-Banashi Story of a Tengu At Yaidzu (4) List of Illustrations. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1899, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- Inouye, Jukichi, _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1900, vol. 86, pp. 399. _International Studio, The_, 1905, vol. 25, p. XL. _Nation, The_, January 26, 1905, vol. 80, p. 68. No. 13. 1900. SHADOWINGS. By Lafcadio Hearn. Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University, Tôkyô, Japan. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900. 12mo., pp. (IV) 268, cloth. (I.) Dedication:-- To Paymaster Mitchell McDonald U. S. Navy My dear Mitchell,-- Herein I have made some attempt to satisfy your wish for "a few more queer stories from the Japanese." Please accept the book as another token of the writer's affection. Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) Tôkyô, Japan, January 1, 1900. (II.) Contents:-- Stories from Strange Books:-- I. The Reconciliation II. A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu III. The Screen-Maiden IV. The Corpse-Rider V. The Sympathy of Benten VI. The Gratitude of the Samébito Japanese Studies:-- I. Sémi II.Japanese Female Names III. Old Japanese Songs Fantasies:-- I. Noctilucæ II. A Mystery of Crowds III. Gothic Horror IV. Levitation V. Nightmare-Touch VI. Readings from a Dream-Book VII. In a Pair of Eyes (III.) Illustrations. (IV.) Bastard title-page:-- Il avait vu brûler d'étranges pierres, Jadis, dans les brasiers de lapensée. Émile Verhaeren The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1900, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, January 5, 1901, p. 15. Bentzon, Th., _Revue des Deux Mondes_, June 1, 1904, vol. 21, p. 556. F. T. C., _The Bookman_, February, 1901, vol. 12, p. 582. _Dial, The_, January 1, 1901, vol. 30, p. 19. _International Studio, The_, 1905, vol. 25, p. XL. Kinnosuké, Adachi, _The Critic_, January, 1901, vol. 38, p. 29. _Nation, The_, November 8, 1900, vol. 71, p. 372. _Nation, The_, January 26, 1905, vol. 80, p. 68. _Public Opinion_, October 18, 1900, vol. 29, p. 504. No. 14. 1901. A JAPANESE MISCELLANY. By Lafcadio Hearn. Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Tôkyô. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, MDCCCCI. 12mo., 5 p. l., pp. 305, 2 full-page illustrations, 6 plates, 5 illustrations in the text. Green cloth, decorated, gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Dedication:-- To Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore (2) Contents:-- Strange Stories: I. Of a Promise Kept II. Of a Promise Broken III. Before the Supreme Court IV. The Story of Kwashin Koji V. The Story of Umétsu Chûbei VI. The Story of Kôgi the Priest Folklore Gleanings: I. Dragon-Flies (_illustrated_) II. Buddhist Names of Plants and Animals III. Songs of Japanese Children (_illustrated_) Studies Here and There: I. On a Bridge II. The Case of O-Dai III. Beside the Sea (_illustrated_) IV. Drifting V. Otokichi's Daruma (_illustrated_) VI. In a Japanese Hospital (3) Illustrations. The Same. London: Sampson, Low and Company, 1901, 8vo. New Popular Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1904, 16mo. New Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum_, December 21, 1901, p. 833. _International Studio, The_, 1905, vol. 25, p. XL. _Literary World, The_, December 1, 1901, vol. 32, p. 207. _Nation, The_, January 9, 1902, vol. 74, p. 39. _Nation, The_, January 26, 1905, vol. 80, p. 68. No. 15. 1902. JAPANESE FAIRY TALES. Rendered into English by Lafcadio Hearn. Published by T. Hasegawa, Publisher and Art-Printer, Tôkyô, Japan. Four 16mo. books on Japanese folded crêpe paper, highly illustrated in colours. No. 22. The Goblin Spider No. 23. The Boy Who Drew Cats No. 24. The Old Woman Who Lost Her Dumpling No. 25. Chin Chin Kobakama No. 16. 1902. KOTTÔ (Japanese Characters). Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs. Collected by Lafcadio Hearn, Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Tôkyô, Japan. With illustrations by Genjiro Yeto. New York: The Macmillan Company (London: Macmillan & Company, Ltd.), 1902. 8vo., 4 p. l., pp. 251, brown cloth, decorated, gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Dedication:-- To SIR EDWIN ARNOLD in grateful remembrance of kind words (2) Contents:-- Old Stories: I. The Legend of Yurei-Daki II. In a Cup of Tea III. Common Sense IV. Ikiryô V. Shiryô VI. The Story of O-Kamé VII. Story of a Fly VIII. Story of a Pheasant IX. The Story of Chûgorô A Woman's Diary Heiké-Gani Fireflies A Drop of Dew Gaki A Matter of Custom Revery Pathological In the Dead of the Night Kusa-Hibari The Eater of Dreams (3) Old Stories _The following nine tales have been selected from the "Shin-Chomon-Shû," "Hyaku Monogatari," "Uji-Jûi-Monogatari-Shô," and other old Japanese books, to illustrate some strange beliefs. They are only Curios._ The Same. Reprinted April, 1903. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, January 17, 1903, p. 77. _Book Buyer, The_, December, 1902, vol. 25, p. 416. More, Paul Elmer, _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1903, vol. 91, p. 204. _Nation, The_, March 26, 1903, vol. 76, p. 254. No. 17. 1904. KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.--Lafcadio Hearn, Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Tôkyô, Japan (1896-1903). Honorary Member of the Japan Society, London. (Japanese Characters.) Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, MDCCCCIV. (Published April, 1904.) 12mo., 6 p. 1., pp. 240, illustrated, 2 plates, dark green cloth, decorated, gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Introduction by Publisher:-- (3) Prefatory Note:-- Most of the following _Kwaidan_, or Weird Tales, have been taken from old Japanese books,--such as the _Yasô-Kidan_, _Bukkyô-Hyakkwa-Zenshô_, _Kokon-Chomonshû_, _Tama-Sudaré_ and _Hyaku-Monogatari_. Some of the stories may have had a Chinese origin: the very remarkable "Dream of Akinosuké," for example, is certainly from a Chinese source. But the Japanese story-teller in every case, has so recoloured and reshaped his borrowing as to naturalize it.... One queer tale, "Yuki-Onna," was told me by a farmer of Chôfu, Nishitamagôri, in Musashi province, as a legend of his native village. Whether it has even been written in Japanese I do not know; but the extraordinary belief which it records used certainly to exist in most parts of Japan, and in many curious forms.... The incident of "Riki-Baka" was a personal experience; and I wrote it down almost exactly as it happened, changing only a family-name mentioned by the Japanese narrator. Tôkyô, Japan, January 20, 1904. L. H. (4) Contents:-- Kwaidan The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hôichi (_Atlantic Monthly_, August, 1903) Oshidori The Story of O-Tei Ubazakura Diplomacy Of a Mirror and a Bell Jikininki Mujina Rokuro-Kubi A Dead Secret Yuki-Onna The Story of Aoyagi Jiu-Roku-Zakura The Dream of Akinosuké (_Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1904) Riki-Baka Hi-Mawari Hôrai Insect-Studies Butterflies Mosquitoes Ants (5) Notes on the Illustrations The two drawings are by the Japanese artist, Keichû Takénouche. The frontispiece illustrates the scene in the story "Yuki-Onna" described on page 113, and the drawing facing page 180 illustrates the Butterfly Dance, described on page 203. The Same. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1904, 12mo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Athenæum, The_, September 17, 1904, p. 373. _Atlantic Monthly_, June, 1904, vol. 93, p. 857. _Bookman, The_, November, 1904, vol. 20, p. 159. No. 18. 1904. (Japanese Characters.) JAPAN: An Attempt at Interpretation. By Lafcadio Hearn. Honorary Member of the Japan Society, London; formerly Lecturer in the Imperial University of Tôkyô (1896-1903), and Fourteen Years a Resident of Japan. "Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back to a time of rigid and pervading discipline." --Walter Bagehot. New York: The Macmillan Company (London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd.), 1904. (Published, September, 1904.) 8vo., 2 p. l., pp. 541, coloured frontispiece, brown cloth, black and gold lettering, gilt top. (1) Contents:-- I. Difficulties II. Strangeness and Charm III. The Ancient Cult IV. The Religion of the Home V. The Japanese Family VI. The Communal Cult VII. Developments of Shintô VIII. Worship and Purification IX. The Rule of the Dead X. The Introduction of Buddhism XI. The Higher Buddhism XII.The Social Organization XIII. The Rise of the Military Power XIV. The Religion of Loyalty XV. The Jesuit Peril XVI. Feudal Integration XVII. The Shintô Revival XVIII. Survivals XIX. Modern Restraints XX. Official Education XXI. Industrial Danger XXII. Reflections Bibliographical Notes Index The Same. London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd., 1904, 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- Buckley, Edmund, _The American Journal of Sociology_, January 1905, vol. 10, p. 545. Griffis, William Elliot, _The Critic_, February, 1905, vol. 46, p. 185. Griffis, William Elliot, _The Dial_, December 1, 1904, vol. 36, p. 368. _Independent, The_, October 27, 1904, vol. 57, p. 976. _Nation, The_, December 8, 1904, vol. 79, p. 465. _Public Opinion_, October 27, 1904, vol. 37, p. 537. _Review of Reviews_, November, 1904, vol. 30, p. 561. Shore, W. Teignmouth, _The Academy_, December 10, 1904, vol. 67, p. 584. _Spectator, The_, January 14, 1905, vol. 94, p. 54. Thurston, S. J., Herbert, _The Messenger_, January, 1906, vol. 45, p. 1. No. 19. 1905. THE ROMANCE OF THE MILKY WAY, and other Studies and Stories. By Lafcadio Hearn. Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston and New York, 1905. (Published October, 1905.) 12mo., pp. (XIV) 209, decorated title-page, grey cloth with yellow trimmings, yellow top. (V) Contents:-- The Romance of the Milky Way (_Atlantic Monthly_, August, 1905) Goblin Poetry "Ultimate Questions" (_Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1905) The Mirror Maiden The Story of Itô Norisuké (_Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1905) Stranger than Fiction (_Atlantic Monthly_, April, 1905) A Letter from Japan (_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1904) (VII-XIV) Introduction by F. G. The Same. London: Constable and Company, 1905, Cr. 8vo. Articles and Reviews:-- _Academy, The_, December 2, 1905, vol. 69, p. 1257. _Athenæum, The_, March 31, 1906, p. 389. _Dial, The_, November 1, 1905, vol. 39, p. 276. Griffis, W. E., _The Critic_, March, 1906, vol. 48, p. 222. _Independent_, The, December 21, 1905, vol. 59, p. 1478. _Nation, The_, December 21, 1905, vol. 81, p. 510. _Outlook, The_, November 9, 1906, vol. 84, p. 503. TRANSLATIONS No. 20. 1882. ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS, and other Fantastic Romances. By Théophile Gautier. Faithfully translated by Lafcadio Hearn. Contents:-- One of Cleopatra's Nights Clarimonde Arria Marcella: A Souvenir of Pompeii The Mummy's Foot Omphale: A Rococo Story King Candaules New York: R. Worthington, 770 Broadway, 1882. 8vo., pp. (IX) 321, red cloth, gilt top. Head Gautier as Frontispiece. (III) _The love that caught strange light from death's own eyes, And filled death's lips with fiery words and sighs, And half asleep, let feed from veins of his, Her close red warm snake's-mouth, Egyptian-wise: And that great night of love more strange than this, When she that made the whole world's bale and bliss Made king of the whole world's desire a slave And killed him in mid-kingdom with a kiss._ Swinburne. "_Memorial verses on the death of Théophile Gautier._" (V-IX) To the Reader (_Extract_). It is the artist, therefore, who must judge of Gautier's creations. To the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, the lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth,--of the charm of youthful dreams and young passion in its blossoming,--of poetic ambitions and the sweet pantheism that finds all Nature vitalized by the Spirit of the Beautiful,--to such the first English version of these graceful fantasies is offered in the hope that it may not be found wholly unworthy of the original. New Orleans, 1882. L. H. Pages 317-21 Addenda. New Edition. New York: Brentano's, 1899, 12mo. New Edition. New York: Brentano's, 1906, 12mo. CLARIMONDE. New York: Brentano's, 1899, 16mo. Articles and Reviews:-- Brandt, M. von, _Deutsche Rundschau_, October, 1900, vol. 105, p. 68. Coleman, Charles W., Jr., _Harper's Monthly_, May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855. _Dayton (Ohio) Journal_, September 30, 1904. _Literary World, The_, February 14, 1891, vol. 22, p. 56. No. 21. 1890. THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD (Member of the Institute). By Anatole France. The Translation and Introduction by Lafcadio Hearn. (Publisher's Vignette.) New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, 1890. 8vo., pp. (IX) 281, paper. (V-IX) Introduction (_Extract_). But it is not because M. Anatole France has rare power to create original characters, or to reflect for us something of the more recondite literary life of Paris, that his charming story will live. It is because of his far rarer power to deal with what is older than any art, and withal more young, and incomparably more precious: the beauty of what is beautiful in human emotion. And that writer who touches the spring of generous tears by some simple story of gratitude, of natural kindness, of gentle self-sacrifice, is surely more entitled to our love than the sculptor who shapes for us a dream of merely animal grace, or the painter who images for us, however richly, the young bloom of that form which is only the husk of Being. L. H. (1) Contents:-- Part I. The Log. Part II. The Daughter of Clémentine. The Fairy The Little Saint-George Articles and Reviews:-- _Literary World_, The, February 15, 1890, vol. 21, p. 59. IV TRANSLATIONS PUBLISHED IN THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT[43] [43] Hearn failed to give the years in which these translations were published, and often also the days and months. (Nos. 31-218) No. 31. 1. Crucifying Crocodiles. By Cousot. From _Le Figaro_, February 7. No. 32. 2. The Last of the Great Moguls. By Ali. From _Le Nouvelle Revue_, March 1. No. 33. 3. Killed by Rollin's Ancient History. By Chas. Baissac. No. 34. 4. Mohammed Fripouille. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Yvette." No. 35. 5. The Eldest Daughter. By Jules Lemaitre. From _Le Figaro_. No. 36. 6. The Burnt Rock. By "Carmen Sylva," Elizabeth, Queen of Roumania. From _Le Figaro_. No. 37. 7. The Confession. By de Maupassant. From _Contes du Jour et de la Nuit_. No. 38. 8. In the Mountain of Marble. By Pierre Loti. No. 39. 9. A Story of Quinine. By Chas. Baissac. From _Récits Créoles_. No. 40. 10. How Gerard Resigned His Tutorship. By Chas. Baissac. From _Récits Créoles_. No. 41. 11. A Vendetta. By Guy de Maupassant. From _Contes du Jour et de la Nuit_. No. 42. 12. A Coward. By Guy de Maupassant. From _Contes du Jour et de la Nuit_. No. 43. 13. The Titaness. By Jules Lermina. From _Le Figaro_, April 25. No. 44. 14. Reminiscences of Gustave Doré. By Albert Wolff. From _Le Figaro_, March 2. No. 45. 15. The Return. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Yvette." No. 46. 16. Two Friends. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 47. 17. Moloch, the Devourer. (The Sacrifice.) By Gustave Flaubert. From "Salambo," Ed. 1880. No. 48. 18. The Ring. By N. de Semenow. From _Le Figaro_, August 15. No. 49. 19. The Phalanx in Battle. By Gustave Flaubert. From "Salambo," Ed. 1880. No. 50. 20. The Little Sister. By Hector Malot. Novel. No. 51. 21. Riri's Rag-Picking. By Jean Rameau. From _Le Figaro_, October 31. No. 52. 22. A Divorced Man's New Year's Day. By Frantz Jourdain. From _Le Figaro_, January 2. No. 53. 23. Especially Interesting Apropos of the Comet with the Sodium Tail. By Camille Flammarion. From _Le Voltaire_, September 21. No. 54. 24. Eaten Alive. By Camille Debans. From _Le Figaro_, September 13. No. 55. 25. The Christmas Tree. By Theodore Dostoievsky. From _Le Figaro_. No. 56. 26. "A Madman?" By Guy de Maupassant. No. 57. 27. Tourgueneff. By Firmin Javel. From _L'Evénement_, September 6. Tourgueneff. By Maurice Guillemot. From _Le Figaro_, September 5. No. 58. 28. A Polish Regiment under Fire. By Hendrik Sienkiewicz. From _Nouvelle Revue_. No. 59. 29. In Oran. By Guy de Maupassant. From _Au Soleil_. No. 60. 30. En Voyage. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Miss Harriet." No. 61. 31. "La Mère Sauvage." By Guy de Maupassant. From "Miss Harriet." No. 62. 32. The Adopted Child. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Miss Harriet." No. 63. 33. The Child. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Miss Harriet." No. 64. 34. The Minuet. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Miss Harriet." No. 65. 35. My Uncle Jules. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Miss Harriet." No. 66. 36. The Love Chamber. By Albert Delpit, 1884. No. 67. 37. The Chair Mender. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 68. 38. Coco. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 69. 39. A Parricide. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 70. 40. The Red Wolves. By Henry Leturque. From _Le Figaro_, April 24. No. 71. 41. Suicides. By Guy de Maupassant. "Les Soeurs Rondoli." No. 72. 42. The Cross. By Verax. From _Le Figaro_, October 17. No. 73. 43. The Art of Dancing. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, March 19. No. 74. 44. Haikona's Story. By Quatrelles. From _Le Figaro_, January 3. No. 75. 45. Forgotten on the Battle Field. From _Le Figaro_, December 19. No. 76. 46. The Folly of Armaments. By P. From _L'Evénement_, June 13. No. 77. 47. Japanese Theatricals. By Yedoko. From _Le Figaro_, August 7, 1886. No. 78. 48. On the Planet Mars. By Camille Flammarion. From _Le Figaro_. No. 79. 49. The Colonel's Ideas. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Yvette." No. 80. 50. Waterloo. By Léon Cladel. From _L'Evénement_, April 26. No. 81. 51. Terrifying a King. By XXX. From _Le Figaro_, December 9. No. 82. 52. The Secret of the Scaffold. By Comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. From _Le Figaro_, October 23. No. 83. 53. Littre as a Physician. By Emile Zola. From _Le Voltaire_, June 5. No. 84. 54. Hugo and Littre. By Emile Zola. From _Le Figaro_. No. 85. 55. A Modern Combat of the Thirty. By Vigeant. No. 86. 56. Algerian Warfare. By Ferdinand Hugonnet. No. 87. 57. Orden's Redoubt. By Adam Mickiewicz. From _Le Figaro_. No. 88. 58. Lasker's Romance. By Aurelien Scholl. From _L'Evénement_, February 26. No. 89. 59. The Duel. By Aurelien Scholl. From _L'Evénement_, March 2. No. 90. 60. The Wife of Sobieski. From _Le Figaro_ Supplement, February 23. No. 91. 61. Redemption. By Matilde Serao. From _Le Figaro_. No. 92. 62. The Rats of Paris. By Olivier de Rawton. From _Le Figaro_ Supplement. No. 93. 63. The Story of Tse-I-La. By Comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. From _Le Figaro_ Sunday Supplement. No. 94. 64. Cremation in Paris. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, March 6. No. 95. 65. Madame Auguste's Lion. By Horace Bertin. From _Croquis de Province_. No. 96. 66. The Secret History of "Madame Bovary." By Guy de Maupassant. From _L'Evénement_, January 23. No. 97. 67. Nissa. By Albert Delpit. From _Revue de Deux Mondes_. No. 98. 68. The Soudanian Marseillais. No. 99. 69. Justice in the Soudan. After De Bisson. 1868. No. 100. 70. Eaten by a Lion. By Louis Rousselet. From _La Peau du Tigre_. No. 101. 71. Chanzy. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, January 10. No. 102. 72. Notes on Von Moltke. By Robert de Bonnieres. From _Le Figaro_, August 17. No. 103. 73. The Hunchback. By Chas. Richard. From _Le Figaro_, August 29. No. 104. 74. The Pacha of Audjelah. By H. Georges. From _Le Figaro_, September 5. No. 105. 75. The Umbrella. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 106. 76. Gambling for a Wife. By A. de Colonne. From _Le Figaro_, January 30. No. 107. 77. Happiness. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 108. 78. "Schmah Israel." By Sacher Masoch. From _Revue Politique et Litteraire_, November 7. No. 109. 79. The Alfa-Gatherer. By Lieutenant Palat. ("Marcel Frescaly.") From _Le Figaro_, April 3. No. 110. 80. He. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 111. 81. 'Toine. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 112. 82. The Dowry. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 113. 83. The Funeral of an Indian Prince. By Guy de Maupassant. From _Le Figaro_, September 7. No. 114. 84. The Jewelry. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 115. 85. The Five Senses. By Harry Alis. From _Revue Politique et Litteraire_, October 2. No. 116. 86. A Bombshell. By Leon Tolstoi. No. 117. 87. A Day at Lahore. By Robert de Bonnieres. From _Revue Politique et Litteraire_. No. 118. 88. Mario, Marquis of Candia. By Mario di Candia. From _Le Figaro_, November 24. No. 119. 89. My Tailor Abrahamek. By Sacher-Masoch. From _Revue Politique et Litteraire_, May 22. No. 120. 90. The Flesh-Eaters. By Olivier de Rawton. From _Le Figaro_. No. 121. 91. Palabra Suelta No Tiene Vuelta. By Ricardo Palma. (Lima, 1880.) No. 122. 92. The Diva. By Luigi Gualdo. No. 123. 93. The Story of the Unfortunate Merchant. By Rene Bassett. No. 124. 94. Bamba. By Eugene Forgues. From _Nouvelle Revue_. No. 125. 95. "Notre Père Qui Etesaux Cieux." By Chas. Baissac. From _Récits Créoles_. No. 126. 96. "Red Minette." By Chas. Baissac. From _Récits Créoles_. No. 127. 97. Fight at the Mill. By Emile Zola. No. 128. 98. Leo XIII. By Roman Correspondent. From _Le Figaro_, February 27. No. 129. 99. The Carp Herder. By Charles Richard. From _Le Figaro_, December 15, 1883. No. 130. 100. Fanny Elssler. By Viennese Correspondent. From _Le Figaro_. No. 131. 101. Lola Montes and Ludwig I. of Bavaria. By X. From _Le Figaro_. No. 132. 102. The Art of Being a Bore. By "De Ferney." From _Le Voltaire_, January 31. No. 133. 103. Humanity of the Japanese. From _L'Illustration_. No. 134. 104. By the Balloon Post. By Alexis Bouvier. From _Le Figaro_, January 29. No. 135. 105. An Extraordinary Letter from Von Moltke. By Count Von Moltke. From _Le Voltaire_, February 5. No. 136. 106. Chinese Women. By Lydie Paschkoff. From _Le Figaro_. No. 137. 107. A Haul at Madagascar in 1717. By Chas. Baissac. From _Récits Créoles_. No. 138. 108. Pierrot. By Guy de Maupassant. No. 139. 109. My Aunt Minon. By Chas. Baissac. From _Récits Créoles_. No. 140. 110. An Episode of the War in Soudan. By Victor Cherbuliez. From an address before the _Cinq Academies_. No. 141. 111. The Punishment of the Unfaithful Lover. By Sacher-Masoch. From "The Mother of God." No. 142. 112. The Sorceress. The Comte d'Avesnes. By Michelet. From "La Sorcière." No. 143. 113. The Great Fiddler of the Nineteenth Century. By "L'Homme Masque." From _Le Voltaire_, October 8. No. 144. 114. The Duello. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, August 31. No. 145. 115. How Balzac Found Names for his Novels. By Léon Gozlan. From _Le Figaro_. No. 146. 116. Tchernyschevsky and the Women of Nihilism. By Victor Tissot. From "Les Pères du Nihilisme," in _L'Illustration_. No. 147. 117. Emile Zola on Style. By Emile Zola. From _Le Figaro_. No. 148. 118. The Man of the XVIth Century. By Victorien Sardou. From _Le Figaro_, February 4. No. 149. 119. The Forest Growing in the Heart of Paris. By Camille Flammarion. From _Le Voltaire_, June 25. No. 150. 120. The Tomb of Nichelet. By An Old Parisian. From _Le Figaro_, July 10. No. 151. 121. A Master Wizard. By Un Vieux Parisien. From _Le Figaro_, October 6. No. 152. 122. By Rail Across the Sahara. By Charles de Maurceley. From _Le Voltaire_, January 23 and 27. No. 153. 123. In the House of Mahomet. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, October 20. No. 154. 124. The Chinese in Pnom-Penh, Cambodia. By Albert de Chenclos. From _La Revue Liberale_. No. 155. 125. Algeria. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, June 15. No. 156. 126. The Drum. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Contes de la Bécasse." No. 157. 127. Henry Charles Read. By Maxime du Camp. From "Souvenirs Litteraires." No. 158. 128. Recollections of Baudelaire. By Maxime du Camp. From "Souvenirs Litteraires." No. 159. 129. A Converted Libertine. By Ricardo Palma. (Lima, 1880.) No. 160. 130. Women of Fashionable Paris Society. By Emile Zola. From _Le Figaro_, June 27. No. 161. 131. La Parisienne. By Adrien Marx. From _Le Figaro_, May 13. No. 162. 132. At Sea. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Contes de la Bécasse." No. 163. 133. "Aunt Ess." By Arnold Mortier. From _Le Figaro's_ "Contes d'Été," August 23. No. 164. 134. Pasteur. From _Le Figaro_, November 23. No. 165. 135. A Ghost. By Parisis. From _Le Voltaire_, October 23. No. 166. 136. Matrimonial Agencies at Paris. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, April 20. No. 167. 137. Liszt. By Ignotus. From _Le Figaro_, May 25. No. 168. 138. The Stranglers of Paris, etc. By George Grison. From _Le Figaro_, May 23. No. 169. 139. The Lights of the Wedding. By R. M. From _La Epoca_, January 10. No. 170. 140. The Foundation of Skadra (Scutari). By W. Stephanowitsch. From French translation. No. 171. 141. The Last Hideous Days of the Flatters Mission. From _Le Figaro_, September 23. No. 172. 142. The Two Neighbours. By Julia de Asensi. From _La Epoca_, April 18. No. 173. 143. Candita. By "Almaviva." From _La Epoca_, October 18. No. 174. 144. A Drunken Lion. By Hector de Callias. From _Le Figaro_, June 30. No. 175. 145. The Song of Love Triumphant. By Ivan Tourgueneff. From _Le Figaro._ No. 176. 146. A Rich Man's Death. By Emile Zola. From _Le Figaro_, August 1. No. 177. 147. Germanillo. By "Juan Manuel de Capua." From _La Epoca_, December 27. No. 178. 148. Simon's Papa. By Guy de Maupassant. From "La Maison Tellier." No. 179. 149. "Las Hechas Y Por Hacer." By Ricardo Palma. (Lima, 1879.) No. 180. 150. The Bishop's Twenty Thousand Godos. By Ricardo Palma. No. 181. 151. "Los Postres del Festin." By Ricardo Palma. From _La Raza Latina_, February 29. No. 182. 152. The Blessed Bread. By François Coppée. From _Le Figaro_, March 6. No. 183. 153. The Invitation to Sleep. By François Coppée. From _Le Figaro's_ "Contes d'Été." No. 184. 154. Cousin Rosa. By "Almaviva." From _La Epoca_, March 17. No. 185. 155. The Chemise of Margarita Pareja. By Ricardo Palma. From _La Raza Latina_. No. 186. 156. The Just Man. By F. Luzel. From Luzel's Collection. No. 187. 157. Saint Peter's Betrothed. By De Luzel. No. 188. 158. Fantic Loho. By Luzel. From "Breton Legends." No. 189. 159. The Adventures of Walter Schnaffs. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Contes de la Bécasse." No. 190. 160. L'Abandounado. By René Maizeroy. From "The Love That Bleeds." No. 191. 161. Flaubert at Sparta. By Maxime du Camp. From _Revue des Deux Mondes_. No. 192. 162. Daddy Goat and Daddy Tiger. By Pa Lindor. From _Le Courrier des Opelousas_. No. 193. 163. The Great Chinese Vase. By Edmond de L. From _Le Figaro_, February 17. No. 194. 164. The Two Porcelain Vases. By Charles Richard. From _Le Figaro_. No. 195. 165. A Bit of Jewish Folk Lore. By Leopold Kompert. From "Scenes du Ghetto." No. 196. 166. A Story of the Ghetto. By Leopold Kompert. From "Scenes du Ghetto." No. 197. 167. A Legend of Rabbi Loeb. By Daniel Stauben. No. 198. 168. Loulou. By Lucien Griveau. No. 199. 169. The Cabecilla; the Story of the Carlist War. By Alphonse Daudet. No. 200. 170. Tried, Condemned, Executed. By P. Didier. No. 201. 171. The Man with the Golden Brain. By Alphonse Daudet. From "Ballades en Prose." No. 202. 172. The Death of the Dauphin, etc. By Alphonse Daudet. No. 203. 173. My First Duel. By Carle de Perrières. From "Paris-Joyeux." No. 204. 174. My Two Cats. By Emile Zola. No. 205. 175. The Khouans. By N. Ney. From _L'Illustration_, July 30. No. 206. 176. The Dead Wife. After S. Juhens' French translation from Chinese. No. 207. 177. Scenes of Polish Life. By Krazewski. From "Jermola," _Le Figaro_. No. 208. 178. Memory of Algeria. By Alphonse Daudet. From "Tartarin de Tarascon," _Nouvelle Revue_. No. 209. 179. Anecdote of Baudelaire. "Les Fantaisites." By Pierre Quiroul. From _Le Figaro_, August 15. No. 210. 180. Adelaide Neilson. From _L'Illustration_, August 21. No. 211. 181. A Morning with Baudelaire. By "Theodore de Grave." No. 212. 182. "L'Enfant de la Balle." By François Coppée. From _Le Figaro_. No. 213. 183. Poetical Illusions. By Maxime du Camp. From "Souvenirs Litteraires." No. 214. 184. The Moon's Blessings. By Charles Baudelaire. No. 215. 185. Patti and Her New Home. By "Adrien Marx." From _Le Figaro_. No. 216. 186. The Ghostly Mass. By Luzel. From "Veillees Bretonnes." No. 217. 187. Solitude. By Guy de Maupassant. From "Monsieur Parent." No. 218. "Fantastics." 1. "Aida." 2. Hiouen-Thsang. 3. El Vomito. (?) 4. The Devil's Carbuncle. 5. A Hemisphere in a Woman's Hair. 6. The Clock. 7. The Fool and Venus. 8. The Stranger. No. 219. The winter of 1877, Mr. Hearn contributed from New Orleans, a series of letters to the Cincinnati _Commercial_ under the name of "Ozias Midwinter." V MAGAZINE STORIES AND PAPERS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER[44] [44] If published also in book-form, the title of the book is given. (Nos. 220-275) No. 220. The Scenes of Cable's Romances. _The Century Magazine_, November, 1883, vol. 27 (N. S. Vol. 5), p. 40. No. 221. Quaint New Orleans and its Habitants. _Harper's Weekly_, December 6, 1884, vol. 28, p. 812. No. 222. New Orleans Exposition. _Harper's Weekly_, January 3, 1885, vol. 29, p. 14. No. 223. The Creole Patois. _Harper's Weekly_, January 10, 1885, vol. 29, p. 27. No. 224. The Creole Patois. _Harper's Weekly_, January 17, 1885, vol. 29, p. 43. No. 225. New Orleans Exposition. _Harper's Weekly_, January 31, 1885, vol. 29, p. 71 No. 226. The East at New Orleans. _Harper's Weekly_, March 7, 1885, vol. 29, p. 155. No. 227. Mexico at New Orleans. _Harper's Weekly_, March 14, 1885, vol. 29, p. 167. No. 228. The New Orleans Exposition. Some Oriental Curiosities. _Harper's Bazaar_, March 28, 1885, vol. 18, p. 201. No. 229. The New Orleans Exposition. Notes of a Curiosity Hunter. _Harper's Bazaar_, April 4, 1885, vol. 18, p. 218 No. 230. The Government Exhibit at New Orleans. _Harper's Weekly_, April 11, 1885, vol. 29, p. 234. No. 231. The Legend of Tchi-Niu. A Chinese Story of Filial Piety. _Harper's Bazaar_, October 31, 1885, vol. 18, p. 703. "Some Chinese Ghosts," 1887. No. 232. The Last of the Voudoos. _Harper's Weekly_, November 7, 1885, vol. 29, p. 726. No. 233. New Orleans Superstitions. _Harper's Weekly_, December 25, 1886, vol. 30, p. 843. No. 234. Rabyah's Last Ride. A tradition of Pre-Islamic Arabia. _Harper's Bazaar_, April 2, 1887, vol. 20, p. 239. No. 235. Chita. _Harper's Monthly_, April, 1888, vol. 76, p. 733. "Chita," 1890. No. 236. A Midsummer Trip to the West Indies. _Harper's Monthly_, July-September, 1888, vol. 77, pp. 209, 327, 614. "Two Years in the French West Indies," 1890. No. 237. La Vérette and the Carnival in St. Pierre, Martinique. _Harper's Monthly_, October, 1888, vol. 77, p. 737. "Two Years in the French West Indies," 1890. No. 238. Les Porteuses. _Harper's Monthly_, July, 1889, vol. 79, p. 299. "Two Years in the French West Indies," 1890. No. 239. At Grand Anse. _Harper's Monthly_, November, 1889, vol. 79, p. 844. "Two Years in the French West Indies," 1890. No. 240. A Ghost. _Harper's Monthly_, December, 1889, vol. 80, p. 116. No. 241. Youma. _Harper's Monthly_, January-February, 1890, vol. 80, pp. 218, 408. "Youma," 1890. No. 242. Karma. _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890, vol. 45, p. 667. No. 243. A Study of Half-Breed Races in the West Indies. _The Cosmopolitan_, June, 1890, vol. 9, p. 167. No. 244. West Indian Society of Many Colourings. _The Cosmopolitan_, July, 1890, vol. 9, p. 337. No. 245. A Winter Journey to Japan. _Harper's Monthly_, November, 1890, vol. 81, p. 860. No. 246. At the Market of the Dead. _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1891, vol. 68, p. 382. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 1894. No. 247. The Chief City of the Province of the Gods. _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1891, vol. 68, p. 621. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 1894. No. 248. The Most Ancient Shrine in Japan. _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1891, vol. 68, p. 780. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 1894. No. 249. In a Japanese Garden. _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1892, vol. 70, p. 14. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 1894. No. 250. Of a Dancing Girl. _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1893, vol. 71, p. 332. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 1894. No. 251. The Japanese Smile. _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1893, vol. 71, p. 634. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 1894. No. 252. Of the Eternal Feminine. _Atlantic Monthly,_ December, 1893, vol. 72, p. 761. "Out of the East," 1895. No. 253. The Red Bridal. _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1894, vol. 74, p. 74. "Out of the East," 1895. No. 254. At Hakata. _Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1894, vol. 74, p. 510. "Out of the East," 1895. No. 255. From my Japanese Diary. _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1894, vol. 74, p. 609. No. 256. A Wish Fulfilled. _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1895, vol. 75, p. 90. "Out of the East," 1895. No. 257. In the Twilight of the Gods. _Atlantic Monthly_, June, 1895, vol. 75, p. 791. "Kokoro," 1896. No. 258. The Genius of Japanese Civilization. _Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1895, vol. 76, p. 449. "Kokoro," 1896. No. 259. After the War. _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1895, vol. 76, p. 599. "Kokoro," 1896. No. 260. Notes from a Travelling Diary. _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1895, vol. 76, p. 815. "Kokoro," 1896. No. 261. China and the Western World. _Atlantic Monthly_, April, 1896, vol. 77, p. 450. No. 262. A Trip to Kyôto. _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1896, vol. 77, p. 613. "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," 1897. No. 263. About Faces in Japanese Art. _Atlantic Monthly_, August, 1896, vol. 78, p. 219. "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," 1897. No. 264. Out of the Street: Japanese Folk-Songs. _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1896, vol. 78, p. 347. "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," 1897. No. 265. Dust. _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1896, vol. 78, p. 642, "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," 1897. No. 266. A Living God. _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1896, vol. 78, p. 833. "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," 1897. No. 267. Notes of a Trip to Izumo. _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1897, vol. 79, p. 678. No. 268. The Story of Mimi-Nashi Hôïchi. _Atlantic Monthly_, August, 1903, vol. 92, p. 237. "Kwaidan," 1904. No. 269. The Dream of Akinosuké. _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1904, vol. 93, p. 340. "Kwaidan," 1904. No. 270. A Letter from Japan. _Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1904, vol. 94, p. 625. "The Romance of the Milky Way," 1905. No. 271. The Story of Itô Norisuké. _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1905, vol. 95, p. 98. "The Romance of the Milky Way," 1905. No. 272. Stranger than Fiction. _Atlantic Monthly_, April, 1905, vol. 95, p. 494. "The Romance of the Milky Way," 1905. No. 273. The Romance of the Milky Way. _Atlantic Monthly_, August, 1905, vol. 96, p. 238. "The Romance of the Milky Way," 1905. No. 274. Ultimate Questions. _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1905, vol. 96, p. 391. "The Romance of the Milky Way," 1905. No. 275. Two Memories of a Childhood. _Atlantic Monthly_, October, 1906, vol. 98, p. 445. * * * * * VI ARTICLES BY HEARN TRANSLATED IN FOREIGN MAGAZINES (Nos. 276-280) No. 276. Le Sourire japonais. Traduction de Madame Léon Raynal, _Revue de Paris_, July 15, 1900, Year 7, vol. 4, p. 429. No. 277. Une Danseuse japonais. Traduction de Madame Léon Raynal, _Revue de Paris,_ March 15, 1901, Year 8, vol. 2, p. 330. No. 278. Le Nirvâna, étude de Bouddhisme Synthétique. Traduite par M. & Mme. Charles-Marie Garnier, _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1903, Year 11, p. 352. No. 279. Kitsonné (superstition japonaise). Traduction de Madame Léon Raynal, _Revue de Paris_, November 1, 1903, Year 10, vol. 6, p. 188. No. 280. Cimètieres et Temples japonais (Jizô). Traduction de Madame Léon Raynal, _Revue de Paris,_ April 15, 1904, Year 11, vol. 2, p. 829. * * * * * VII UNPUBLISHED WORKS (Nos. 281-282) No. 281. 1885. AVATAR. Par Gautier, Translation by Lafcadio Hearn. Unable to find a publisher, Hearn destroyed the manuscript. No. 282. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY, by Gustave Flaubert; translated from the Fifth Paris Edition, Vols. I-II. (Manuscript copy in the possession of Dr. Gould.) The half-page containing, at one time, probably, the translator's name, is cut off. The title-page is preceded by a half-page, printed, of directions to the printer, regarding size of type, etc. The volumes are 6 x 9-1/2 inches, opening at the end. The writing is in pencil, and the letters large, even for an ordinary handwriting, but remarkably so for that of Hearn, who, when writing with a pen, made his letters very small. The paper has the yellow tint habitually used by him. Volume I contains 364 pages; Volume II, numbered consecutively, the balance of a total of 679 pages. Five pages of _addenda_ follow, containing notes upon passages, with original texts, etc., which the American publisher would hardly dare to put forth. Hearn's synopsis (printed) of the "St. Anthony" accompanies the text of the translation, and is reproduced herewith:-- ARGUMENT FRAILTY Sunset in the desert. Enfeebled by prolonged fasting, the hermit finds himself unable to concentrate his mind upon holy things. His thoughts wander: memories of youth evoke regrets that his relaxed will can no longer find strength to suppress;--and, remembrance begetting remembrance, his fancy leads him upon dangerous ground. He dreams of his flight from home,--of Ammonaria, his sister's playmate,--of his misery in the waste,--his visit to Alexandria with the blind monk Didymus,--the unholy sights of the luxurious city. Involuntarily he yields to the nervous dissatisfaction growing upon him. He laments his solitude, his joylessness, his poverty, the obscurity of his life: grace departs from him; hope burns low within his heart. Suddenly revolting against his weakness, he seeks refuge from distraction in the study of the Scriptures. Vain effort! An invisible hand turns the leaves, placing perilous texts before his eyes. He dreams of the Maccabees slaughtering their enemies, and desires that he might do likewise with the Arians of Alexandria;--he becomes inspired with admiration of King Nebuchadnezzar;--he meditates voluptuously upon the visit of Sheba's queen to Solomon;--discovers a text in the Acts of the Apostles antagonistic to principles of monkish asceticism,--indulges in reveries regarding the riches of the Biblical Kings and holy men. The Tempter comes to tempt him with evil hallucinations for which the Saint's momentary frailty has paved the way; and with the Evil One comes also-- THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS Phantom gold is piled up to excite Covetousness; shadowy banquets appear to evoke Gluttony. The scene shifts to aid the temptations of Anger and of Pride.... Anthony finds himself in Alexandria, at the head of a wild army of monks slaughtering the heretics and the pagans, without mercy for age or sex. In fantastic obedience to the course of his fancy while reading the Scriptures a while before, and like an invisible echo of his evil thoughts, the scene changes again. Alexandria is transformed into Constantinople. Anthony finds himself the honoured of the Emperor. He beholds the vast circus in all its splendour, the ocean of faces, the tumult of excitement. Simultaneously he beholds his enemies degraded to the condition of slaves, toiling in the stables of Constantine. He feels joy in the degradation of the Fathers of Nicæa. Then all is transformed. It is no longer the splendour of Constantinople he beholds under the luminosity of a Greek day; but the prodigious palace of Nebuchadnezzar by night. He beholds the orgies, the luxuries, the abominations;--and the spirit of Pride enters triumphantly into him as the spirit of Nebuchadnezzar.... Awakening as from a dream, he finds himself again before his hermitage. A vast caravan approaches, halts; and the Queen of Sheba descends to tempt the Saint with the deadliest of all temptations. Her beauty is enhanced by Oriental splendour of adornment; her converse is a song of witchcraft. The Saint remains firm.... The Seven Deadly Sins depart from him. THE HERESIARCHS But now the Tempter assumes a subtler form. Under the guise of a former disciple of Anthony,--Hilarion,--the demon, while pretending to seek instruction seeks to poison the mind of Anthony with hatred of the fathers of the church. He repeats all the scandals amassed by ecclesiastical intriguers, all the calumnies created by malice;--he cites texts only to foment doubt, and quotes the Evangels only to make confusion. Under the pretext of obtaining mental enlightenment from the wisest of men, he induces Anthony to enter with him into a spectral basilica, wherein are assembled all the Heresiarchs of the third century. The hermit is confounded by the multitude of tenets,--horrified by the blasphemies and abominations of Elkes, Corpocrates, Valentinus, Manes, Cerdo,--disgusted by the perversions of the Paternians, Marcosians, Serpentians,--bewildered by the apocryphal Gospels of Eve and of Judas, of the Lord and of Thomas. And Hilarion grows taller. THE MARTYRS Anthony finds himself in the dungeons of a vast amphitheatre, among Christians condemned to the wild beasts. By this hallucination the tempter would prove to the Saint that martyrdom is not always suffered for purest motives. Anthony finds the martyrs possessed of bigotry and insincerity. He sees many compelled to die against their will; many who would forswear their faith could it avail them aught. He beholds heretics die for their heterodoxy more nobly than orthodox believers. He finds himself transported to the tombs of the martyrs. He witnesses the meeting of Christian women at the sepulchres. He beholds the touching ceremonies of prayer change into orgie,--lamentations give place to amorous dalliance. THE MAGICIANS Then the Tempter seeks to shake Anthony's faith in the excellence and evidence of miracles. He assumes the form of a Hindoo Brahmin, terminating a life of wondrous holiness by self-cremation;--he appears as Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre,--as Apollonius of Tyana, greatest of all thaumaturgists, who claim superiority to Christ. All the marvels related by Philostratus are embodied in the converse of Apollonius and Damis. THE GODS Hilarion reappears, taller than ever, growing more gigantic in proportion to the increasing weakness of the Saint. Standing beside Anthony he evokes all the deities of the antique world. They defile before him a marvellous panorama;--Gods of Egypt and India, Chaldæa and Hellas, Babylon and Ultima Thule,--monstrous and multiform, phallic and ithyphallic, fantastic and obscene. Some intoxicate by their beauty; others appal by their foulness. The Buddha recounts the story of his wondrous life; Venus displays the rounded daintiness of her nudity; Isis utters awful soliloquy. Lastly the phantom of Jehovah appears, as the shadow of a god passing away for ever. Suddenly the stature of Hilarion towers to the stars; he assumes the likeness and luminosity of Lucifer; he announces himself as-- SCIENCE And Anthony is lifted upon mighty wings and borne away beyond the world, above the solar system, above the starry arch of the Milky Way. All future discoveries of Astronomy are revealed to him. He is tempted by the revelation of innumerable worlds,--by the refutation of all his previous ideas of the nature of the Universe,--by the enigmas of infinity,--by all the marvels that conflict with faith. Even in the night of the Immensity the demon renews the temptation of reason; Anthony wavers upon the verge of pantheism. LUST AND DEATH Anthony, abandoned by the Spirit of Science, comes to himself in the desert. Then the Tempter returns under a two-fold aspect: as the Spirit of Fornication and the Spirit of Destruction. The latter urges him to suicide,--the former to indulgence of sense. They inspire him with strong fancies of palingenesis, of the illusion of death, of the continuity of life. The pantheistic temptation intensifies. THE MONSTERS Anthony in reveries meditates upon the monstrous symbols painted upon the walls of certain ancient temples. Could he know their meaning he might learn also something of the secret lien between Matter and Thought. Forthwith a phantasmagoria of monsters commence to pass before his eyes:--the Sphinx and the Chimera, the Blemmyes and Astomi, the Cynocephali and all creatures of mythologic creation. He beholds the fabulous beings of Oriental imagining,--the abnormities described by Pliny and Herodotus,--the fantasticalities to be adopted later by heraldry,--the grotesqueries of future mediæval illumination made animate;--the goblinries and foulnesses of superstitious fancy,--the Witches' Sabbath of abominations. METAMORPHOSIS The multitude of monsters melts away; the land changes into an Ocean; the creatures of the briny abysses appear. And the waters in turn also change; seaweeds are transformed to herbs, forests of coral give place to forests of trees, polypous life changes to vegetation. Metals crystallize; frosts effloresce, plants become living things, inanimate matter takes animate form, monads vibrate, the pantheism of nature makes itself manifest. Anthony feels a delirious desire to unite himself with the Spirit of Universal Being.... The vision vanishes. The sun arises. The face of Christ is revealed. The temptation has passed; Anthony kneels in prayer. L. H. VIII BOOKS ABOUT HEARN (Nos. 283-284) No. 283. 1906. THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF LAFCADIO HEARN. By Elizabeth Bisland. With Illustrations. In two volumes. (Publisher's Vignette.) Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (The Riverside Press, Cambridge), 1906. 8vo., 2 vols., pp. (VIII), 475, 554, black cloth, Japanese characters on small red disc, gold lettering, gilt top. Volume I. (V-VIII) Preface by E. B. Contents:-- Introductory Sketch I. Boyhood II. The Artist's Apprenticeship III. The Master Workman IV. The Last Stage Letters List of Illustrations. Volume II. List of Illustrations. Letters (continued) Pages 519-529 Appendix. Pages 533-554 Index. Articles and Reviews:-- _Academy, The_, January 26, 1907, vol. 72, p. 88. _Athenæum, The_, February 2, 1907, p. 126. _Current Literature_, January, 1907, vol. 42, p. 49. Dunbar, Olivia Howard, _North American Review_, February 15, 1907, vol. 184, p. 417. Greenslet, Ferris, _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1907, vol. 99, p. 261. Godkin, F. W., _The Dial_, December 16, 1906, vol. 41, p. 447. Huneker, James, _New York Times, The_, December 1, 1906, vol. 11, p. 817. _Nation, The_, November 29, 1906, vol. 83, p. 464. _New York Evening Post, The_, December 1, 1906. _New York Tribune, The_, December 5, 1906. Tunison, J. S., _Dayton (Ohio) Journal, The_, December 25, 1906. No. 284. 1907. LETTERS FROM THE RAVEN, being the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn with Henry Watkin, with Introduction and critical comment by the editor, Milton Bronner. (Vignette drawing of the Raven.) New York: Brentano's, 1907. 12mo., pp. 201, half cloth brown. Ornamental black and gold back, gilt top. Contents:-- Introduction Letters from the Raven Letters to a Lady Letters of Ozias Midwinter * * * * * IX ARTICLES AND CRITICAL REVIEWS ABOUT HEARN (Nos. 285-388) ACADEMY, The No. 285. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," November 13, 1897, vol. 52, p. 395. No. 286. "Koizumi Yakumo--Lafcadio Hearn," by N. C., April 13, 1901, vol. 60, p. 328. No. 287. Sketch and list of works, October 8, 1904, vol. 67, p. 305. No. 288. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," by W. Teignmouth Shore, December 10, 1904, vol. 67, p. 584. No. 289. A review of "The Romance of the Milky Way," December 2, 1905, vol. 69, p. 1257. No. 290. A review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," January 26, 1907, vol. 72, p. 88. AMENOMORI, NOBUSHIGE No. 291. _Atlantic Monthly_, "Lafcadio Hearn, the Man," October, 1905, vol. 96, p. 510. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, The No. 292. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," by Edmund Buckley, of the University of Chicago, January, 1905, vol. 10, p. 545. AMERICAN MONTHLY REVIEW OF REVIEWS, The No. 293. "Lafcadio Hearn, Interpretator of Japan," November, 1904, vol. 30, p. 561. ATHENÆUM, The No. 294. A review of "Youma," August 30, 1890, p. 284. No. 295. A review of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," November 10, 1894, p. 634. No. 296. A review of "Out of the East," August 24, 1895, p. 249. No. 297. A review of "Kokoro," August 8, 1896, p. 185. No. 298. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," November 13, 1897, p. 664. No. 299. A review of "Exotics and Retrospectives," January 6, 1900, p. 11. No. 300. A review of "Shadowings," January 5, 1901, p. 15. No. 301. A review of "A Japanese Miscellany," December 21, 1901, p. 833. No. 302. A review of "Kottô," January 17, 1903, p. 77. No. 303. A review of "Kwaidan," September 17, 1904, p. 373. No. 304. A review of "The Romance of the Milky Way," March 31, 1906, p. 389. No. 305. A review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," February 2, 1907, p. 126. ATLANTIC MONTHLY, The No. 306. A review of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and "Out of the East," by Mrs. M. McN. Scott, June, 1895, vol. 75, p. 830. No. 307. A review of "In Ghostly Japan," by Jukichi Inouye, September, 1900, vol. 86, p. 399. No. 308. "Lafcadio Hearn: The Meeting of Three Ways," by Paul Elmer More, February, 1903, vol. 91, p. 204. No. 309. A review of "Kwaidan," June, 1904, vol. 93, p. 857. No. 291. "Lafcadio Hearn: the Man," by Nobushige Amenomori, October, 1905, vol. 96, p. 510. No. 310. "Lafcadio Hearn," by Ferris Greenslet, February, 1907, vol. 99, p. 261. AUTHOR, The No. 311. Sketch by O. P. Caylor (Reprinted from an article in the _Philadelphia North American_), January 15, 1890, vol. 2, p. 51. BOOKBUYER, The No. 312. "Lafcadio Hearn," by J. S. Tunison, May, 1896, vol. 13, p. 209. No. 313. A review of "Kokoro," by Tozo Takayanagi, May, 1896, vol. 13, p. 229. No. 314. "Through the Medium of a Temperament," by John Harrison Wagner, June, 1898, vol. 16, p. 437. No. 315. A review of "Kottô," December, 1902, vol. 25, p. 416. BOOKMAN, The No. 316. A review of "Shadowings," by F. T. C., February, 1901, vol. 12, p. 582. No. 317. A review of "Kwaidan," November, 1904, vol. 20, p. 159. No. 318. "The Late Lafcadio Hearn," November, 1904, vol. 20, p. 190. BUCKLEY, EDMUND No. 292. _The American Journal of Sociology_, a review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," January, 1905, vol. 10, P. 545. CAYLOR, O. P. No. 311. _The Author_, January 15, 1890, vol. 2, p. 51. CHAUTAUQUAN, The No. 319. Short Sketch of Hearn, and reprints "Fragment," "Juiroku-zakura," "Riki-Baka," "Yuki-Onna," "The Screen Maiden," September, 1905, vol. 42, p. 245. CHICAGO EVENING POST, The No. 320. "Lafcadio Hearn," by Francis Hackett. COCKERILL, COLONEL JOHN A. No. 321. _Current Literature_, "Lafcadio Hearn: the author of 'Kokoro.'" (Reprinted from the New York _Herald_.) June, 1896, vol. 19, p. 476. COLEMAN, JR., CHARLES W. No. 322. _Harper's Monthly_, "The Recent Movement in Southern Literature," May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855. CRITIC, The No. 323. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," April 9, 1898, vol. 29, p. 248. No. 324. "Mr. Hearn's Japanese Shadowings," by Adachi Kinnosuké, January, 1901, vol. 38, p. 29. No. 325. "Lafcadio Hearn's Funeral," by Margaret Emerson, January, 1905, vol. 46, p. 34. No. 326. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," by Wm. Elliot Griffis, February, 1905, vol. 46, p. 185. No. 327. "Hearn's Stories of Old Japan," by W. E. Griffis, March, 1906, vol. 48, p. 222. No. 328. "Letters of a Poet to a Musician," by Henry E. Krehbiel, April, 1906, vol. 48, p. 309. CURRENT LITERATURE No. 321. "Lafcadio Hearn: the author of 'Kokoro,'" by Colonel John A. Cockerill. (Reprinted from the New York _Herald_.) June, 1896, vol. 19, p. 476. No. 329. "A Glimpse of Lafcadio Hearn," October, 1899, vol. 26, p. 310. No. 330. "Lafcadio Hearn: a Dreamer," by Yone Noguchi. (Reprinted from the _National Magazine_.) June, 1905, vol. 38, p. 521. No. 331. "The Mystic Dream of Lafcadio Hearn," January, 1907, vol. 42, p. 49. DAYTON, OHIO, JOURNAL, The No. 332. Editorial on Lafcadio Hearn, September 30, 1904. No. 333. "Lafcadio Hearn," by J. S. Tunison, December 25, 1906. DIAL, The No. 334. A review of "Exotics and Retrospectives," July 16, 1899, vol. 27, p. 52. No. 335. A review of "Shadowings," January 1, 1901, vol. 30, p. 19. No. 336. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," by Wm. Elliot Griffis, December 1, 1904, vol. 36, p. 368. No. 337. A review of "The Romance of the Milky Way," November 1, 1905, vol. 39, p. 276. No. 338. "Self-Revelation of Lafcadio Hearn," by F. W. Godkin, December 16, 1906, vol. 41, p. 447. DUNBAR, OLIVIA HOWARD No. 339. _North American Review_, a review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," February 15, 1907, vol. 184, p. 417. EMERSON, MARGARET No. 325. _The Critic_, "Lafcadio Hearn's Funeral," January, 1905, vol. 46, p. 34. EVENING SUN, The New York No. 340. "A Native's Tribute to the Dead American Poet of Japan," November 11, 1904. EVENING POST, The New York No. 341. A review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," December 1, 1906. EVENING TRANSCRIPT, The Boston No. 342. A review of "Chita," November 2, 1889. F. T. C. No. 316. _The Bookman_, a review of "Shadowings," February, 1901, vol. 12, p. 582. FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, The No. 343. "Lafcadio Hearn: a Study of his Personality and Art," by George M. Gould, October-November, 1906, vol. 86, pp. 685, 881. GODKIN, F. W. No. 338. _The Dial_, "Self-Revelation of Lafcadio Hearn," December 16, 1906, vol. 41, p. 447. GOULD, GEORGE M. No. 343. _Putnam's Monthly_, "Lafcadio Hearn: a Study of his Personality and Art," October-November, 1906, vol. 1, pp. 97, 156. The Same, _Fortnightly Review_, October-November, 1906, vol. 86, pp.685, 881. GREENSLET, FERRIS No. 310. _Atlantic Monthly_, "Lafcadio Hearn," February, 1907, vol. 99, p. 261. GRIFFIS, WILLIAM ELLIOT No. 336. _The Dial_, a review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," December 1, 1904, vol. 36, p. 308. No. 326. _The Critic_, a review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," February, 1905, vol. 46, p. 185. No. 327. _The Critic_, "Hearn's Stories of Old Japan," March, 1906, vol. 48, p. 222. HACKETT, FRANCIS No. 320. Chicago _Evening Post_, "Lafcadio Hearn." HARPER'S MONTHLY No. 322. "The Recent Movement in Southern Literature," by Charles W. Coleman, Jr., May, 1887, vol. 74, p. 855. HUNEKER, JAMES No. 344. The New York _Times_, "Exotic Lafcadio Hearn: The Life and Letters of a Master of Nuance--Elizabeth Bisland's Sympathetic Biography," December 1, 1906, vol. 11, p. 817. HUTSON, CHARLES WOODWARD No. 345. _Poet-Lore_ "The English of Lafcadio Hearn," Spring, 1905, vol. 16, p. 53. INDEPENDENT, The No. 346. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," November 24, 1898, vol. 50, p. 1508. No. 347. "An Interpreter of the East" (A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation"), October 27, 1904, vol. 57, p. 976. No. 348. A review of "The Romance of the Milky Way," December 21, 1905, vol. 59, p. 1478. INOUYE, JUKICHI No. 307. _Atlantic Monthly_, a review of "In Ghostly Japan," September, 1900, vol. 86, p. 399. INTERNATIONAL STUDIO, The No. 349. A review of "Stories and Sketches of Japan," 1905, vol. 25, p. XL. KENNARD, NINA H. No. 350. _Nineteenth Century and After_, "Lafcadio Hearn," January, 1906, vol. 59, p. 135. KINNOSUKÉ, ADACHI No. 324. _The Critic_, "Mr. Hearn's Japanese Shadowings," January, 1901, vol. 38, p. 29. KREHBIEL, HENRY E. No. 328. _The Critic_, "Letters of a Poet to a Musician," April, 1906, vol. 48, p. 309. No. 351. The New York _Tribune_, "Hearn and Folk-Lore Music." LITERARY WORLD, The No. 352. A review of "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard," February 15, 1890, vol. 21, p. 59. No. 353. A review of "One of Cleopatra's Nights," February 14, 1891, vol. 22, p. 56. No. 354. A review of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," October 20, 1894, vol. 25, p. 347. No. 355. A review of "Out of the East," April 20, 1895, vol. 26, p. 123. No. 356. A review of "Kokoro," April 18, 1896, vol. 27, p. 116. No. 357. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," November 13, 1897, vol. 28, p. 389. No. 358. A review of "A Japanese Miscellany," December 1, 1901, vol. 32, p. 207. LIVING AGE, The No. 359. "Lafcadio Hearn," by Robert Young, March 23, 1907, vol. 252, p. 760. (Reprinted from the _Speaker_.) MATHER, JR., F. J. No. 360. _The Nation_, "Lafcadio Hearn on Style" (editorial), December 6, 1906, vol. 83, p. 478. MESSENGER, The No. 361. "Mr. Lafcadio Hearn on the Jesuit Missions in Japan," by Herbert Thurston, S. J., January, 1906, vol. 45, p. 1. MORE, PAUL ELMER No. 308. _Atlantic Monthly_, "Lafcadio Hearn: the Meeting of Three Ways," February, 1903, vol. 91, p. 204. NATION, The No. 362. A review of "Gombo Zhèbes," April 23, 1885, vol. 40, p. 349. No. 363. A review of "Some Chinese Ghosts," May 26, 1887, vol. 44, p. 456. No. 364. A review of "Youma," May 7, 1891, vol. 52, p. 385. No. 365. A review of "Kokoro," July 9, 1896, vol. 63, p. 35. No. 366. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," February 3, 1898, vol. 66, p. 97. No. 367. A review of "Shadowings," November 8, 1900, vol. 71, p. 372. No. 368. A review of "A Japanese Miscellany," January 9, 1902, vol. 74, p. 39. No. 369. A review of "Kottô," March 26, 1903, vol. 76, p. 254. No. 370. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," December 8, 1904, vol. 79, p. 465. No. 371. A review of "Stories and Sketches of Japan," January 26, 1905, vol. 80, p. 68. No. 372. A review of "The Romance of the Milky Way," December 21, 1905, vol. 81, p. 510. No. 373. A review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," November 29, 1906, vol. 83, p. 464. No. 360. "Lafcadio Hearn on Style" (editorial), by F. J. Mather, Jr., December 6, 1906, vol. 83, p. 478. NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER, The No. 350. "Lafcadio Hearn," by Nina H. Kennard, January, 1906, vol. 59, p. 135. NOGUCHI, YONE No. 330. _Current Literature_, "Lafcadio Hearn: a Dreamer." (Reprinted from the _National Magazine_.) June, 1905, vol. 38, p. 521. NORTH AMERICAN, The No. 339. A review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," by Olivia Howard Dunbar, February 15, 1907, vol. 184, p. 417. OUTLOOK, The No. 374. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," October 16, 1897, vol. 57, p. 435. No. 375. A review of "The Romance of the Milky Way," November 9, 1906, vol. 84, p. 503. POET-LORE No. 345. "The English of Lafcadio Hearn," by Charles Woodward Hutson, Spring, 1905, vol. 16, p. 53. PUBLIC OPINION No. 376. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," November 25, 1897, vol. 23, p. 694. No. 377. A review of "Shadowings," October 18, 1900, vol. 29, p. 504. No. 378. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," October 27, 1904. vol. 37, p. 537. PUTNAM'S MONTHLY No. 343. "Lafcadio Hearn: A Study of his Personality and Art," by George M. Gould, October-November, 1906, vol. I, pp. 97, 156. SCOTT, MRS. M. MCN. No. 306. _Atlantic Monthly_, a review of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and "Out of the East," June, 1895, vol. 75, p. 830. SHORE, W. TEIGNMOUTH No. 288. _Academy_, a review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," December 10, 1904, vol. 67, p. 584. SPECTATOR, The No. 379. A review of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," November 17, 1894, vol. 73, p. 698. No. 380. A review of "Out of the East," October 12, 1895, vol. 75, p.459. No. 381. A review of "Kokoro," May 23, 1896, vol. 76, p. 739. No. 382. A review of "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields," November 20, 1897, vol. 79, p. 736. No. 383. A review of "Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation," January 14, 1905, vol. 94, p. 54. TAKAYANAGI, TOZO No. 313. _The Book Buyer_, a review of "Kokoro," May, 1896, vol. 13, p. 229. THURSTON, S. J., Herbert No. 361. _The Messenger_, "Mr. Lafcadio Hearn on the Jesuit Missions in Japan," January, 1906, vol. 45, p. 1. TIMES-DEMOCRAT, The New Orleans No. 384. "A Strange Career," August 5, 1906. No. 385. "Lafcadio Hearn and His Friends," August 20, 1906. No. 386. "Silken Fetters," May 26, 1907. TIMES, The New York No. 387. A review of "Two Years in the French West Indies," September 1, 1890. No. 344. "Exotic Lafcadio Hearn: The Life and Letters of a Master of Nuance--Elizabeth Bisland's Sympathetic Biography," by James Huneker, December 1, 1906, vol. 11, p. 817. TRIBUNE, The New York No. 388. A review of "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," December 5, 1906. No. 351. "Hearn and Folk-Lore Music," by H. E. Krehbiel. TUNISON, J. S. No. 312. _The Book Buyer_, "Lafcadio Hearn," May, 1896, vol. 13, p. 209. No. 333. _The Dayton (Ohio) Journal_, "Lafcadio Hearn," December 25, 1906. WAGNER, JOHN HARRISON No. 314. _The Book Buyer_, "Through the Medium of a Temperament," June, 1898, vol. 16, p. 437. YOUNG, ROBERT No. 359. _The Living Age_, "Lafcadio Hearn," March 23, 1907, vol. 252, p. 760. * * * * * X FOREIGN ARTICLES AND CRITICAL REVIEWS UPON HEARN (Nos. 389-398) DANISH NYA PRESSEN No. 389. "Ur en författares lif," af Konni Zilliacus, February 2, 1899. FRENCH BENTZON, TH. No. 390. _Revue des deux Mondes_, "Un Peintre du Japon: Lafcadio Hearn,"[45] June 1, 1904, vol. 21, p. 556. CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE No. 391. "Impressions sur la vie japonaise," par Félicien Challayé, June, 1902, 3rd Series, 17th Cahier. CHALLAYÉ, FÉLICIEN No. 391. _Cahiers de la quinzaine_, "Impressions sur la vie japonaise," June, 1902, 3rd Series, 17th Cahier. No. 392. _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_. "Un Philosophe japonisant, Lafcadio Hearn,"[45] 1903, vol. 11, p. 338. No. 393. _Revue de Paris_, "Lafcadio Hearn et le Japon,"[45] December 1, 1904, vol. 6, p. 655. [45] Translations by M. B. Easton, unpublished, in MSS., in the possession of Dr. Gould. REVUE DES DEUX MONDES No. 390. "Un Peintre du Japon: 'Lafcadio Hearn,'"[45] par Th. Bentzon, June 1, 1904, vol. 21, p. 556. REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE No. 392. "Un Philosophe japonisant, Lafcadio Hearn,"[45] par Félicien Challayé, 1903, vol. 11, p. 338. REVUE DE PARIS No. 393. "Lafcadio Hearn et le Japon,"[45] par Félicien Challayé, December 1, 1904, vol. 6, p. 655. GERMAN BRANDT, M. VON No. 394. _Deutsche Rundschau_ "Lafcadio Hearn: Volksglaube und Volkssitte in Japan," October, 1900, vol. 105, p. 68. DEUTSCHE RUNDSCHAU No. 394. "Lafcadio Hearn: Volksglaube und Volkssitte in Japan," von M. von Brandt, October, 1900, vol. 105, p. 68. HERZOG, WILHELM No. 395. _Die Nation_, a review of "Kokoro,"[45] January 6, 1906, vol. 23, p. 217. HIRN, PROFESSOR YRIÖ No. 396. _Neue Freie Presse_, "Lafcadio Hearn," March 26, 1905, vol. 31, p. 14580. NATION, Die No. 395. A review of "Kokoro,"[45] von Wilhelm Herzog, January 6, 1906, vol. 23, p. 217. NEUE FREIE PRESSE No. 396. "Lafcadio Hearn," von Professor Yrjö Hirn, March 26, 1905, vol. 31, p. 14580. WAGE, Die No. 397. "Ein englischer Japaner," von Th. Bentzon. (Deutsche von Leo Fried.) A condensation of Mme. Bentzon's article in _Revue des deux Mondes_. October 22-29, 1904, Year 7, Nr. 43, 44, pp. 987, 1001. SWEDISH HIRN, MRS. KARIN No. 398. _Ord od Bild_, 1905. ORD OD BILD No. 398. Mrs. Karin Hirn, 1905. * * * * * XI SUPPLEMENTAL LIST (Nos. 399-424) No. 399. The Last of the New Orleans Fencing Masters, _Southern Bivouac_, Louisville, Ky., New Series, vol. 2, Nov., 1886. Speaks of the Story of Jean Louis, from Vigeant's _Un Maître d'armes sous la restauration_, and tells the tale of Don José Llulla. Six double column, 8vo. pages, size and style of _Atlantic Monthly_. No. 400. The Legend of Skobeleff. Looks like an editorial in T.-D.[46] (No date, etc.) [47] The New Orleans _Times-Democrat_. No. 401. A Voudoo Dance. In style of T.-D. and of Hearn; unsigned, undated, was evidently in T.-D. No. 402. The Future of France in the Orient. Editorial, doubtless in T.-D., undated. No. 403. Pierre Loti. Translation by Hearn. "From the Original Manuscript," signed by "Pierre Loti" and "Translated by Lafcadio Hearn." Subheading: "Fragments from my Diary." Undated. Probably in T.-D. No. 404. Death of the Great Danseuse of the Century. Unsigned and undated. Not in type of editorial, but of contributed matter in T.-D. Probably by Hearn. No. 405. The First Muezzin. With Arabic Sub-title, under which is "Bilâl," and 15-line poetic excerpt from Edwin Arnold. Contains a musical setting of Prayer by Villoteau, Description de l'Egypte: Vol. XIV. Probably in T.-D. Without date, etc. No. 406. Dorodom the Last. Editorial, probably in T.-D. Undated. No. 407. The Naval Engagements of the Future. Translation from _Le Figaro_. No. 408. Cable and the Negroes. Editorial, probably in T.-D. and by Hearn. No date. No. 409. The Most Original of Modern Novelists (Loti). Editorial, probably in T.-D. Undated. No. 410. Heroic Deeds at Sea. Editorial in T.-D. Undated. No. 411. Study and Play. Editorial in T.-D. Undated. No. 412. Arabian Women. Article contributed probably to T.-D. Undated. No. 413. The Roar of a Great City. Editorial contributed probably to T.-D. Undated. No. 414. Some Fossil Anthropology. Editorial probably by Hearn, and probably in T.-D. Undated. No. 415. A Word for the Tramps. Editorial possibly by Hearn, and probably in T.-D. No. 416. Torn Letters. Signed original story in T.-D. Undated. Later enlarged and published as "Chita." No. 417. Death and Resurrection in the Soudan. Editorial, probably in T.-D. Undated. No. 418. A Memory of Two Fannies (Fanny Elssler, and Fanny Cerrito). Editorial, probably in T.-D. Undated. No. 419. Shapira. Editorial, probably in T.-D. Undated. No. 420. To the Fountain of Youth. Original, signed contribution: T.-D., May 24, 1885. No. 421. The Creole Doctor. Some Curiosities of Medicine in Louisiana. From an Occasional Correspondent of _The Tribune_, New Orleans, Dec. 28th. Probably in New York _Tribune_. Undated. Signed Contribution. No. 422. A Story of Hands. The Hand and its Gestures. Translation, Eugene Mouton, "From advance sheets." Undated. No. 423. The Legend of the Tea-Plant. Original contribution, probably to the T.-D. Undated. Published later in "Some Chinese Ghosts," 1887. No. 424. Academical Triumphs. Editorial, probably by Hearn, T.-D., Dec. 20, 1885. RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. Transcriber Notes: Some of the illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up paragraphs and so they correspond to the text, thus the page number of the illustration no longer matches the page number in the List of Illustrations. Throughout the document, vowels having macrons in Japanese words are indicated by vowels having circumflexes. For example, English word for the Japanese capital (currently written in Japanese romanji as toukyou) used to be written as Tokyo, but with macrons associated with each letter "o". In this text the Japanese capital would be written as Tôkyô. On page 8, "ludricrous" was replaced with "ludicrous". On page 28, "Lokis'" was replaced with "Loki's". On page 55, "An E volutional History" was replaced with "An Evolutional History". On page 56, the [OE] ligature was replaced with "OE". On page 85, "As, mine are" was replaced with "As mine are". On page 91, "it it incapable" was replaced with "it is incapable". On page 97, the single quotation mark after "What insect stings so!" was changed to a double quotation mark. On page 129, "gnored" was replaced with "ignored". On page 133, "refocussed" was replaced with "refocused". On page 159, "la belle negrésse" was replaced with "la belle négresse". On page 188 through 190, there is a long quotation that is marked by a single set of quotation marks, which differs than the quotation scheme used elsewhere in the book. This inconsistency was not corrected. On page 236, a quotation mark was removed from before "His book is a re-reading". On page 252, "Karin Kirn" was replaced with "Karin Hirn". On page 259, "n aye" was replaced with "n'aye". On page 278, the closing single quotation mark after "Madame Bovary" was replaces with a closing double quotation mark. On page 286, in the item No. 277, the period after "Raynal" was replaced with a comma, to be in agreement with the previous item. On page 293, in the item 307, "p." was added before the page number. On page 295, in the item 334, a quotation mark was added after "Exotics and Retrospectives,". On page 295, in the item 341, a period was added after the date December 1, 1906. On page 298, in the item 366, a stray comma was deleted after the word "February". On page 299, in the item 387, a single quotation mark was replaced with a double quotation mark. On page 301, in the item 390, the unmatched quotation marks were corrected. Sometimes, a single footnote had multiple links to it. 
8133	----	Glimpses of Unfamilar Japan Second Series by Lafcadio Hearn CONTENTS 1 IN A JAPANESE GARDEN 2 THE HOUSEHOLD SHRINE 3 OF WOMEN'S HAIR 4 FROM THE DIARY OF AN ENGLISH TEACHER 5 TWO STRANGE FESTIVALS 6 BY THE JAPANESE SEA 7 OF A DANCING-GIRL 8 FROM HOKI TO OKI 9 OF SOULS 10 OF GHOSTS AND GOBLINS 11 THE JAPANESE SMILE 12 SAYONARA! Chapter One In a Japanese Garden Sec. 1 MY little two-story house by the Ohashigawa, although dainty as a bird- cage, proved much too small for comfort at the approach of the hot season--the rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that an ordinary mosquito-net could not be suspended in them. I was sorry to lose the beautiful lake view, but I found it necessary to remove to the northern quarter of the city, into a very quiet Street behind the mouldering castle. My new home is a katchiu-yashiki, the ancient residence of some samurai of high rank. It is shut off from the street, or rather roadway, skirting the castle moat by a long, high wall coped with tiles. One ascends to the gateway, which is almost as large as that of a temple court, by a low broad flight of stone steps; and projecting from the wall, to the right of the gate, is a look-out window, heavily barred, like a big wooden cage. Thence, in feudal days, armed retainers kept keen watch on all who passed by--invisible watch, for the bars are set so closely that a face behind them cannot be seen from the roadway. Inside the gate the approach to the dwelling is also walled in on both sides, so that the visitor, unless privileged, could see before him only the house entrance, always closed with white shoji. Like all samurai homes, the residence itself is but one story high, but there are fourteen rooms within, and these are lofty, spacious, and beautiful. There is, alas, no lake view nor any charming prospect. Part of the O-Shiroyama, with the castle on its summit, half concealed by a park of pines, may be seen above the coping of the front wall, but only a part; and scarcely a hundred yards behind the house rise densely wooded heights, cutting off not only the horizon, but a large slice of the sky as well. For this immurement, however, there exists fair compensation in the shape of a very pretty garden, or rather a series of garden spaces, which surround the dwelling on three sides. Broad verandas overlook these, and from a certain veranda angle I can enjoy the sight of two gardens at once. Screens of bamboos and woven rushes, with wide gateless openings in their midst, mark the boundaries of the three divisions of the pleasure-grounds. But these structures are not intended to serve as true fences; they are ornamental, and only indicate where one style of landscape gardening ends and another begins. Sec. 2 Now a few words upon Japanese gardens in general. After having learned--merely by seeing, for the practical knowledge of the art requires years of study and experience, besides a natural, instinctive sense of beauty--something about the Japanese manner of arranging flowers, one can thereafter consider European ideas of floral decoration only as vulgarities. This observation is not the result of any hasty enthusiasm, but a conviction settled by long residence in the interior. I have come to understand the unspeakable loveliness of a solitary spray of blossoms arranged as only a Japanese expert knows how to arrange it--not by simply poking the spray into a vase, but by perhaps one whole hour's labour of trimming and posing and daintiest manipulation--and therefore I cannot think now of what we Occidentals call a 'bouquet' as anything but a vulgar murdering of flowers, an outrage upon the colour-sense, a brutality, an abomination. Somewhat in the same way, and for similar reasons, after having learned what an old Japanese garden is, I can remember our costliest gardens at home only as ignorant displays of what wealth can accomplish in the creation of incongruities that violate nature. Now a Japanese garden is not a flower garden; neither is it made for the purpose of cultivating plants. In nine cases out of ten there is nothing in it resembling a flower-bed. Some gardens may contain scarcely a sprig of green; some have nothing green at all, and consist entirely of rocks and pebbles and sand, although these are exceptional. [1] As a rule, a Japanese garden is a landscape garden, yet its existence does not depend upon any fixed allowances of space. It may cover one acre or many acres. It may also be only ten feet square. It may, in extreme cases, be much less; for a certain kind of Japanese garden can be contrived small enough to put in a tokonoma. Such a garden, in a vessel no larger than a fruit-dish, is called koniwa or toko-niwa, and may occasionally be seen in the tokonoma of humble little dwellings so closely squeezed between other structures as to possess no ground in which to cultivate an outdoor garden. (I say 'an outdoor garden,' because there are indoor gardens, both upstairs and downstairs, in some large Japanese houses.) The toko-niwa is usually made in some curious bowl, or shallow carved box or quaintly shaped vessel impossible to describe by any English word. Therein are created minuscule hills with minuscule houses upon them, and microscopic ponds and rivulets spanned by tiny humped bridges; and queer wee plants do duty for trees, and curiously formed pebbles stand for rocks, and there are tiny toro perhaps a tiny torii as well-- in short, a charming and living model of a Japanese landscape. Another fact of prime importance to remember is that, in order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand--or at least to learn to understand--the beauty of stones. Not of stones quarried by the hand of man, but of stones shaped by nature only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. In the foreigner, however aesthetic he may be, this feeling needs to be cultivated by study. It is inborn in the Japanese; the soul of the race comprehends Nature infinitely better than we do, at least in her visible forms. But although, being an Occidental, the true sense of the beauty of stones can be reached by you only through long familiarity with the Japanese use and choice of them, the characters of the lessons to be acquired exist everywhere about you, if your life be in the interior. You cannot walk through a street without observing tasks and problems in the aesthetics of stones for you to master. At the approaches to temples, by the side of roads, before holy groves, and in all parks and pleasure- grounds, as well as in all cemeteries, you will notice large, irregular, flat slabs of natural rock--mostly from the river-beds and water-worn-- sculptured with ideographs, but unhewn. These have been set up as votive tablets, as commemorative monuments, as tombstones, and are much more costly than the ordinary cut-stone columns and haka chiselled with the figures of divinities in relief. Again, you will see before most of the shrines, nay, even in the grounds of nearly all large homesteads, great irregular blocks of granite or other hard rock, worn by the action of torrents, and converted into water-basins (chodzubachi) by cutting a circular hollow in the top. Such are but common examples of the utilisation of stones even in the poorest villages; and if you have any natural artistic sentiment, you cannot fail to discover, sooner or later, how much more beautiful are these natural forms than any shapes from the hand of the stone-cutter. It is probable, too, that you will become so habituated at last to the sight of inscriptions cut upon rock surfaces, especially if you travel much through the country, that you will often find yourself involuntarily looking for texts or other chisellings where there are none, and could not possibly be, as if ideographs belonged by natural law to rock formation. And stones will begin, perhaps, to assume for you a certain individual or physiognomical aspect--to suggest moods and sensations, as they do to the Japanese. Indeed, Japan is particularly a land of suggestive shapes in stone, as high volcanic lands are apt to be; and such shapes doubtless addressed themselves to the imagination of the race at a time long prior to the date of that archaic text which tells of demons in Izumo 'who made rocks, and the roots of trees, and leaves, and the foam of the green waters to speak. As might be expected in a country where the suggestiveness of natural forms is thus recognised, there are in Japan many curious beliefs and superstitions concerning stones. In almost every province there are famous stones supposed to be sacred or haunted, or to possess miraculous powers, such as the Women's Stone at the temple of Hachiman at Kamakura, and the Sessho-seki, or Death Stone of Nasu, and the Wealth-giving Stone at Enoshima, to which pilgrims pay reverence. There are even legends of stones having manifested sensibility, like the tradition of the Nodding Stones which bowed down before the monk Daita when he preached unto them the word of Buddha; or the ancient story from the Kojiki, that the Emperor O-Jin, being augustly intoxicated, 'smote with his august staff a great stone in the middle of the Ohosaka road, whereupon the stone ran away!' [2] Now stones are valued for their beauty; and large stones selected for their shape may have an aesthetic worth of hundreds of dollars. And large stones form the skeleton, or framework, in the design of old Japanese gardens. Not only is every stone chosen with a view to its particular expressiveness of form, but every stone in the garden or about the premises has its separate and individual name, indicating its purpose or its decorative duty. But I can tell you only a little, a very little, of the folk-lore of a Japanese garden; and if you want to know more about stones and their names, and about the philosophy of gardens, read the unique essay of Mr. Conder on the Art of Landscape Gardening in Japan, [3] and his beautiful book on the Japanese Art of Floral Decoration; and also the brief but charming chapter on Gardens, in Morse's Japanese Homes. [4] Sec. 3 No effort to create an impossible or purely ideal landscape is made in the Japanese garden. Its artistic purpose is to copy faithfully the attractions of a veritable landscape, and to convey the real impression that a real landscape communicates. It is therefore at once a picture and a poem; perhaps even more a poem than a picture. For as nature's scenery, in its varying aspects, affects us with sensations of joy or of solemnity, of grimness or of sweetness, of force or of peace, so must the true reflection of it in the labour of the landscape gardener create not merely an impression of beauty, but a mood in the soul. The grand old landscape gardeners, those Buddhist monks who first introduced the art into Japan, and subsequently developed it into an almost occult science, carried their theory yet farther than this. They held it possible to express moral lessons in the design of a garden, and abstract ideas, such as Chastity, Faith, Piety, Content, Calm, and Connubial Bliss. Therefore were gardens contrived according to the character of the owner, whether poet, warrior, philosopher, or priest. In those ancient gardens (the art, alas, is passing away under the withering influence of the utterly commonplace Western taste) there were expressed both a mood of nature and some rare Oriental conception of a mood of man. I do not know what human sentiment the principal division of my garden was intended to reflect; and there is none to tell me. Those by whom it was made passed away long generations ago, in the eternal transmigration of souls. But as a poem of nature it requires no interpreter. It occupies the front portion of the grounds, facing south; and it also extends west to the verge of the northern division of the garden, from which it is partly separated by a curious screen-fence structure. There are large rocks in it, heavily mossed; and divers fantastic basins of stone for holding water; and stone lamps green with years; and a shachihoko, such as one sees at the peaked angles of castle roofs--a great stone fish, an idealised porpoise, with its nose in the ground and its tail in the air. [5] There are miniature hills, with old trees upon them; and there are long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks; and there are green knolls like islets. All these verdant elevations rise from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk and miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. These sanded spaces are not to be trodden upon; they are much too beautiful for that. The least speck of dirt would mar their effect; and it requires the trained skill of an experienced native gardener--a delightful old man he is--to keep them in perfect form. But they are traversed in various directions by lines of flat unhewn rock slabs, placed at slightly irregular distances from one another, exactly like stepping-stones across a brook. The whole effect is that of the shores of a still stream in some lovely, lonesome, drowsy place. There is nothing to break the illusion, so secluded the garden is. High walls and fences shut out streets and contiguous things; and the shrubs and the trees, heightening and thickening toward the boundaries, conceal from view even the roofs of the neighbouring katchiu-yashiki. Softly beautiful are the tremulous shadows of leaves on the sunned sand; and the scent of flowers comes thinly sweet with every waft of tepid air; and there is a humming of bees. Sec. 4 By Buddhism all existences are divided into Hijo things without desire, such as stones and trees; and Ujo things having desire, such as men and animals. This division does not, so far as I know, find expression in the written philosophy of gardens; but it is a convenient one. The folk- lore of my little domain relates both to the inanimate and the animate. In natural order, the Hijo may be considered first, beginning with a singular shrub near the entrance of the yashiki, and close to the gate of the first garden. Within the front gateway of almost every old samurai house, and usually near the entrance of the dwelling itself, there is to be seen a small tree with large and peculiar leaves. The name of this tree in Izumo is tegashiwa, and there is one beside my door. What the scientific name of it is I do not know; nor am I quite sure of the etymology of the Japanese name. However, there is a word tegashi, meaning a bond for the hands; and the shape of the leaves of the tegashiwa somewhat resembles the shape of a hand. Now, in old days, when the samurai retainer was obliged to leave his home in order to accompany his daimyo to Yedo, it was customary, just before his departure, to set before him a baked tai [6] served up on a tegashiwa leaf. After this farewell repast the leaf upon which the tai had been served was hung up above the door as a charm to bring the departed knight safely back again. This pretty superstition about the leaves of the tegashiwa had its origin not only in their shape but in their movement. Stirred by a wind they seemed to beckon--not indeed after our Occidental manner, but in the way that a Japanese signs to his friend to come, by gently waving his hand up and down with the palm towards the ground. Another shrub to be found in most Japanese gardens is the nanten, [7] about which a very curious belief exists. If you have an evil dream, a dream which bodes ill luck, you should whisper it to the nanten early in the morning, and then it will never come true. [8] There are two varieties of this graceful plant: one which bears red berries, and one which bears white. The latter is rare. Both kinds grow in my garden. The common variety is placed close to the veranda (perhaps for the convenience of dreamers); the other occupies a little flower-bed in the middle of the garden, together with a small citron-tree. This most dainty citron-tree is called 'Buddha's fingers,' [9] because of the wonderful shape of its fragrant fruits. Near it stands a kind of laurel, with lanciform leaves glossy as bronze; it is called by the Japanese yuzuri-ha, [10] and is almost as common in the gardens of old samurai homes as the tegashiwa itself. It is held to be a tree of good omen, because no one of its old leaves ever falls off before a new one, growing behind it, has well developed. For thus the yuzuri-ha symbolises hope that the father will not pass away before his son has become a vigorous man, well able to succeed him as the head of the family. Therefore, on every New Year's Day, the leaves of the yuzuriha, mingled with fronds of fern, are attached to the shimenawa which is then suspended before every Izumo home. Sec. 5 The trees, like the shrubs, have their curious poetry and legends. Like the stones, each tree has its special landscape name according to its position and purpose in the composition. Just as rocks and stones form the skeleton of the ground-plan of a garden, so pines form the framework of its foliage design. They give body to the whole. In this garden there are five pines,--not pines tormented into fantasticalities, but pines made wondrously picturesque by long and tireless care and judicious trimming. The object of the gardener has been to develop to the utmost possible degree their natural tendency to rugged line and massings of foliage--that spiny sombre-green foliage which Japanese art is never weary of imitating in metal inlay or golden lacquer. The pine is a symbolic tree in this land of symbolism. Ever green, it is at once the emblem of unflinching purpose and of vigorous old age; and its needle- shaped leaves are credited with the power of driving demons away. There are two sakuranoki, [11] Japanese cherry-trees--those trees whose blossoms, as Professor Chamberlain so justly observes, are 'beyond comparison more lovely than anything Europe has to show.' Many varieties are cultivated and loved; those in my garden bear blossoms of the most ethereal pink, a flushed white. When, in spring, the trees flower, it is as though fleeciest masses of cloud faintly tinged by sunset had floated down from the highest sky to fold themselves about the branches. This comparison is no poetical exaggeration; neither is it original: it is an ancient Japanese description of the most marvellous floral exhibition which nature is capable of making. The reader who has never seen a cherry-tree blossoming in Japan cannot possibly imagine the delight of the spectacle. There are no green leaves; these come later: there is only one glorious burst of blossoms, veiling every twig and bough in their delicate mist; and the soil beneath each tree is covered deep out of sight by fallen petals as by a drift of pink snow. But these are cultivated cherry-trees. There are others which put forth their leaves before their blossoms, such as the yamazakura, or mountain cherry. [12] This, too, however, has its poetry of beauty and of symbolism. Sang the great Shinto writer and poet, Motowori: Shikishima no Yamato-gokoro wo Hito-towaba, Asa-hi ni niou Yamazakura bana. [13] Whether cultivated or uncultivated, the Japanese cherry-trees are emblems. Those planted in old samurai gardens were not cherished for their loveliness alone. Their spotless blossoms were regarded as symbolising that delicacy of sentiment and blamelessness of life belonging to high courtesy and true knightliness. 'As the cherry flower is first among flowers,' says an old proverb, 'so should the warrior be first among men'. Shadowing the western end of this garden, and projecting its smooth dark limbs above the awning of the veranda, is a superb umenoki, Japanese plum-tree, very old, and originally planted here, no doubt, as in other gardens, for the sake of the sight of its blossoming. The flowering of the umenoki, [14] in the earliest spring, is scarcely less astonishing than that of the cherry-tree, which does not bloom for a full month later; and the blossoming of both is celebrated by popular holidays. Nor are these, although the most famed, the only flowers thus loved. The wistaria, the convolvulus, the peony, each in its season, form displays of efflorescence lovely enough to draw whole populations out of the cities into the country to see them.. In Izumo, the blossoming of the peony is especially marvellous. The most famous place for this spectacle is the little island of Daikonshima, in the grand Naka-umi lagoon, about an hour's sail from Matsue. In May the whole island flames crimson with peonies; and even the boys and girls of the public schools are given a holiday, in order that they may enjoy the sight. Though the plum flower is certainly a rival in beauty of the sakura-no- hana, the Japanese compare woman's beauty--physical beauty--to the cherry flower, never to the plum flower. But womanly virtue and sweetness, on the other hand, are compared to the ume-no-hana, never to the cherry blossom. It is a great mistake to affirm, as some writers have done, that the Japanese never think of comparing a woman to trees and flowers. For grace, a maiden is likened to a slender willow; [15] for youthful charm, to the cherry-tree in flower; for sweetness of heart, to the blossoming plum-tree. Nay, the old Japanese poets have compared woman to all beautiful things. They have even sought similes from flowers for her various poses, for her movements, as in the verse, Tateba skakuyaku; [16] Suwareba botan; Aruku sugatawa Himeyuri [17] no hana. [18] Why, even the names of the humblest country girls are often those of beautiful trees or flowers prefixed by the honorific O: [19] O-Matsu (Pine), O-Take (Bamboo), O-Ume (Plum), O-Hana (Blossom), O-ine (Ear-of- Young-Rice), not to speak of the professional flower-names of dancing- girls and of joro. It has been argued with considerable force that the origin of certain tree-names borne by girls must be sought in the folk- conception of the tree as an emblem of longevity, or happiness, or good fortune, rather than in any popular idea of the beauty of the tree in itself. But however this may be, proverb, poem, song, and popular speech to-day yield ample proof that the Japanese comparisons of women to trees and flowers are in no-wise inferior to our own in aesthetic sentiment. Sec. 6 That trees, at least Japanese trees, have souls, cannot seem an unnatural fancy to one who has seen the blossoming of the umenoki and the sakuranoki. This is a popular belief in Izumo and elsewhere. It is not in accord with Buddhist philosophy, and yet in a certain sense it strikes one as being much closer to cosmic truth than the old Western orthodox notion of trees as 'things created for the use of man.' Furthermore, there exist several odd superstitions about particular trees, not unlike certain West Indian beliefs which have had a good influence in checking the destruction of valuable timber. Japan, like the tropical world, has its goblin trees. Of these, the enoki (Celtis Willdenowiana) and the yanagi (drooping willow) are deemed especially ghostly, and are rarely now to be found in old Japanese gardens. Both are believed to have the power of haunting. 'Enoki ga bakeru,' the izumo saying is. You will find in a Japanese dictionary the word 'bakeru' translated by such terms as 'to be transformed,' 'to be metamorphosed,' 'to be changed,' etc.; but the belief about these trees is very singular, and cannot be explained by any such rendering of the verb 'bakeru.' The tree itself does not change form or place, but a spectre called Ki-no o-bake disengages itself from the tree and walks about in various guises.' [20] Most often the shape assumed by the phantom is that of a beautiful woman. The tree spectre seldom speaks, and seldom ventures to go very far away from its tree. If approached, it immediately shrinks back into the trunk or the foliage. It is said that if either an old yanagi or a young enoki be cut blood will flow from the gash. When such trees are very young it is not believed that they have supernatural habits, but they become more dangerous the older they grow. There is a rather pretty legend--recalling the old Greek dream of dryads--about a willow-tree which grew in the garden of a samurai of Kyoto. Owing to its weird reputation, the tenant of the homestead desired to cut it down; but another samurai dissuaded him, saying: 'Rather sell it to me, that I may plant it in my garden. That tree has a soul; it were cruel to destroy its life.' Thus purchased and transplanted, the yanagi flourished well in its new home, and its spirit, out of gratitude, took the form of a beautiful woman, and became the wife of the samurai who had befriended it. A charming boy was the result of this union. A few years later, the daimyo to whom the ground belonged gave orders that the tree should be cut down. Then the wife wept bitterly, and for the first time revealed to her husband the whole story. 'And now,' she added, 'I know that I must die; but our child will live, and you will always love him. This thought is my only solace.' Vainly the astonished and terrified husband sought to retain her. Bidding him farewell for ever, she vanished into the tree. Needless to say that the samurai did everything in his power to persuade the daimyo to forgo his purpose. The prince wanted the tree for the reparation of a great Buddhist temple, the San-jiu-san-gen-do. [21]' The tree was felled, but, having fallen, it suddenly became so heavy that three hundred men could not move it. Then the child, taking a branch in his little hand, said, 'Come,' and the tree followed him, gliding along the ground to the court of the temple. Although said to be a bakemono-ki, the enoki sometimes receives highest religious honours; for the spirit of the god Kojin, to whom old dolls are dedicated, is supposed to dwell within certain very ancient enoki trees, and before these are placed shrines whereat people make prayers. Sec. 7 The second garden, on the north side, is my favourite, It contains no large growths. It is paved with blue pebbles, and its centre is occupied by a pondlet--a miniature lake fringed with rare plants, and containing a tiny island, with tiny mountains and dwarf peach-trees and pines and azaleas, some of which are perhaps more than a century old, though scarcely more than a foot high. Nevertheless, this work, seen as it was intended to be seen, does not appear to the eye in miniature at all. From a certain angle of the guest-room looking out upon it, the appearance is that of a real lake shore with a real island beyond it, a stone's throw away. So cunning the art of the ancient gardener who contrived all this, and who has been sleeping for a hundred years under the cedars of Gesshoji, that the illusion can be detected only from the zashiki by the presence of an ishidoro or stone lamp, upon the island. The size of the ishidoro betrays the false perspective, and I do not think it was placed there when the garden was made. Here and there at the edge of the pond, and almost level with the water, are placed large flat stones, on which one may either stand or squat, to watch the lacustrine population or to tend the water-plants. There are beautiful water-lilies, whose bright green leaf-disks float oilily upon the surface (Nuphar Japonica), and many lotus plants of two kinds, those which bear pink and those which bear pure white flowers. There are iris plants growing along the bank, whose blossoms are prismatic violet, and there are various ornamental grasses and ferns and mosses. But the pond is essentially a lotus pond; the lotus plants make its greatest charm. It is a delight to watch every phase of their marvellous growth, from the first unrolling of the leaf to the fall of the last flower. On rainy days, especially, the lotus plants are worth observing. Their great cup- shaped leaves, swaying high above the pond, catch the rain and hold it a while; but always after the water in the leaf reaches a certain level the stem bends, and empties the leaf with a loud plash, and then straightens again. Rain-water upon a lotus-leaf is a favourite subject with Japanese metal-workers, and metalwork only can reproduce the effect, for the motion and colour of water moving upon the green oleaginous surface are exactly those of quicksilver. Sec. 8 The third garden, which is very large, extends beyond the inclosure containing the lotus pond to the foot of the wooded hills which form the northern and north-eastern boundary of this old samurai quarter. Formerly all this broad level space was occupied by a bamboo grove; but it is now little more than a waste of grasses and wild flowers. In the north-east corner there is a magnificent well, from which ice-cold water is brought into the house through a most ingenious little aqueduct of bamboo pipes; and in the north-western end, veiled by tall weeds, there stands a very small stone shrine of Inari with two proportionately small stone foxes sitting before it. Shrine and images are chipped and broken, and thickly patched with dark green moss. But on the east side of the house one little square of soil belonging to this large division of the garden is still cultivated. It is devoted entirely to chrysanthemum plants, which are shielded from heavy rain and strong sun by slanting frames of light wood fashioned, like shoji with panes of white paper, and supported like awnings upon thin posts of bamboo. I can venture to add nothing to what has already been written about these marvellous products of Japanese floriculture considered in themselves; but there is a little story relating to chrysanthemums which I may presume to tell. There is one place in Japan where it is thought unlucky to cultivate chrysanthemums, for reasons which shall presently appear; and that place is in the pretty little city of Himeji, in the province of Harima. Himeji contains the ruins of a great castle of thirty turrets; and a daimyo used to dwell therein whose revenue was one hundred and fifty-six thousand koku of rice. Now, in the house of one of that daimyo's chief retainers there was a maid-servant, of good family, whose name was O- Kiku; and the name 'Kiku' signifies a chrysanthemum flower. Many precious things were intrusted to her charge, and among others ten costly dishes of gold. One of these was suddenly missed, and could not be found; and the girl, being responsible therefor, and knowing not how otherwise to prove her innocence, drowned herself in a well. But ever thereafter her ghost, returning nightly, could be heard counting the dishes slowly, with sobs: Ichi-mai, Yo-mai, Shichi-mai, Ni-mai, Go-mai, Hachi-mai, San-mai, Roku-mai, Ku-mai-- Then would be heard a despairing cry and a loud burst of weeping; and again the girl's voice counting the dishes plaintively: 'One--two-- three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--' Her spirit passed into the body of a strange little insect, whose head faintly resembles that of a ghost with long dishevelled hair; and it is called O-Kiku-mushi, or 'the fly of O-Kiku'; and it is found, they say, nowhere save in Himeji. A famous play was written about O-Kiku, which is still acted in all the popular theatres, entitled Banshu-O-Kiku-no-Sara- yashiki; or, The Manor of the Dish of O-Kiku of Banshu. Some declare that Banshu is only the corruption of the name of an ancient quarter of Tokyo (Yedo), where the story should have been laid. But the people of Himeji say that part of their city now called Go-Ken- Yashiki is identical with the site of the ancient manor. What is certainly true is that to cultivate chrysanthemum flowers in the part of Himeji called Go-KenYashiki is deemed unlucky, because the name of O- Kiku signifies 'Chrysanthemum.' Therefore, nobody, I am told, ever cultivates chrysanthemums there. Sec. 9 Now of the ujo or things having desire, which inhabit these gardens. There are four species of frogs: three that dwell in the lotus pond, and one that lives in the trees. The tree frog is a very pretty little creature, exquisitely green; it has a shrill cry, almost like the note of a semi; and it is called amagaeru, or 'the rain frog,' because, like its kindred in other countries, its croaking is an omen of rain. The pond frogs are called babagaeru, shinagaeru, and Tono-san-gaeru. Of these, the first-named variety is the largest and the ugliest: its colour is very disagreeable, and its full name ('babagaeru' being a decent abbreviation) is quite as offensive as its hue. The shinagaeru, or 'striped frog,' is not handsome, except by comparison with the previously mentioned creature. But the Tono-san-gaeru, so called after a famed daimyo who left behind him a memory of great splendour is beautiful: its colour is a fine bronze-red. Besides these varieties of frogs there lives in the garden a huge uncouth goggle-eyed thing which, although called here hikigaeru, I take to be a toad. 'Hikigaeru' is the term ordinarily used for a bullfrog. This creature enters the house almost daily to be fed, and seems to have no fear even of strangers. My people consider it a luck-bringing visitor; and it is credited with the power of drawing all the mosquitoes out of a room into its mouth by simply sucking its breath in. Much as it is cherished by gardeners and others, there is a legend about a goblin toad of old times, which, by thus sucking in its breath, drew into its mouth, not insects, but men. The pond is inhabited also by many small fish; imori, or newts, with bright red bellies; and multitudes of little water-beetles, called maimaimushi, which pass their whole time in gyrating upon the surface of the water so rapidly that it is almost impossible to distinguish their shape clearly. A man who runs about aimlessly to and fro, under the influence of excitement, is compared to a maimaimushi. And there are some beautiful snails, with yellow stripes on their shells. Japanese children have a charm-song which is supposed to have power to make the snail put out its horns: Daidaimushi, [22] daidaimushi, tsuno chitto dashare! Ame haze fuku kara tsuno chitto dashare! [23] The playground of the children of the better classes has always been the family garden, as that of the children of the poor is the temple court. It is in the garden that the little ones first learn something of the wonderful life of plants and the marvels of the insect world; and there, also, they are first taught those pretty legends and songs about birds and flowers which form so charming a part of Japanese folk-lore. As the home training of the child is left mostly to the mother, lessons of kindness to animals are early inculcated; and the results are strongly marked in after life It is true, Japanese children are not entirely free from that unconscious tendency to cruelty characteristic of children in all countries, as a survival of primitive instincts. But in this regard the great moral difference between the sexes is strongly marked from the earliest years. The tenderness of the woman-soul appears even in the child. Little Japanese girls who play with insects or small animals rarely hurt them, and generally set them free after they have afforded a reasonable amount of amusement. Little boys are not nearly so good, when out of sight of parents or guardians. But if seen doing anything cruel, a child is made to feel ashamed of the act, and hears the Buddhist warning, 'Thy future birth will be unhappy, if thou dost cruel things.' Somewhere among the rocks in the pond lives a small tortoise--left in the garden, probably, by the previous tenants of the house. It is very pretty, but manages to remain invisible for weeks at a time. In popular mythology, the tortoise is the servant of the divinity Kompira; [24] and if a pious fisherman finds a tortoise, he writes upon his back characters signifying 'Servant of the Deity Kompira,' and then gives it a drink of sake and sets it free. It is supposed to be very fond of sake. Some say that the land tortoise, or 'stone tortoise,' only, is the servant of Kompira, and the sea tortoise, or turtle, the servant of the Dragon Empire beneath the sea. The turtle is said to have the power to create, with its breath, a cloud, a fog, or a magnificent palace. It figures in the beautiful old folk-tale of Urashima. [25] All tortoises are supposed to live for a thousand years, wherefore one of the most frequent symbols of longevity in Japanese art is a tortoise. But the tortoise most commonly represented by native painters and metal-workers has a peculiar tail, or rather a multitude of small tails, extending behind it like the fringes of a straw rain-coat, mino, whence it is called minogame Now, some of the tortoises kept in the sacred tanks of Buddhist temples attain a prodigious age, and certain water--plants attach themselves to the creatures' shells and stream behind them when they walk. The myth of the minogame is supposed to have had its origin in old artistic efforts to represent the appearance of such tortoises with confervae fastened upon their shells. Sec. 10 Early in summer the frogs are surprisingly numerous, and, after dark, are noisy beyond description; but week by week their nightly clamour grows feebler, as their numbers diminish under the attacks of many enemies. A large family of snakes, some fully three feet long, make occasional inroads into the colony. The victims often utter piteous cries, which are promptly responded to, whenever possible, by some inmate of the house, and many a frog has been saved by my servant-girl, who, by a gentle tap with a bamboo rod, compels the snake to let its prey go. These snakes are beautiful swimmers. They make themselves quite free about the garden; but they come out only on hot days. None of my people would think of injuring or killing one of them. Indeed, in Izumo it is said that to kill a snake is unlucky. 'If you kill a snake without provocation,' a peasant assured me, 'you will afterwards find its head in the komebitsu [the box in which cooked rice is kept] 'when you take off the lid.' But the snakes devour comparatively few frogs. Impudent kites and crows are their most implacable destroyers; and there is a very pretty weasel which lives under the kura (godown) and which does not hesitate to take either fish or frogs out of the pond, even when the lord of the manor is watching. There is also a cat which poaches in my preserves, a gaunt outlaw, a master thief, which I have made sundry vain attempts to reclaim from vagabondage. Partly because of the immorality of this cat, and partly because it happens to have a long tail, it has the evil reputation of being a nekomata, or goblin cat. It is true that in Izumo some kittens are born with long tails; but it is very seldom that they are suffered to grow up with long tails. For the natural tendency of cats is to become goblins; and this tendency to metamorphosis can be checked only by cutting off their tails in kittenhood. Cats are magicians, tails or no tails, and have the power of making corpses dance. Cats are ungrateful 'Feed a dog for three days,' says a Japanese proverb, 'and he will remember your kindness for three years; feed a cat for three years and she will forget your kindness in three days.' Cats are mischievous: they tear the mattings, and make holes in the shoji, and sharpen their claws upon the pillars of tokonoma. Cats are under a curse: only the cat and the venomous serpent wept not at the death of Buddha and these shall never enter into the bliss of the Gokuraku For all these reasons, and others too numerous to relate, cats are not much loved in Izumo, and are compelled to pass the greater part of their lives out of doors. Sec. 11 Not less than eleven varieties of butterflies have visited the neighbourhood of the lotus pond within the past few days. The most common variety is snowy white. It is supposed to be especially attracted by the na, or rape-seed plant; and when little girls see it, they sing: Cho-cho cho-cho, na no ha ni tomare; Na no ha ga iyenara, te ni tomare. [26] But the most interesting insects are certainly the semi (cicadae). These Japanese tree crickets are much more extraordinary singers than even the wonderful cicadae of the tropics; and they are much less tiresome, for there is a different species of semi, with a totally different song, for almost every month during the whole warm season. There are, I believe, seven kinds; but I have become familiar with only four. The first to be heard in my trees is the natsuzemi, or summer semi: it makes a sound like the Japanese monosyllable ji, beginning wheezily, slowly swelling into a crescendo shrill as the blowing of steam, and dying away in another wheeze. This j-i-i-iiiiiiiiii is so deafening that when two or three natsuzemi come close to the window I am obliged to make them go away. Happily the natsuzemi is soon succeeded by the minminzemi, a much finer musician, whose name is derived from its wonderful note. It is said 'to chant like a Buddhist priest reciting the kyo'; and certainly, upon hearing it the first time, one can scarcely believe that one is listening to a mere cicada. The minminzemi is followed, early in autumn, by a beautiful green semi, the higurashi, which makes a singularly clear sound, like the rapid ringing of a small bell,--kana-kana-kan a-kana- kana. But the most astonishing visitor of all comes still later, the tsukiu-tsukiu-boshi. [27] I fancy this creature can have no rival in the whole world of cicadae its music is exactly like the song of a bird. Its name, like that of the minminzemi, is onomatopoetic; but in Izumo the sounds of its chant are given thus: Tsuku-tsuku uisu , [28] Tsuku-tsuku uisu, Tsuku-tsuku uisu; Ui-osu, Ui-osu, Ui-osu, Ui-os-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-su. However, the semi are not the only musicians of the garden. Two remarkable creatures aid their orchestra. The first is a beautiful bright green grasshopper, known to the Japanese by the curious name of hotoke-no-uma, or 'the horse of the dead.' This insect's head really bears some resemblance in shape to the head of a horse--hence the fancy. It is a queerly familiar creature, allowing itself to be taken in the hand without struggling, and generally making itself quite at home in the house, which it often enters. It makes a very thin sound, which the Japanese write as a repetition of the syllables jun-ta; and the name junta is sometimes given to the grasshopper itself. The other insect is also a green grasshopper, somewhat larger, and much shyer: it is called gisu, [29] on account of its chant: Chon, Gisu; Chon, Gisu; Chon, Gisu; Chon . . . (ad libitum). Several lovely species of dragon-flies (tombo) hover about the pondlet on hot bright days. One variety--the most beautiful creature of the kind I ever saw, gleaming with metallic colours indescribable, and spectrally slender--is called Tenshi-tombo, 'the Emperor's dragon-fly.' There is another, the largest of Japanese dragon-flies, but somewhat rare, which is much sought after by children as a plaything. Of this species it is said that there are many more males than females; and what I can vouch for as true is that, if you catch a female, the male can be almost immediately attracted by exposing the captive. Boys, accordingly, try to secure a female, and when one is captured they tie it with a thread to some branch, and sing a curious little song, of which these are the original words: Konna [30] dansho Korai o Adzuma no meto ni makete Nigeru Wa haji dewa naikai? Which signifies, 'Thou, the male, King of Korea, dost thou not feel shame to flee away from the Queen of the East?' (This taunt is an allusion to the story of the conquest of Korea by the Empress Jin-go.) And the male comes invariably, and is also caught. In Izumo the first seven words of the original song have been corrupted into 'konna unjo Korai abura no mito'; and the name of the male dragon-fly, unjo, and that of the female, mito, are derived from two words of the corrupted version. Sec. 12 Of warm nights all sorts of unbidden guests invade the house in multitudes. Two varieties of mosquitoes do their utmost to make life unpleasant, and these have learned the wisdom of not approaching a lamp too closely; but hosts of curious and harmless things cannot be prevented from seeking their death in the flame. The most numerous victims of all, which come thick as a shower of rain, are called Sanemori. At least they are so called in Izumo, where they do much damage to growing rice. Now the name Sanemori is an illustrious one, that of a famous warrior of old times belonging to the Genji clan. There is a legend that while he was fighting with an enemy on horseback his own steed slipped and fell in a rice-field, and he was consequently overpowered and slain by his antagonist. He became a rice-devouring insect, which is still respectfully called, by the peasantry of Izumo, Sanemori-San. They light fires, on certain summer nights, in the rice-fields, to attract the insect, and beat gongs and sound bamboo flutes, chanting the while, 'O- Sanemori, augustly deign to come hither!' A kannushi performs a religious rite, and a straw figure representing a horse and rider is then either burned or thrown into a neighbouring river or canal. By this ceremony it is believed that the fields are cleared of the insect. This tiny creature is almost exactly the size and colour of a rice-husk. The legend concerning it may have arisen from the fact that its body, together with the wings, bears some resemblance to the helmet of a Japanese warrior. [31] Next in number among the victims of fire are the moths, some of which are very strange and beautiful. The most remarkable is an enormous creature popularly called okorichocho or the 'ague moth,' because there is a superstitious belief that it brings intermittent fever into any house it enters. It has a body quite as heavy and almost as powerful as that of the largest humming-bird, and its struggles, when caught in the hand, surprise by their force. It makes a very loud whirring sound while flying. The wings of one which I examined measured, outspread, five inches from tip to tip, yet seemed small in proportion to the heavy body. They were richly mottled with dusky browns and silver greys of various tones. Many flying night-comers, however, avoid the lamp. Most fantastic of all visitors is the toro or kamakiri, called in Izumo kamakake, a bright green praying mantis, extremely feared by children for its capacity to bite. It is very large. I have seen specimens over six inches long. The eyes of the kamakake are a brilliant black at night, but by day they appear grass-coloured, like the rest of the body. The mantis is very intelligent and surprisingly aggressive. I saw one attacked by a vigorous frog easily put its enemy to flight. It fell a prey subsequently to other inhabitants of the pond, but, it required the combined efforts of several frogs to vanquish the monstrous insect, and even then the battle was decided only when the kamakake had been dragged into the water. Other visitors are beetles of divers colours, and a sort of small roach called goki-kaburi, signifying 'one whose head is covered with a bowl.' It is alleged that the goki-kaburi likes to eat human eyes, and is therefore the abhorred enemy of Ichibata-Sama--Yakushi-Nyorai of Ichibata,--by whom diseases of the eye are healed. To kill the goki- kaburi is consequently thought to be a meritorious act in the sight of this Buddha. Always welcome are the beautiful fireflies (hotaru), which enter quite noiselessly and at once seek the darkest place in the house, slow-glimmering, like sparks moved by a gentle wind. They are supposed to be very fond of water; wherefore children sing to them this little song: Hotaru koe midzu nomasho; Achi no midzu wa nigaizo; Kochi no midzu wa amaizo. [32] A pretty grey lizard, quite different from some which usually haunt the garden, also makes its appearance at night, and pursues its prey along the ceiling. Sometimes an extraordinarily large centipede attempts the same thing, but with less success, and has to be seized with a pair of fire-tongs and thrown into the exterior darkness. Very rarely, an enormous spider appears. This creature seems inoffensive. If captured, it will feign death until certain that it is not watched, when it will run away with surprising swiftness if it gets a chance. It is hairless, and very different from the tarantula, or fukurogumo. It is called miyamagumo, or mountain spider. There are four other kinds of spiders common in this neighbourhood: tenagakumo, or 'long-armed spider;' hiratakumo, or 'flat spider'; jikumo, or 'earth spider'; and totatekumo, or 'doorshutting spider.' Most spiders are considered evil beings. A spider seen anywhere at night, the people say, should be killed; for all spiders that show themselves after dark are goblins. While people are awake and watchful, such creatures make themselves small; but when everybody is fast asleep, then they assume their true goblin shape, and become monstrous. Sec. 13 The high wood of the hill behind the garden is full of bird life. There dwell wild uguisu, owls, wild doves, too many crows, and a queer bird that makes weird noises at night-long deep sounds of hoo, hoo. It is called awamakidori or the 'millet-sowing bird,' because when the farmers hear its cry they know that it is time to plant the millet. It is quite small and brown, extremely shy, and, so far as I can learn, altogether nocturnal in its habits. But rarely, very rarely, a far stranger cry is heard in those trees at night, a voice as of one crying in pain the syllables 'ho-to-to-gi-su.' The cry and the name of that which utters it are one and the same, hototogisu. It is a bird of which weird things are told; for they say it is not really a creature of this living world, but a night wanderer from the Land of Darkness. In the Meido its dwelling is among those sunless mountains of Shide over which all souls must pass to reach the place of judgment. Once in each year it comes; the time of its coming is the end of the fifth month, by the antique counting of moons; and the peasants, hearing its voice, say one to the other, 'Now must we sow the rice; for the Shide-no-taosa is with us.' The word taosa signifies the head man of a mura, or village, as villages were governed in the old days; but why the hototogisu is called the taosa of Shide I do not know. Perhaps it is deemed to be a soul from some shadowy hamlet of the Shide hills, whereat the ghosts are wont to rest on their weary way to the realm of Emma, the King of Death. Its cry has been interpreted in various ways. Some declare that the hototogisu does not really repeat its own name, but asks, 'Honzon kaketaka?' (Has the honzon [33] been suspended?) Others, resting their interpretation upon the wisdom of the Chinese, aver that the bird's speech signifies, 'Surely it is better to return home.' This, at least is true: that all who journey far from their native place, and hear the voice of the hototogisu in other distant provinces, are seized with the sickness of longing for home. Only at night, the people say, is its voice heard, and most often upon the nights of great moons; and it chants while hovering high out of sight, wherefore a poet has sung of it thus: Hito koe wa. Tsuki ga naitaka Hototogisu! [34] And another has written: Hototogisu Nakitsuru kata wo Nagamureba,-- Tada ariake no Tsuki zo nokoreru. [35] The dweller in cities may pass a lifetime without hearing the hototogisu. Caged, the little creature will remain silent and die. Poets often wait vainly in the dew, from sunset till dawn, to hear the strange cry which has inspired so many exquisite verses. But those who have heard found it so mournful that they have likened it to the cry of one wounded suddenly to death. Hototogisu Chi ni naku koe wa Ariake no Tsuki yori kokani Kiku hito mo nashi. [36] Concerning Izumo owls, I shall content myself with citing a composition by one of my Japanese students: 'The Owl is a hateful bird that sees in the dark. Little children who cry are frightened by the threat that the Owl will come to take them away; for the Owl cries, "Ho! ho! sorotto koka! sorotto koka!" which means, "Thou! must I enter slowly?" It also cries "Noritsuke hose! ho! ho!" which means, "Do thou make the starch to use in washing to-morrow" And when the women hear that cry, they know that to-morrow will be a fine day. It also cries, "Tototo," "The man dies," and "Kotokokko," "The boy dies." So people hate it. And crows hate it so much that it is used to catch crows. The Farmer puts an Owl in the rice-field; and all the crows come to kill it, and they get caught fast in the snares. This should teach us not to give way to our dislikes for other people.' The kites which hover over the city all day do not live in the neighbourhood. Their nests are far away upon the blue peaks; but they pass much of their time in catching fish, and in stealing from back- yards. They pay the wood and the garden swift and sudden piratical visits; and their sinister cry--pi-yoroyoro, pi-yoroyoro--sounds at intervals over the town from dawn till sundown. Most insolent of all feathered creatures they certainly are--more insolent than even their fellow-robbers, the crows. A kite will drop five miles to filch a tai out of a fish-seller's bucket, or a fried-cake out of a child's hand, and shoot back to the clouds before the victim of the theft has time to stoop for a stone. Hence the saying, 'to look as surprised as if one's aburage [37] had been snatched from one's hand by a kite.' There is, moreover, no telling what a kite may think proper to steal. For example, my neighbour's servant-girl went to the river the other day, wearing in her hair a string of small scarlet beads made of rice-grains prepared and dyed in a certain ingenious way. A kite lighted upon her head, and tore away and swallowed the string of beads. But it is great fun to feed these birds with dead rats or mice which have been caught in traps overnight and subsequently drowned. The instant a dead rat is exposed to view a kite pounces from the sky to bear it away. Sometimes a crow may get the start of the kite, but the crow must be able to get to the woods very swiftly indeed in order to keep his prize. The children sing this song: Tobi, tobi, maute mise! Ashita no ha ni Karasu ni kakushite Nezumi yaru. [38] The mention of dancing refers to the beautiful balancing motion of the kite's wings in flight. By suggestion this motion is poetically compared to the graceful swaying of a maiko, or dancing-girl, extending her arms and waving the long wide sleeves of her silken robe. Although there is a numerous sub-colony of crows in the wood behind my house, the headquarters of the corvine army are in the pine grove of the ancient castle grounds, visible from my front rooms. To see the crows all flying home at the same hour every evening is an interesting spectacle, and popular imagination has found an amusing comparison for it in the hurry-skurry of people running to a fire. This explains the meaning of a song which children sing to the crows returning to their nests: Ato no karasu saki ine, Ware ga iye ga yakeru ken, Hayo inde midzu kake, Midzu ga nakya yarozo, Amattara ko ni yare, Ko ga nakya modose. [39] Confucianism seems to have discovered virtue in the crow. There is a Japanese proverb, 'Karasu ni hampo no ko ari,' meaning that the crow performs the filial duty of hampo, or, more literally, 'the filial duty of hampo exists in the crow.' 'Hampo' means, literally, 'to return a feeding.' The young crow is said to requite its parents' care by feeding them when it becomes strong. Another example of filial piety has been furnished by the dove. 'Hato ni sanshi no rei ad'--the dove sits three branches below its parent; or, more literally, 'has the three-branch etiquette to perform.' The cry of the wild dove (yamabato), which I hear almost daily from the wood, is the most sweetly plaintive sound that ever reached my ears. The Izumo peasantry say that the bird utters these words, which it certainly seems to do if one listen to it after having learned the alleged syllables: Tete poppo, Kaka poppo Tete poppo, Kaka poppo, tete. . . (sudden pause). 'Tete' is the baby word for 'father,' and 'kaka' for 'mother'; and 'poppo' signifies, in infantile speech, 'the bosom.' [40] Wild uguisu also frequently sweeten my summer with their song, and sometimes come very near the house, being attracted, apparently, by the chant of my caged pet. The uguisu is very common in this province. It haunts all the woods and the sacred groves in the neighbourhood of the city, and I never made a journey in Izumo during the warm season without hearing its note from some shadowy place. But there are uguisu and uguisu. There are uguisu to be had for one or two yen, but the finely trained, cage-bred singer may command not less than a hundred. It was at a little village temple that I first heard one curious belief about this delicate creature. In Japan, the coffin in which a corpse is borne to burial is totally unlike an Occidental coffin. It is a surprisingly small square box, wherein the dead is placed in a sitting posture. How any adult corpse can be put into so small a space may well be an enigma to foreigners. In cases of pronounced rigor mortis the work of getting the body into the coffin is difficult even for the professional doshin-bozu. But the devout followers of Nichiren claim that after death their bodies will remain perfectly flexible; and the dead body of an uguisu, they affirm, likewise never stiffens, for this little bird is of their faith, and passes its life in singing praises unto the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law. Sec. 14 I have already become a little too fond of my dwelling-place. Each day, after returning from my college duties, and exchanging my teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable Japanese robe, I find more than compensation for the weariness of five class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shaded veranda overlooking the gardens. Those antique garden walls, high-mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seem to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There are no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of semi, or, at long, lazy intervals, the solitary plash of a diving frog. Nay, those walls seclude me from much more than city streets. Outside them hums the changed Japan of telegraphs and newspapers and steamships; within dwell the all- reposing peace of nature and the dreams of the sixteenth century. There is a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet all about one; perhaps the gentle haunting of dead ladies who looked like the ladies of the old picture-books, and who lived here when all this was new. Even in the summer light--touching the grey strange shapes of stone, thrilling through the foliage of the long- loved trees--there is the tenderness of a phantom caress. These are the gardens of the past. The future will know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius may reproduce. Of the human tenants here no creature seems to be afraid. The little frogs resting upon the lotus-leaves scarcely shrink from my touch; the lizards sun themselves within easy reach of my hand; the water-snakes glide across my shadow without fear; bands of semi establish their deafening orchestra on a plum branch just above my head, and a praying mantis insolently poses on my knee. Swallows and sparrows not only build their nests on my roof, but even enter my rooms without concern--one swallow has actually built its nest in the ceiling of the bathroom--and the weasel purloins fish under my very eyes without any scruples of conscience. A wild uguisu perches on a cedar by the window, and in a burst of savage sweetness challenges my caged pet to a contest in song; and always though the golden air, from the green twilight of the mountain pines, there purls to me the plaintive, caressing, delicious call of the yamabato: Tete poppo, Kaka poppo Tete poppo, Kaka poppo, tete. No European dove has such a cry. He who can hear, for the first time, the voice of the yamabato without feeling a new sensation at his heart little deserves to dwell in this happy world. Yet all this--the old katchiu-yashiki and its gardens--will doubtless have vanished for ever before many years. Already a multitude of gardens, more spacious and more beautiful than mine, have been converted into rice-fields or bamboo groves; and the quaint Izumo city, touched at last by some long-projected railway line--perhaps even within the present decade--will swell, and change, and grow commonplace, and demand these grounds for the building of factories and mills. Not from here alone, but from all the land the ancient peace and the ancient charm seem doomed to pass away. For impermanency is the nature of things, more particularly in Japan; and the changes and the changers shall also be changed until there is found no place for them--and regret is vanity. The dead art that made the beauty of this place was the art, also, of that faith to which belongs the all-consoling text, 'Verily, even plants and trees, rocks and stones, all shall enter into Nirvana.' Chapter Two The Household Shrine Sec. 1 IN Japan there are two forms of the Religion of the Dead--that which belongs to Shinto; and that which belongs to Buddhism. The first is the primitive cult, commonly called ancestor-worship. But the term ancestor- worship seems to me much too confined for the religion which pays reverence not only to those ancient gods believed to be the fathers of the Japanese race, but likewise to a host of deified sovereigns, heroes, princes, and illustrious men. Within comparatively recent times, the great Daimyo of Izumo, for example, were apotheosised; and the peasants of Shimane still pray before the shrines of the Matsudaira. Moreover Shinto, like the faiths of Hellas and of Rome, has its deities of the elements and special deities who preside over all the various affairs of life. Therefore ancestor-worship, though still a striking feature of Shinto, does not alone constitute the State Religion: neither does the term fully describe the Shinto cult of the dead--a cult which in Izumo retains its primitive character more than in other parts of Japan. And here I may presume, though no Sinologue, to say something about that State Religion of Japan--that ancient faith of Izumo--which, although even more deeply rooted in national life than Buddhism, is far less known to the Western world. Except in special works by such men of erudition as Chamberlain and Satow--works with which the Occidental reader, unless himself a specialist, is not likely to become familiar outside of Japan--little has been written in English about Shinto which gives the least idea of what Shinto is. Of its ancient traditions and rites much of rarest interest may be learned from the works of the philologists just mentioned; but, as Mr. Satow himself acknowledges, a definite answer to the question, 'What is the nature of Shinto?' is still difficult to give. How define the common element in the six kinds of Shinto which are known to exist, and some of which no foreign scholar has yet been able to examine for lack of time or of authorities or of opportunity? Even in its modern external forms, Shinto is sufficiently complex to task the united powers of the historian, philologist, and anthropologist, merely to trace out the multitudinous lines of its evolution, and to determine the sources of its various elements: primeval polytheisms and fetishisms, traditions of dubious origin, philosophical concepts from China, Korea, and elsewhere--all mingled with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. The so-called 'Revival of Pure Shinto'--an effort, aided by Government, to restore the cult to its archaic simplicity, by divesting it of foreign characteristics, and especially of every sign or token of Buddhist origin--resulted only, so far as the avowed purpose was concerned, in the destruction of priceless art, and in leaving the enigma of origins as complicated as before. Shinto had been too profoundly modified in the course of fifteen centuries of change to be thus remodelled by a fiat. For the like reason scholarly efforts to define its relation to national ethics by mere historical and philological analysis must fail: as well seek to define the ultimate secret of Life by the elements of the body which it animates. Yet when the result of such efforts shall have been closely combined with a deep knowledge of Japanese thought and feeling--the thought and sentiment, not of a special class, but of the people at large--then indeed all that Shinto was and is may be fully comprehended. And this may be accomplished, I fancy, through the united labour of European and Japanese scholars. Yet something of what Shinto signifies--in the simple poetry of its beliefs--in the home training of the child--in the worship of filial piety before the tablets of the ancestors--may be learned during a residence of some years among the people, by one who lives their life and adopts their manners and customs. With such experience he can at least claim the right to express his own conception of Shinto. Sec. 2 Those far-seeing rulers of the Meiji era, who disestablished Buddhism to strengthen Shinto, doubtless knew they were giving new force not only to a faith in perfect harmony with their own state policy, but likewise to one possessing in itself a far more profound vitality than the alien creed, which although omnipotent as an art-influence, had never found deep root in the intellectual soil of Japan. Buddhism was already in decrepitude, though transplanted from China scarcely more than thirteen centuries before; while Shinto, though doubtless older by many a thousand years, seems rather to have gained than to have lost force through all the periods of change. Eclectic like the genius of the race, it had appropriated and assimilated all forms of foreign thought which could aid its material manifestation or fortify its ethics. Buddhism had attempted to absorb its gods, even as it had adopted previously the ancient deities of Brahmanism; but Shinto, while seeming to yield, was really only borrowing strength from its rival. And this marvellous vitality of Shinto is due to the fact that in the course of its long development out of unrecorded beginnings, it became at a very ancient epoch, and below the surface still remains, a religion of the heart. Whatever be the origin of its rites and traditions, its ethical spirit has become identified with all the deepest and best emotions of the race. Hence, in Izumo especially, the attempt to create a Buddhist Shintoism resulted only in the formation of a Shinto-Buddhism. And the secret living force of Shinto to-day--that force which repels missionary efforts at proselytising--means something much more profound than tradition or worship or ceremonialism. Shinto may yet, without loss of real power, survive all these. Certainly the expansion of the popular mind through education, the influences of modern science, must compel modification or abandonment of many ancient Shinto conceptions; but the ethics of Shinto will surely endure. For Shinto signifies character in the higher sense--courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things, loyalty. The spirit of Shinto is the spirit of filial piety, the zest of duty, the readiness to surrender life for a principle without a thought of wherefore. It is the docility of the child; it is the sweetness of the Japanese woman. It is conservatism likewise; the wholesome check upon the national tendency to cast away the worth of the entire past in rash eagerness to assimilate too much of the foreign present. It is religion--but religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse-- religion transmuted into ethical instinct. It is the whole emotional life of the race--the Soul of Japan. The child is born Shinto. Home teaching and school training only give expression to what is innate: they do not plant new seed; they do but quicken the ethical sense transmitted as a trait ancestral. Even as a Japanese infant inherits such ability to handle a writing-brush as never can be acquired by Western fingers, so does it inherit ethical sympathies totally different from our own. Ask a class of Japanese students--young students of fourteen to sixteen--to tell their dearest wishes; and if they have confidence in the questioner, perhaps nine out of ten will answer: 'To die for His Majesty Our Emperor.' And the wish soars from the heart pure as any wish for martyrdom ever born. How much this sense of loyalty may or may not have been weakened in such great centres as Tokyo by the new agnosticism and by the rapid growth of other nineteenth-century ideas among the student class, I do not know; but in the country it remains as natural to boyhood as joy. Unreasoning it also is--unlike those loyal sentiments with us, the results of maturer knowledge and settled conviction. Never does the Japanese youth ask himself why; the beauty of self-sacrifice alone is the all-sufficing motive. Such ecstatic loyalty is a part of the national life; it is in the blood--inherent as the impulse of the ant to perish for its little republic--unconscious as the loyalty of bees to their queen. It is Shinto. That readiness to sacrifice one's own life for loyalty's sake, for the sake of a superior, for the sake of honour, which has distinguished the race in modern times, would seem also to have been a national characteristic from the earliest period of its independent existence. Long before the epoch of established feudalism, when honourable suicide became a matter of rigid etiquette, not for warriors only, but even for women and little children, the giving one's life for one's prince, even when the sacrifice could avail nothing, was held a sacred duty. Among various instances which might be cited from the ancient Kojiki, the following is not the least impressive: Prince Mayowa, at the age of only seven years, having killed his father's slayer, fled into the house of the Grandee (Omi) Tsubura. 'Then Prince Oho-hatsuse raised an army, and besieged that house. And the arrows that were shot were for multitude like the ears of the reeds. And the Grandee Tsubura came forth himself, and having taken off the weapons with which he was girded, did obeisance eight times, and said: "The maiden-princess Kara, my daughter whom thou deignedst anon to woo, is at thy service. Again I will present to thee five granaries. Though a vile slave of a Grandee exerting his utmost strength in the fight can scarcely hope to conquer, yet must he die rather than desert a prince who, trusting in him, has entered into his house." Having thus spoken, he again took his weapons, and went in once more to fight. Then, their strength being exhausted, and their arrows finished, he said to the Prince: "My hands are wounded, and our arrows are finished. We cannot now fight: what shall be done?" The Prince replied, saying: "There is nothing more to do. Do thou now slay me." So the Grandee Tsubura thrust the Prince to death with his sword, and forthwith killed himself by cutting off his own head.' Thousands of equally strong examples could easily be quoted from later Japanese history, including many which occurred even within the memory of the living. Nor was it for persons alone that to die might become a sacred duty: in certain contingencies conscience held it scarcely less a duty to die for a purely personal conviction; and he who held any opinion which he believed of paramount importance would, when other means failed, write his views in a letter of farewell, and then take his own life, in order to call attention to his beliefs and to prove their sincerity. Such an instance occurred only last year in Tokyo, [1] when the young lieutenant of militia, Ohara Takeyoshi, killed himself by harakiri in the cemetery of Saitokuji, leaving a letter stating as the reason for his act, his hope to force public recognition of the danger to Japanese independence from the growth of Russian power in the North Pacific. But a much more touching sacrifice in May of the same year--a sacrifice conceived in the purest and most innocent spirit of loyalty-- was that of the young girl Yoko Hatakeyama, who, after the attempt to assassinate the Czarevitch, travelled from Tokyo to Kyoto and there killed herself before the gate of the Kencho, merely as a vicarious atonement for the incident which had caused shame to Japan and grief to the Father of the people--His Sacred Majesty the Emperor. Sec. 3 As to its exterior forms, modern Shinto is indeed difficult to analyse; but through all the intricate texture of extraneous beliefs so thickly interwoven about it, indications of its earliest character are still easily discerned. In certain of its primitive rites, in its archaic prayers and texts and symbols, in the history of its shrines, and even in many of the artless ideas of its poorest worshippers, it is plainly revealed as the most ancient of all forms of worship--that which Herbert Spencer terms 'the root of all religions'--devotion to the dead. Indeed, it has been frequently so expounded by its own greatest scholars and theologians. Its divinities are ghosts; all the dead become deities. In the Tama-no-mihashira the great commentator Hirata says 'the spirits of the dead continue to exist in the unseen world which is everywhere about us, and they all become gods of varying character and degrees of influence. Some reside in temples built in their honour; others hover near their tombs; and they continue to render services to their prince, parents, wife, and children, as when in the body.' And they do more than this, for they control the lives and the doings of men. 'Every human action,' says Hirata, 'is the work of a god.' [3] And Motowori, scarcely less famous an exponent of pure Shinto doctrine, writes: 'All the moral ideas which a man requires are implanted in his bosom by the gods, and are of the same nature with those instincts which impel him to eat when he is hungry or to drink when he is thirsty.' [4] With this doctrine of Intuition no Decalogue is required, no fixed code of ethics; and the human conscience is declared to be the only necessary guide. Though every action be 'the work of a Kami.' yet each man has within him the power to discern the righteous impulse from the unrighteous, the influence of the good deity from that of the evil. No moral teacher is so infallible as one's own heart. 'To have learned that there is no way (michi),'[5] says Motowori, 'to be learned and practiced, is really to have learned the Way of the Gods.' [6] And Hirata writes: 'If you desire to practise true virtue, learn to stand in awe of the Unseen; and that will prevent you from doing wrong. Make a vow to the Gods who rule over the Unseen, and cultivate the conscience (ma-gokoro) implanted in you; and then you will never wander from the way.' How this spiritual self- culture may best be obtained, the same great expounder has stated with almost equal brevity: 'Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duty to them will ever be disrespectful to the Gods or to his living parents. Such a man will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle with his wife and children.' [7] How far are these antique beliefs removed from the ideas of the nineteenth century? Certainly not so far that we can afford to smile at them. The faith of the primitive man and the knowledge of the most profound psychologist may meet in strange harmony upon the threshold of the same ultimate truth, and the thought of a child may repeat the conclusions of a Spencer or a Schopenhauer. Are not our ancestors in very truth our Kami? Is not every action indeed the work of the Dead who dwell within us? Have not our impulses and tendencies, our capacities and weaknesses, our heroisms and timidities, been created by those vanished myriads from whom we received the all-mysterious bequest of Life? Do we still think of that infinitely complex Something which is each one of us, and which we call EGO, as 'I' or as 'They'? What is our pride or shame but the pride or shame of the Unseen in that which They have made?--and what our Conscience but the inherited sum of countless dead experiences with varying good and evil? Nor can we hastily reject the Shinto thought that all the dead become gods, while we respect the convictions of those strong souls of to-day who proclaim the divinity of man. Sec. 4 Shino ancestor-worship, no doubt, like all ancestor-worship, was developed out of funeral rites, according to that general law of religious evolution traced so fully by Herbert Spencer. And there is reason to believe that the early forms of Shinto public worship may have been evolved out of a yet older family worship--much after the manner in which M. Fustel de Coulanges, in his wonderful book, La Cite Antique, has shown the religious public institutions among the Greeks and Romans to have been developed from the religion of the hearth. Indeed, the word ujigami, now used to signify a Shinto parish temple, and also its deity, means 'family God,' and in its present form is a corruption or contraction of uchi-no-Kami, meaning the 'god of the interior' or 'the god of the house.' Shinto expounders have, it is true, attempted to interpret the term otherwise; and Hirata, as quoted by Mr. Ernest Satow, declared the name should be applied only to the common ancestor, or ancestors, or to one so entitled to the gratitude of a community as to merit equal honours. Such, undoubtedly, was the just use of the term in his time, and long before it; but the etymology of the word would certainly seem to indicate its origin in family worship, and to confirm modern scientific beliefs in regard to the evolution of religious institutions. Now just as among the Greeks and Latins the family cult always continued to exist through all the development and expansion of the public religion, so the Shinto family worship has continued concomitantly with the communal worship at the countless ujigami, with popular worship at the famed Ohoya-shiro of various provinces or districts, and with national worship at the great shrines of Ise and Kitzuki. Many objects connected with the family cult are certainly of alien or modern origin; but its simple rites and its unconscious poetry retain their archaic charm. And, to the student of Japanese life, by far the most interesting aspect of Shinto is offered in this home worship, which, like the home worship of the antique Occident, exists in a dual form. Sec. 5 In nearly all Izumo dwellings there is a kamidana, [8] or 'Shelf of the Gods.' On this is usually placed a small Shinto shrine (miya) containing tablets bearing the names of gods (one at least of which tablets is furnished by the neighbouring Shinto parish temple), and various ofuda, holy texts or charms which most often are written promises in the name of some Kami to protect his worshipper. If there be no miya, the tablets or ofuda are simply placed upon the shelf in a certain order, the most sacred having the middle place. Very rarely are images to be seen upon a kamidana: for primitive Shintoism excluded images rigidly as Jewish or Mohammedan law; and all Shinto iconography belongs to a comparatively modern era--especially to the period of Ryobu-Shinto--and must be considered of Buddhist origin. If there be any images, they will probably be such as have been made only within recent years at Kitauki: those small twin figures of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami and of Koto-shiro- nushi-no-Kami, described in a former paper upon the Kitzuki-no-oho- yashiro. Shinto kakemono, which are also of latter-day origin, representing incidents from the Kojiki, are much more common than Shinto icons: these usually occupy the toko, or alcove, in the same room in which the kamidana is placed; but they will not be seen in the houses of the more cultivated classes. Ordinarily there will be found upon the kamidana nothing but the simple miya containing some ofuda: very, very seldom will a mirror [9] be seen, or gohei--except the gohei attached to the small shimenawa either hung just above the kamidana or suspended to the box-like frame in which the miya sometimes is placed. The shimenawa and the paper gohei are the true emblems of Shinto: even the ofuda and the mamori are quite modern. Not only before the household shrine, but also above the house-door of almost every home in Izumo, the shimenawa is suspended. It is ordinarily a thin rope of rice straw; but before the dwellings of high Shinto officials, such as the Taisha-Guji of Kitzuki, its size and weight are enormous. One of the first curious facts that the traveller in Izumo cannot fail to be impressed by is the universal presence of this symbolic rope of straw, which may sometimes even be seen round a rice-field. But the grand displays of the sacred symbol are upon the great festivals of the new year, the accession of Jimmu Tenno to the throne of Japan, and the Emperor's birthday. Then all the miles of streets are festooned with shimenawa thick as ship-cables. Sec. 6 A particular feature of Matsue are the miya-shops--establishments not, indeed, peculiar to the old Izumo town, but much more interesting than those to be found in larger cities of other provinces. There are miya of a hundred varieties and sizes, from the child's toy miya which sells for less than one sen, to the large shrine destined for some rich home, and costing perhaps ten yen or more. Besides these, the household shrines of Shinto, may occasionally be seen massive shrines of precious wood, lacquered and gilded, worth from three hundred even to fifteen hundred yen. These are not household shrines; but festival shrines, and are made only for rich merchants. They are displayed on Shinto holidays, and twice a year are borne through the streets in procession, to shouts of 'Chosaya! chosaya!' [10] Each temple parish also possesses a large portable miya which is paraded on these occasions with much chanting and beating of drums. The majority of household miya are cheap constructions. A very fine one can be purchased for about two yen; but those little shrines one sees in the houses of the common people cost, as a rule, considerably less than half a yen. And elaborate or costly household shrines are contrary to the spirit of pure Shinto The true miya should be made of spotless white hinoki [11] wood, and be put together without nails. Most of those I have seen in the shops had their several parts joined only with rice-paste; but the skill of the maker rendered this sufficient. Pure Shinto requires that a miya should be without gilding or ornamentation. The beautiful miniature temples in some rich homes may justly excite admiration by their artistic structure and decoration; but the ten or thirteen cent miya, in the house of a labourer or a kurumaya, of plain white wood, truly represents that spirit of simplicity characterising the primitive religion. Sec. 7 The kamidana or 'God-shelf,' upon which are placed the miya and other sacred objects of Shinto worship, is usually fastened at a height of about six or seven feet above the floor. As a rule it should not be placed higher than the hand can reach with ease; but in houses having lofty rooms the miya is sometimes put up at such a height that the sacred offerings cannot be made without the aid of a box or other object to stand upon. It is not commonly a part of the house structure, but a plain shelf attached with brackets either to the wall itself, at some angle of the apartment, or, as is much more usual, to the kamoi, or horizontal grooved beam, in which the screens of opaque paper (fusuma), which divide room from room, slide to and fro. Occasionally it is painted or lacquered. But the ordinary kamidana is of white wood, and is made larger or smaller in proportion to the size of the miya, or the number of the ofuda and other sacred objects to be placed upon it. In some houses, notably those of innkeepers and small merchants, the kamidana is made long enough to support a number of small shrines dedicated to different Shinto deities, particularly those believed to preside over wealth and commercial prosperity. In the houses of the poor it is nearly always placed in the room facing the street; and Matsue shopkeepers usually erect it in their shops--so that the passer-by or the customer can tell at a glance in what deities the occupant puts his trust. There are many regulations concerning it. It may be placed to face south or east, but should not face west, and under no possible circumstances should it be suffered to face north or north-west. One explanation of this is the influence upon Shinto of Chinese philosophy, according to which there is some fancied relation between South or East and the Male Principle, and between West or North and the Female Principle. But the popular notion on the subject is that because a dead person is buried with the head turned north, it would be very wrong to place a miya so as to face north--since everything relating to death is impure; and the regulation about the west is not strictly observed. Most kamidana in Izumo, however, face south or east. In the houses of the poorest--often consisting of but one apartment--there can be little choice as to rooms; but it is a rule, observed in the dwellings of the middle classes, that the kamidana must not be placed either in the guest room (zashiki) nor in the kitchen; and in shizoku houses its place is usually in one of the smaller family apartments. Respect must be shown it. One must not sleep, for example, or even lie down to rest, with his feet turned towards it. One must not pray before it, or even stand before it, while in a state of religious impurity--such as that entailed by having touched a corpse, or attended a Buddhist funeral, or even during the period of mourning for kindred buried according to the Buddhist rite. Should any member of the family be thus buried, then during fifty days [12] the kamidana must be entirely screened from view with pure white paper, and even the Shinto ofuda, or pious invocations fastened upon the house-door, must have white paper pasted over them. During the same mourning period the fire in the house is considered unclean; and at the close of the term all the ashes of the braziers and of the kitchen must be cast away, and new fire kindled with a flint and steel. Nor are funerals the only source of legal uncleanliness. Shinto, as the religion of purity and purification, has a Deuteronomy of quite an extensive kind. During certain periods women must not even pray before the miya, much less make offerings or touch the sacred vessels, or kindle the lights of the Kami. Sec. 8 Before the miya, or whatever holy object of Shinto worship be placed upon the kamidana, are set two quaintly shaped jars for the offerings of sake; two small vases, to contain sprays of the sacred plant sakaki, or offerings of flowers; and a small lamp, shaped like a tiny saucer, where a wick of rush-pith floats in rape-seed oil. Strictly speaking, all these utensils, except the flower-vases, should be made of unglazed red earthenware, such as we find described in the early chapters of the Kojiki: and still at Shinto festivals in Izumo, when sake is drunk in honour of the gods, it is drunk out of cups of red baked unglazed clay shaped like shallow round dishes. But of late years it has become the fashion to make all the utensils of a fine kamidana of brass or bronze-- even the hanaike, or flower-vases. Among the poor, the most archaic utensils are still used to a great extent, especially in the remoter country districts; the lamp being a simple saucer or kawarake of red clay; and the flower-vases most often bamboo cups, made by simply cutting a section of bamboo immediately below a joint and about five inches above it. The brazen lamp is a much more complicated object than the kawarake, which costs but one rin. The brass lamp costs about twenty-five sen, at least. It consists of two parts. The lower part, shaped like a very shallow, broad wineglass, with a very thick stem, has an interior as well as an exterior rim; and the bottom of a correspondingly broad and shallow brass cup, which is the upper part and contains the oil, fits exactly into this inner rim. This kind of lamp is always furnished with a small brass object in the shape of a flat ring, with a stem set at right angles to the surface of the ring. It is used for moving the floating wick and keeping it at any position required; and the little perpendicular stem is long enough to prevent the fingers from touching the oil. The most curious objects to be seen on any ordinary kamidana are the stoppers of the sake-vessels or o-mikidokkuri ('honourable sake-jars'). These stoppers--o-mikidokkuri-nokuchisashi--may be made of brass, or of fine thin slips of wood jointed and bent into the singular form required. Properly speaking, the thing is not a real stopper, in spite of its name; its lower part does not fill the mouth of the jar at all: it simply hangs in the orifice like a leaf put there stem downwards. I find it difficult to learn its history; but, though there are many designs of it--the finer ones being of brass--the shape of all seems to hint at a Buddhist origin. Possibly the shape was borrowed from a Buddhist symbol--the Hoshi-notama, that mystic gem whose lambent glow (iconographically suggested as a playing of flame) is the emblem of Pure Essence; and thus the object would be typical at once of the purity of the wine-offering and the purity of the heart of the giver. The little lamp may not be lighted every evening in all homes, since there are families too poor to afford even this infinitesimal nightly expenditure of oil. But upon the first, fifteenth, and twenty-eighth of each month the light is always kindled; for these are Shinto holidays of obligation, when offerings must be made to the gods, and when all uji- ko, or parishioners of a Shinto temple, are supposed to visit their ujigami. In every home on these days sake is poured as an offering into the o-mikidokkuri, and in the vases of the kamidana are placed sprays of the holy sakaki, or sprigs of pine, or fresh flowers. On the first day of the new year the kamidana is always decked with sakaki, moromoki (ferns), and pine-sprigs, and also with a shimenawa; and large double rice cakes are placed upon it as offerings to the gods. Sec. 9 But only the ancient gods of Shinto are worshipped before the kamidana. The family ancestors or family dead are worshipped either in a separate room (called the mitamaya or 'Spirit Chamber'), or, if worshipped according to the Buddhist rites, before the butsuma or butsudan. The Buddhist family worship coexists in the vast majority of Izumo homes with the Shinto family worship; and whether the dead be honoured in the mitamaya or before the butsudan altogether depends upon the religious traditions of the household. Moreover, there are families in Izumo-- particularly in Kitzuki--whose members do not profess Buddhism in any form, and a very few, belonging to the Shin-shu or Nichirenshu, [13] whose members do not practise Shinto. But the domestic cult of the dead is maintained, whether the family be Shinto or Buddhist. The ihai or tablets of the Buddhist family dead (Hotoke) are never placed in a special room or shrine, but in the Buddhist household shrine [14] along with the images or pictures of Buddhist divinities usually there inclosed--or, at least, this is always the case when the honours paid them are given according to the Buddhist instead of the Shinto rite. The form of the butsudan or butsuma, the character of its holy images, its ofuda, or its pictures, and even the prayers said before it, differ according to the fifteen different shu, or sects; and a very large volume would have to be written in order to treat the subject of the butsuma exhaustively. Therefore I must content myself with stating that there are Buddhist household shrines of all dimensions, prices, and degrees of magnificence; and that the butsudan of the Shin-shu, although to me the least interesting of all, is popularly considered to be the most beautiful in design and finish. The butsudan of a very poor household may be worth a few cents, but the rich devotee might purchase in Kyoto a shrine worth as many thousands of yen as he could pay. Though the forms of the butsuma and the character of its contents may greatly vary, the form of the ancestral or mortuary tablet is generally that represented in Fig. 4 of the illustrations of ihai given in this book. [15] There are some much more elaborate shapes, costly and rare, and simpler shapes of the cheapest and plainest descriptions; but the form thus illustrated is the common one in Izumo and the whole San-indo country. There are differences, however, of size; and the ihai of a man is larger than that of a woman, and has a headpiece also, which the tablet of a female has not; while a child's ihai is always very small. The average height of the ihai made for a male adult is a little more than a foot, and its thickness about an inch. It has a top, or headpiece, surmounted by the symbol I of the Hoshi-no-tama or Mystic Gem, and ordinarily decorated with a cloud-design of some kind, and the pedestal is a lotus-flower rising out of clouds. As a general rule all this is richly lacquered and gilded; the tablet itself being lacquered in black, and bearing the posthumous name, or kaimyo, in letters of gold--ken-mu-ji-sho-shin-ji, or other syllables indicating the supposed virtues of the departed. The poorest people, unable to afford such handsome tablets, have ihai made of plain wood; and the kaimyo is sometimes simply written on these in black characters; but more commonly it is written upon a strip of white paper, which is then pasted upon the ihai with rice-paste. The living name is perhaps inscribed upon the back of the tablet. Such tablets accumulate, of course, with the passing of generations; and in certain homes great numbers are preserved. A beautiful and touching custom still exists in Izumo, and perhaps throughout Japan, although much less common than it used to be. So far as I can learn, however, it was always confined to the cultivated classes. When a husband dies, two ihai are made, in case the wife resolves never to marry again. On one of these the kaimyo of the dead man is painted in characters of gold, and on the other that of the living widow; but, in the latter case, the first character of the kaimyo is painted in red, and the other characters in gold. These two tablets are then placed in the household butsuma. Two larger ones similarly inscribed, are placed in the parish temple; but no cup is set before that of the wife. The solitary crimson ideograph signifies a solemn pledge to remain faithful to the memory of the dead. Furthermore, the wife loses her living name among all her friends and relatives, and is thereafter addressed only by a fragment of her kaimyo--as, for example, 'Shin-toku-in-San,' an abbreviation of the much longer and more sonorous posthumous name, Shin-toku-in-den-joyo-teiso-daishi. [16] Thus to be called by one's kaimyo is at once an honour to the memory of the husband and the constancy of the bereaved wife. A precisely similar pledge is taken by a man after the loss of a wife to whom he was passionately attached; and one crimson letter upon his ihai registers the vow not only in the home but also in the place of public worship. But the widower is never called by his kaimyo, as is the widow. The first religious duty of the morning in a Buddhist household is to set before the tablets of the dead a little cup of tea, made with the first hot water prepared--O-Hotoke-San-nio-cha-to-ageru. [17] Daily offerings of boiled rice are also made; and fresh flowers are put in the shrine vases; and incense--although not allowed by Shinto--is burned before the tablets. At night, and also during the day upon certain festivals, both candles and a small oil-lamp are lighted in the butsuma--a lamp somewhat differently shaped from the lamp of the miya and called rinto On the day of each month corresponding to the date of death a little repast is served before the tablets, consisting of shojin-ryori only, the vegetarian food of the. Buddhists. But as Shinto family worship has its special annual festival, which endures from the first to the third day of the new year, so Buddhist ancestor-worship has its yearly Bonku, or Bommatsuri, lasting from the thirteenth to the sixteenth day of the seventh month. This is the Buddhist Feast of Souls. Then the butsuma is decorated to the utmost, special offerings of food and of flowers are made, and all the house is made beautiful to welcome the coming of the ghostly visitors. Now Shinto, like Buddhism, has its ihai; but these are of the simplest possible shape and material--mere slips of plain white wood. The average height is only about eight inches. These tablets are either placed in a special miya kept in a different room from that in which the shrine of the Kami is erected, or else simply arranged on a small shelf called by the people Mitama-San-no-tana,--'the Shelf of the August Spirits.' The shelf or the shrine of the ancestors and household dead is placed always at a considerable height in the mitamaya or soreisha (as the Spirit Chamber is sometimes called), just as is the miya of the Kami in the other apartment. Sometimes no tablets are used, the name being simply painted upon the woodwork of the Spirit Shrine. But Shinto has no kaimyo: the living name of the dead is written upon the ihai, with the sole addition of the word 'Mitama' (Spirit). And monthly upon the day corresponding to the menstrual date of death, offerings of fish, wine, and other food are made to the spirits, accompanied by special prayer. [18] The Mitama-San have also their particular lamps and flower-vases, and, though in lesser degree, are honoured with rites like those of the Kami. The prayers uttered before the ihai of either faith begin with the respective religious formulas of Shinto or of Buddhism. The Shintoist, clapping his hands thrice or four times, [19] first utters the sacramental Harai-tamai. The Buddhist, according to his sect, murmurs Namu-myo-ho-ren-ge-kyo, or Namu Amida Butsu, or some other holy words of prayer or of praise to the Buddha, ere commencing his prayer to the ancestors. The words said to them are seldom spoken aloud, either by Shintoist or Buddhist: they are either whispered very low under the breath, or shaped only within the heart. Sec. 10 At nightfall in Izumo homes the lamps of the gods and of the ancestors are kindled, either by a trusted servant or by some member of the family. Shinto orthodox regulations require that the lamps should be filled with pure vegetable oil only--tomoshiabura--and oil of rape-seed is customarily used. However, there is an evident inclination among the poorer classes to substitute a microscopic kerosene lamp for the ancient form of utensil. But by the strictly orthodox this is held to be very wrong, and even to light the lamps with a match is somewhat heretical. For it is not supposed that matches are always made with pure substances, and the lights of the Kami should be kindled only with purest fire--that holy natural fire which lies hidden within all things. Therefore in some little closet in the home of any strictly orthodox Shinto family there is always a small box containing the ancient instruments used for the lighting of' holy fire. These consist of the hi-uchi-ishi, or 'fire-strike-stone'; the hi-uchi-gane, or steel; the hokuchi, or tinder, made of dried moss; and the tsukegi, fine slivers of resinous pine. A little tinder is laid upon the flint and set smouldering with a few strokes of the steel, and blown upon until it flames. A slip of pine is then ignited at this flame, and with it the lamps of the ancestors and the gods are lighted. If several great deities are represented in the miya or upon the kamidana by several ofuda, then a separate lamp is sometimes lighted for each; and if there be a butsuma in the dwelling, its tapers or lamp are lighted at the same time. Although the use of the flint and steel for lighting the lamps of the gods will probably have become obsolete within another generation, it still prevails largely in Izumo, especially in the country districts. Even where the safety-match has entirely supplanted the orthodox utensils, the orthodox sentiment shows itself in the matter of the choice of matches to be used. Foreign matches are inadmissible: the native matchmaker quite successfully represented that foreign matches contained phosphorus 'made from the bones of dead animals,' and that to kindle the lights of the Kami with such unholy fire would be sacrilege. In other parts of Japan the matchmakers stamped upon their boxes the words: 'Saikyo go honzon yo' (Fit for the use of the August High Temple of Saikyo). [20] But Shinto sentiment in Izumo was too strong to be affected much by any such declaration: indeed, the recommendation of the matches as suitable for use in a Shin-shu temple was of itself sufficient to prejudice Shintoists against them. Accordingly special precautions had to be taken before safety-matches could be satisfactorily introduced into the Province of the Gods. Izumo match- boxes now bear the inscription: 'Pure, and fit to use for kindling the lamps of the Kami, or of the Hotoke!' The inevitable danger to all things in Japan is fire. It is the traditional rule that when a house takes fire, the first objects to be saved, if possible, are the household gods and the tablets of the ancestors. It is even said that if these are saved, most of the family valuables are certain to be saved, and that if these are lost, all is lost. Sec. 11 The terms soreisha and mitamaya, as used in Izumo, may, I am told, signify either the small miya in which the Shinto ihai (usually made of cherry-wood) is kept, or that part of the dwelling in which it is placed, and where the offerings are made. These, by all who can afford it, are served upon tables of plain white wood, and of the same high narrow form as the tables upon which offerings are made in the temples and at public funeral ceremonies. The most ordinary form of prayer addressed to the ancient ancestors in the household cult of Shinto is not uttered aloud. After pronouncing the initial formula of all popular Shinto prayer, 'Harai-tamai,' etc., the worshipper says, with his heart only--'Spirits august of our far-off ancestors, ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families and of our kindred, unto you, the founders of our homes, we this day utter the gladness of our thanks.' In the family cult of the Buddhists a distinction is made between the household Hotoke--the souls of those long dead--and the souls of those but recently deceased. These last are called Shin-botoke, 'new Buddhas,' or more strictly, 'the newly dead.' No direct request for any supernatural favour is made to a Shin-botoke; for, though respectfully called Hotoke, the freshly departed soul is not really deemed to have reached Buddhahood: it is only on the long road thither, and is in need itself, perhaps, of aid, rather than capable of giving aid. Indeed, among the deeply pious its condition is a matter of affectionate concern. And especially is this the case when a little child dies; for it is thought that the soul of an infant is feeble and exposed to many dangers. Wherefore a mother, speaking to the departed soul of her child, will advise it, admonish it, command it tenderly, as if addressing a living son or daughter. The ordinary words said in Izumo homes to any Shin-botoke take rather the form of adjuration or counsel than of prayer, such as these:-- 'Jobutsu seyo,' or 'Jobutsu shimasare.' [Do thou become a Buddha.] 'Mayo na yo.' [Go not astray; or, Be never deluded.] 'Miren-wo nokorazu.' [Suffer no regret (for this world) to linger with thee.] These prayers are never uttered aloud. Much more in accordance with the Occidental idea of prayer is the following, uttered by Shin-shu believers on behalf of a Shin-botoke: 'O-mukai kudasare Amida-Sama.' [Vouchsafe, O Lord Amida, augustly to welcome (this soul).] Needless to say that ancestor-worship, although adopted in China and Japan into Buddhism, is not of Buddhist origin. Needless also to say that Buddhism discountenances suicide. Yet in Japan, anxiety about the condition of the soul of the departed often caused suicide--or at least justified it on the part of those who, though accepting Buddhist dogma, might adhere to primitive custom. Retainers killed themselves in the belief that by dying they might give to the soul of their lord or lady, counsel, aid, and service. Thus in the novel Hogen-nomono-gatari, a retainer is made to say after the death of his young master:--'Over the mountain of Shide, over the ghostly River of Sanzu, who will conduct him? If he be afraid, will he not call my name, as he was wont to do? Surely better that, by slaying myself, I go to serve him as of old, than to linger here, and mourn for him in vain.' In Buddhist household worship, the prayers addressed to the family Hotoke proper, the souls of those long dead, are very different from the addresses made to the Shin-botoke. The following are a few examples: they are always said under the breath: 'Kanai anzen.' [(Vouchsafe) that our family may be preserved.] 'Enmei sakusai.' [That we may enjoy long life without sorrow.] 'Shobai hanjo.' [That our business may prosper.] [Said only by merchants and tradesmen.] 'Shison chokin.' [That the perpetuity of our descent may be assured.] 'Onteki taisan.' [That our enemies be scattered.] 'Yakubyo shometsu.' [That pestilence may not come nigh us.] Some of the above are used also by Shinto worshippers. The old samurai still repeat the special prayers of their caste:-- 'Tenka taihei.' [That long peace may prevail throughout the world.] 'Bu-un chokyu.' [That we may have eternal good-fortune in war.] 'Ka-ei-manzoku.' [That our house (family) may for ever remain fortunate.] But besides these silent formulae, any prayers prompted by the heart, whether of supplication or of gratitude, may, of course, be repeated. Such prayers are said, or rather thought, in the speech of daily life. The following little prayer uttered by an Izumo mother to the ancestral spirit, besought on behalf of a sick child, is an example:-- 'O-kage ni kodomo no byoki mo zenkwai itashimashite, arigato- gozarimasu!' [By thine august influence the illness of my child has passed away;--I thank thee.] 'O-kage ni' literally signifies 'in the august shadow of.' There is a ghostly beauty in the original phrase that neither a free nor yet a precise translation can preserve. Sec. 12 Thus, in this home-worship of the Far East, by love the dead are made divine; and the foreknowledge of this tender apotheosis must temper with consolation the natural melancholy of age. Never in Japan are the dead so quickly forgotten as with us: by simple faith they are deemed still to dwell among their beloved; and their place within the home remains ever holy. And the aged patriarch about to pass away knows that loving lips will nightly murmur to the memory of him before the household shrine; that faithful hearts will beseech him in their pain and bless him in their joy; that gentle hands will place before his ihai pure offerings of fruits and flowers, and dainty repasts of the things which he was wont to like; and will pour out for him, into the little cup of ghosts and gods, the fragrant tea of guests or the amber rice-wine. Strange changes are coming upon the land: old customs are vanishing; old beliefs are weakening; the thoughts of today will not be the thoughts of another age--but of all this he knows happily nothing in his own quaint, simple, beautiful Izumo. He dreams that for him, as for his fathers, the little lamp will burn on through the generations; he sees, in softest fancy, the yet unborn--the children of his children's children--clapping their tiny hands in Shinto prayer, and making filial obeisance before the little dusty tablet that bears his unforgotten name. Chapter Three Of Women's Hair Sec. 1 THE hair of the younger daughter of the family is very long; and it is a spectacle of no small interest to see it dressed. It is dressed once in every three days; and the operation, which costs four sen, is acknowledged to require one hour. As a matter of fact it requires nearly two. The hairdresser (kamiyui) first sends her maiden apprentice, who cleans the hair, washes it, perfumes it, and combs it with extraordinary combs of at least five different kinds. So thoroughly is the hair cleansed that it remains for three days, or even four, immaculate beyond our Occidental conception of things. In the morning, during the dusting time, it is carefully covered with a handkerchief or a little blue towel; and the curious Japanese wooden pillow, which supports the neck, not the head, renders it possible to sleep at ease without disarranging the marvellous structure. [1] After the apprentice has finished her part of the work, the hairdresser herself appears, and begins to build the coiffure. For this task she uses, besides the extraordinary variety of combs, fine loops of gilt thread or coloured paper twine, dainty bits of deliciously tinted crape- silk, delicate steel springs, and curious little basket-shaped things over which the hair is moulded into the required forms before being fixed in place. The kamiyui also brings razors with her; for the Japanese girl is shaved--cheeks, ears, brows, chin, even nose! What is here to shave? Only that peachy floss which is the velvet of the finest human skin, but which Japanese taste removes. There is, however, another use for the razor. All maidens bear the signs of their maidenhood in the form of a little round spot, about an inch in diameter, shaven clean upon the very top of the head. This is only partially concealed by a band of hair brought back from the forehead across it, and fastened to the back hair. The girl-baby's head is totally shaved. When a few years old the little creature's hair is allowed to grow except at the top of the head, where a large tonsure is maintained. But the size of the tonsure diminishes year by year, until it shrinks after childhood to the small spot above described; and this, too, vanishes after marriage, when a still more complicated fashion of wearing the hair is adopted. Sec. 2 Such absolutely straight dark hair as that of most Japanese women might seem, to Occidental ideas at least, ill-suited to the highest possibilities of the art of the coiffeuse. [2] But the skill of the kamiyui has made it tractable to every aesthetic whim. Ringlets, indeed, are unknown, and curling irons. But what wonderful and beautiful shapes the hair of the girl is made to assume: volutes, jets, whirls, eddyings, foliations, each passing into the other blandly as a linking of brush- strokes in the writing of a Chinese master! Far beyond the skill of the Parisian coiffeuse is the art of the kamiyui. From the mythical era [3] of the race, Japanese ingenuity has exhausted itself in the invention and the improvement of pretty devices for the dressing of woman's hair; and probably there have never been so many beautiful fashions of wearing it in any other country as there have been in Japan. These have changed through the centuries; sometimes becoming wondrously intricate of design, sometimes exquisitely simple--as in that gracious custom, recorded for us in so many quaint drawings, of allowing the long black tresses to flow unconfined below the waist. [4] But every mode of which we have any pictorial record had its own striking charm. Indian, Chinese, Malayan, Korean ideas of beauty found their way to the Land of the Gods, and were appropriated and transfigured by the finer native conceptions of comeliness. Buddhism, too, which so profoundly influenced all Japanese art and thought, may possibly have influenced fashions of wearing the hair; for its female divinities appear with the most beautiful coiffures. Notice the hair of a Kwannon or a Benten, and the tresses of the Tennin--those angel-maidens who float in azure upon the ceilings of the great temples. Sec. 3 The particular attractiveness of the modern styles is the way in which the hair is made to serve as an elaborate nimbus for the features, giving delightful relief to whatever of fairness or sweetness the young face may possess. Then behind this charming black aureole is a riddle of graceful loopings and weavings whereof neither the beginning nor the ending can possibly be discerned. Only the kantiyui knows the key to that riddle. And the whole is held in place with curious ornamental combs, and shot through with long fine pins of gold, silver, nacre, transparent tortoise-shell, or lacquered wood, with cunningly carven heads. [5] Sec. 4 Not less than fourteen different ways of dressing the hair are practised by the coiffeuses of Izumo; but doubtless in the capital, and in some of the larger cities of eastern Japan, the art is much more elaborately developed. The hairdressers (kamiyui) go from house to house to exercise their calling, visiting their clients upon fixed days at certain regular hours. The hair of little girls from seven to eight years old is in Matsue dressed usually after the style called O-tabako-bon, unless it be simply 'banged.' In the O-tabako-bon ('honourable smoking-box' style) the hair is cut to the length of about four inches all round except above the forehead, where it is clipped a little shorter; and on the summit of the head it is allowed to grow longer and is gathered up into a peculiarly shaped knot, which justifies the curious name of the coiffure. As soon as the girl becomes old enough to go to a female public day-school, her hair is dressed in the pretty, simple style called katsurashita, or perhaps in the new, ugly, semi-foreign 'bundle- style' called sokuhatsu, which has become the regulation fashion in boarding-schools. For the daughters of the poor, and even for most of those of the middle classes, the public-school period is rather brief; their studies usually cease a few years before they are marriageable, and girls marry very early in Japan. The maiden's first elaborate coiffure is arranged for her when she reaches the age of fourteen or fifteen, at earliest. From twelve to fourteen her hair is dressed in the fashion called Omoyedzuki; then the style is changed to the beautiful coiffure called jorowage. There are various forms of this style, more or less complex. A couple of years later, the jorowage yields in the turn to the shinjocho [6] '('new-butterfly' style), or the shimada, also called takawage. The shimjocho style is common, is worn by women of various ages, and is not considered very genteel. The shimada, exquisitely elaborate, is; but the more respectable the family, the smaller the form of this coiffure; geisha and joro wear a larger and loftier variety of it, which properly answers to the name takawage, or 'high coiffure.' Between eighteen and twenty years of age the maiden again exchanges this style for another termed Tenjin-gaeshi; between twenty and twenty-four years of age she adopts the fashion called mitsuwage, or the 'triple coiffure' of three loops; and a somewhat similar but still more complicated coiffure, called mitsuwakudzushi, is worn by young women of from twenty-five to twenty-eight. Up to that age every change in the fashion of wearing the hair has been in the direction of elaborateness and complexity. But after twenty-eight a Japanese woman is no longer considered young, and there is only one more coiffure for her--the mochiriwage or bobai, tine simple and rather ugly style adopted by old women. But the girl who marries wears her hair in a fashion quite different from any of the preceding. The most beautiful, the most elaborate, and the most costly of all modes is the bride's coiffure, called hanayome; a word literally signifying 'flower-wife.' The structure is dainty as its name, and must be seen to be artistically appreciated. Afterwards the wife wears her hair in the styles called kumesa or maruwage, another name for which is katsuyama. The kumesa style is not genteel, and is the coiffure of the poor; the maruwage or katsuyama is refined. In former times the samurai women wore their hair in two particular styles: the maiden's coiffure was ichogaeshi, and that of the married folk katahajishi. It is still possible to see in Matsue a few katahajishi coiffures. Sec. 5 The family kamiyui, O-Koto-San, the most skilful of her craft in Izumo, is a little woman of about thirty, still quite attractive. About her neck there are three soft pretty lines, forming what connoisseurs of beauty term 'the necklace of Venus.' This is a rare charm; but it once nearly proved the ruin of Koto. The story is a curious one. Koto had a rival at the beginning of her professional career--a woman of considerable skill as a coiffeuse, but of malignant disposition, named Jin. Jin gradually lost all her respectable custom, and little Koto became the fashionable hairdresser. But her old rival, filled with jealous hate, invented a wicked story about Koto, and the story found root in the rich soil of old Izumo superstition, and grew fantastically. The idea of it had been suggested to Jin's cunning mind by those three soft lines about Koto's neck. She declared that Koto had a NUKE-KUBI. What is a nuke-kubi? 'Kubi' signifies either the neck or head. 'Nukeru' means to creep, to skulk, to prowl, to slip away stealthily. To have a nuke-kubi is to have a head that detaches itself from the body, and prowls about at night--by itself. Koto has been twice married, and her second match was a happy one. But her first husband caused her much trouble, and ran away from her at last, in company with some worthless woman. Nothing was ever heard of him afterward--so that Jin thought it quite safe to invent a nightmare- story to account for his disappearance. She said that he abandoned Koto because, on awaking one night, he saw his young wife's head rise from the pillow, and her neck lengthen like a great white serpent, while the rest of her body remained motionless. He saw the head, supported by the ever-lengthening neck, enter the farther apartment and drink all the oil in the lamps, and then return to the pillow slowly--the neck simultaneously contracting. 'Then he rose up and fled away from the house in great fear,' said Jin. As one story begets another, all sorts of queer rumours soon began to circulate about poor Koto. There was a tale that some police-officer, late at night, saw a woman's head without a body, nibbling fruit from a tree overhanging some garden-wall; and that, knowing it to be a nuke- kubi, he struck it with the flat of his sword. It shrank away as swiftly as a bat flies, but not before he had been able to recognize the face of the kamiyui. 'Oh! it is quite true!' declared Jin, the morning after the alleged occurrence; 'and if you don't believe it, send word to Koto that you want to see her. She can't go out: her face is all swelled up.' Now the last statement was fact--for Koto had a very severe toothache at that time--and the fact helped the falsehood. And the story found its way to the local newspaper, which published it--only as a strange example of popular credulity; and Jin said, 'Am I a teller of the truth? See, the paper has printed it!' Wherefore crowds of curious people gathered before Koto's little house, and made her life such a burden to her that her husband had to watch her constantly to keep her from killing herself. Fortunately she had good friends in the family of the Governor, where she had been employed for years as coiffeuse; and the Governor, hearing of the wickedness, wrote a public denunciation of it, and set his name to it, and printed it. Now the people of Matsue reverenced their old samurai Governor as if he were a god, and believed his least word; and seeing what he had written, they became ashamed, and also denounced the lie and the liar; and the little hairdresser soon became more prosperous than before through popular sympathy. Some of the most extraordinary beliefs of old days are kept alive in Izumo and elsewhere by what are called in America travelling side- shows'; and the inexperienced foreigner could never imagine the possibilities of a Japanese side-show. On certain great holidays the showmen make their appearance, put up their ephemeral theatres of rush- matting and bamboos in some temple court, surfeit expectation by the most incredible surprises, and then vanish as suddenly as they came. The Skeleton of a Devil, the Claws of a Goblin, and 'a Rat as large as a sheep,' were some of the least extraordinary displays which I saw. The Goblin's Claws were remarkably fine shark's teeth; the Devil's Skeleton had belonged to an orang-outang--all except the horns ingeniously attached to the skull; and the wondrous Rat I discovered to be a tame kangaroo. What I could not fully understand was the exhibition of a nuke-kubi, in which a young woman stretched her neck, apparently, to a length of about two feet, making ghastly faces during the performance. Sec. 6 There are also some strange old superstitions about women's hair. The myth of Medusa has many a counterpart in Japanese folk-lore: the subject of such tales being always some wondrously beautiful girl, whose hair turns to snakes only at night; and who is discovered at last to be either a dragon or a dragon's daughter. But in ancient times it was believed that the hair of any young woman might, under certain trying circumstances, change into serpents. For instance: under the influence of long-repressed jealousy. There were many men of wealth who, in the days of Old Japan, kept their concubines (mekake or aisho) under the same roof with their legitimate wives (okusama). And it is told that, although the severest patriarchal discipline might compel the mekake and the okusama to live together in perfect seeming harmony by day, their secret hate would reveal itself by night in the transformation of their hair. The long black tresses of each would uncoil and hiss and strive to devour those of the other--and even the mirrors of the sleepers would dash themselves together--for, saith an ancient proverb, kagami onna-no tamashii--'a Mirror is the Soul of a Woman.' [7] And there is a famous tradition of one Kato Sayemon Shigenji, who beheld in the night the hair of his wife and the hair of his concubine, changed into vipers, writhing together and hissing and biting. Then Kato Sayemon grieved much for that secret bitterness of hatred which thus existed through his fault; and he shaved his head and became a priest in the great Buddhist monastery of Koya-San, where he dwelt until the day of his death under the name of Karukaya. Sec. 7 The hair of dead women is arranged in the manner called tabanegami, somewhat resembling the shimada extremely simplified, and without ornaments of any kind. The name tabanegami signifies hair tied into a bunch, like a sheaf of rice. This style must also be worn by women during the period of mourning. Ghosts, nevertheless, are represented with hair loose and long, falling weirdly over the face. And no doubt because of the melancholy suggestiveness of its drooping branches, the willow is believed to be the favourite tree of ghosts. Thereunder, 'tis said, they mourn in the night, mingling their shadowy hair with the long dishevelled tresses of the tree. Tradition says that Okyo Maruyama was the first Japanese artist who drew a ghost. The Shogun, having invited him to his palace, said: 'Make a picture of a ghost for me.' Okyo promised to do so; but he was puzzled how to execute the order satisfactorily. A few days later, hearing that one of his aunts was very ill, he visited her. She was so emaciated that she looked like one already long dead. As he watched by her bedside, a ghastly inspiration came to him: he drew the fleshless face and long dishevelled hair, and created from that hasty sketch a ghost that surpassed all the Shogun's expectations. Afterwards Okyo became very famous as a painter of ghosts. Japanese ghosts are always represented as diaphanous, and preternaturally tall--only the upper part of the figure being distinctly outlined, and the lower part fading utterly away. As the Japanese say, 'a ghost has no feet': its appearance is like an exhalation, which becomes visible only at a certain distance above the ground; and it wavers arid lengthens and undulates in the conceptions of artists, like a vapour moved by wind. Occasionally phantom women figure in picture.- books in the likeness of living women; but these are riot true ghosts. They are fox-women or other goblins; and their supernatural character is suggested by a peculiar expression of the eyes arid a certain impossible elfish grace. Little children in Japan, like little children in all countries keenly enjoy the pleasure of fear; and they have many games in which such pleasure forms the chief attraction. Among these is 0-bake-goto, or Ghost-play. Some nurse-girl or elder sister loosens her hair in front, so as to let it fall over her face, and pursues the little folk with moans and weird gestures, miming all the attitudes of the ghosts of the picture-books. Sec. 8 As the hair of the Japanese woman is her richest ornament, it is of all her possessions that which she would most suffer to lose; and in other days the man too manly to kill an erring wife deemed it vengeance enough to turn her away with all her hair shorn off. Only the greatest faith or the deepest love can prompt a woman to the voluntary sacrifice of her entire chevelure, though partial sacrifices, offerings of one or two long thick cuttings, may be seen suspended before many an Izumo shrine. What faith can do in the way of such sacrifice, he best knows who has seen the great cables, woven of women's hair, that hang in the vast Hongwanji temple at Kyoto. And love is stronger than faith, though much less demonstrative. According to ancient custom a wife bereaved sacrifices a portion of her hair to be placed in the coffin of her husband, and buried with him. The quantity is not fixed: in the majority of cases it is very small, so that the appearance of the coiffure is thereby nowise affected. But she who resolves to remain for ever loyal to the memory of the lost yields up all. With her own hand she cuts off her hair, and lays the whole glossy sacrifice--emblem of her youth and beauty--upon the knees of the dead. It is never suffered to grow again. Chapter Four From the Diary of an English Teacher Sec. 1 MATSUE, September 2, 1890. I AM under contract to serve as English teacher in the Jinjo Chugakko, or Ordinary Middle School, and also in the ShihanGakko, or Normal School, of Matsue, Izumo, for the term of one year. The Jinjo Chugakko is an immense two-story wooden building in European style, painted a dark grey-blue. It has accommodations for nearly three hundred day scholars. It is situated in one corner of a great square of ground, bounded on two sides by canals, and on the other two by very quiet streets. This site is very near the ancient castle. The Normal School is a much larger building occupying the opposite angle of the square. It is also much handsomer, is painted snowy white, and has a little cupola upon its summit. There are only about one hundred and fifty students in the Shihan-Gakko, but they are boarders. Between these two schools are other educational buildings, which I shall learn more about later. It is my first day at the schools. Nishida Sentaro, the Japanese teacher of English, has taken me through the buildings, introduced me to the Directors, and to all my future colleagues, given me all necessary instructions about hours and about textbooks, and furnished my desk with all things necessary. Before teaching begins, however, I must be introduced to the Governor of the Province, Koteda Yasusada, with whom my contract has been made, through the medium of his secretary. So Nishida leads the way to the Kencho, or Prefectural office, situated in another foreign-looking edifice across the street. We enter it, ascend a wide stairway, and enter a spacious .room carpeted in European fashion--a room with bay windows and cushioned chairs. One person is seated at a small round table, and about him are standing half a dozen others: all are in full Japanese costume, ceremonial costume-- splendid silken hakama, or Chinese trousers, silken robes, silken haori or overdress, marked with their mon or family crests: rich and dignified attire which makes me ashamed of my commonplace Western garb. These are officials of the Kencho, and teachers: the person seated is the Governor. He rises to greet me, gives me the hand-grasp of a giant: and as I look into his eyes, I feel I shall love that man to the day of my death. A face fresh and frank as a boy's, expressing much placid force and large-hearted kindness--all the calm of a Buddha. Beside him, the other officials look very small: indeed the first impression of him is that of a man of another race. While I am wondering whether the old Japanese heroes were cast in a similar mould, he signs to me to take a seat, and questions my guide in a mellow basso. There is a charm in the fluent depth of the voice pleasantly confirming the idea suggested by the face. An attendant brings tea. 'The Governor asks,' interprets Nishida, 'if you know the old history of Izumo.' I reply that I have read the Kojiki, translated by Professor Chamberlain, and have therefore some knowledge of the story of Japan's most ancient province. Some converse in Japanese follows. Nishida tells the Governor that I came to Japan to study the ancient religion and customs, and that I am particularly interested in Shinto and the traditions of Izumo. The Governor suggests that I make visits to the celebrated shrines of Kitzuki, Yaegaki, and Kumano, and then asks: 'Does he know the tradition of the origin of the clapping of hands before a Shinto shrine?' I reply in the negative; and the Governor says the tradition is given in a commentary upon the Kojiki. 'It is in the thirty-second section of the fourteenth volume, where it is written that Ya-he-Koto-Shiro-nushi-no-Kami clapped his hands.' I thank the Governor for his kind suggestions and his citation. After a brief silence I am graciously dismissed with another genuine hand-grasp; and we return to the school. Sec. 2 I have been teaching for three hours in the Middle School, and teaching Japanese boys turns out to be a much more agreeable task than I had imagined. Each class has been so well prepared for me beforehand by Nishida that my utter ignorance of Japanese makes no difficulty in regard to teaching: moreover, although the lads cannot understand my words always when I speak, they can understand whatever I write upon the blackboard with chalk. Most of them have already been studying English from childhood, with Japanese teachers. All are wonderfully docile' and patient. According to old custom, when the teacher enters, the whole class rises and bows to him. He returns the bow, and calls the roll. Nishida is only too kind. He helps me in every way he possibly can, and is constantly regretting that he cannot help me more. There are, of course, some difficulties to overcome. For instance, it will take me a very, very long time to learn the names of the boys--most of which names I cannot even pronounce, with the class-roll before me. And although the names of the different classes have been painted upon the doors of their respective rooms in English letters, for the benefit of the foreign teacher, it will take me some weeks at least to become quite familiar with them. For the time being Nishida always guides me to the rooms. He also shows me the way, through long corridors, to the Normal School, and introduces me to the teacher Nakayama who is to act there as my guide. I have been engaged to teach only four times a week at the Normal School; but I am furnished there also with a handsome desk in the teachers' apartment, and am made to feel at home almost immediately. Nakayama shows me everything of interest in the building before introducing me to my future pupils. The introduction is pleasant and novel as a school experience. I am conducted along a corridor, and ushered into a large luminous whitewashed room full of young men in dark blue military uniform. Each sits at a very small desk, sup-ported by a single leg, with three feet. At the end of the room is a platform with a high desk and a chair for the teacher. As I take my place at the desk, a voice rings out in English: 'Stand up!' And all rise with a springy movement as if moved by machinery. 'Bow down!' the same voice again commands--the voice of a young student wearing a captain's stripes upon his sleeve; and all salute me. I bow in return; we take our seats; and the lesson begins. All teachers at the Normal School are saluted in the same military fashion before each class-hour--only the command is given in Japanese. For my sake only, it is given in English. Sec. 3 September 22, 1890. The Normal School is a State institution. Students are admitted upon examination and production of testimony as to good character; but the number is, of course, limited. The young men pay no fees, no boarding money, nothing even for books, college-outfits, or wearing apparel. They are lodged, clothed, fed, and educated by the State; but they are required in return, after their graduation, to serve the State as teachers for the space of five years. Admission, however, by no means assures graduation. There are three or four examinations each year; and the students who fail to obtain a certain high average of examination marks must leave the school, however exemplary their conduct or earnest their study. No leniency can be shown where the educational needs of the State are concerned, and these call for natural ability and a high standard of its proof. The discipline is military and severe. Indeed, it is so thorough that the graduate of a Normal School is exempted by military law from more than a year's service in the army: he leaves college a trained soldier. Deportment is also a requisite: special marks are given for it; and however gawky a freshman may prove at the time of his admission, he cannot remain so. A spirit of manliness is cultivated, which excludes roughness but develops self-reliance and self-control. The student is required, when speaking, to look his teacher in the face, and to utter his words not only distinctly, but sonorously. Demeanour in class is partly enforced by the class-room fittings themselves. The tiny tables are too narrow to allow of being used as supports for the elbows; the seats have no backs against which to lean, and the student must hold himself rigidly erect as he studies. He must also keep himself faultlessly neat and clean. Whenever and wherever he encounters one of his teachers he must halt, bring his feet together, draw himself erect, and give the military salute. And this is done with a swift grace difficult to describe. The demeanour of a class during study hours is if anything too faultless. Never a whisper is heard; never is a head raised from the book without permission. But when the teacher addresses a student by name, the youth rises instantly, and replies in a tone of such vigour as would seem to unaccustomed ears almost startling by contrast with the stillness and self-repression of the others. The female department of the Normal School, where about fifty young women are being trained as teachers, is a separate two-story quadrangle of buildings, large, airy, and so situated, together with its gardens, as to be totally isolated from all other buildings and invisible from the street. The girls are not only taught European science by the most advanced methods, but are trained as well in Japanese arts--the arts of embroidery, of decoration, of painting, and of arranging flowers. European drawing is also taught, and beautifully taught, not only here, but in all the schools. It is taught, however, in combination with Japanese methods; and the results of this blending may certainly be expected to have some charming influence upon future art-production. The average capacity of the Japanese student in drawing is, I think, at least fifty per cent, higher than that of European students. The soul of the race is essentially artistic; and the extremely difficult art of learning to write the Chinese characters, in which all are trained from early childhood, has already disciplined the hand and the eye to a marvellous degree--a degree undreamed of in the Occident--long before the drawing-master begins his lessons of perspective. Attached to the great Normal School, and connected by a corridor with the Jinjo Chugakko likewise, is a large elementary school for little boys and girls: its teachers are male and female students of the graduating classes, who are thus practically trained for their profession before entering the service of the State. Nothing could be more interesting as an educational spectacle to any sympathetic foreigner than some of this elementary teaching. In the first room which I visit a class of very little girls and boys--some as quaintly pretty as their own dolls--are bending at their desks over sheets of coal-black paper which you would think they were trying to make still blacker by energetic use of writing-brushes and what we call Indian-ink. They are really learning to write Chinese and Japanese characters, stroke by stroke. Until one stroke has been well learned, they are not suffered to attempt another--much less a combination. Long before the first lesson is thoroughly mastered, the white paper has become all evenly black under the multitude of tyro brush-strokes. But the same sheet is still used; for the wet ink makes a yet blacker mark upon the dry, so that it can easily be seen. In a room adjoining, I see another child-class learning to use scissors --Japanese scissors, which, being formed in one piece, shaped something like the letter U, are much less easy to manage than ours. The little folk are being taught to cut out patterns, and shapes of special objects or symbols to be studied. Flower-forms are the most ordinary patterns; sometimes certain ideographs are given as subjects. And in another room a third small class is learning to sing; the teacher writing the music notes (do, re, mi) with chalk upon a blackboard, and accompanying the song with an accordion. The little ones have learned the Japanese national anthem (Kimi ga yo wa) and two native songs set to Scotch airs--one of which calls back to me, even in this remote corner of the Orient, many a charming memory: Auld Lang Syne. No uniform is worn in this elementary school: all are in Japanese dress --the boys in dark blue kimono, the little girls in robes of all tints, radiant as butterflies. But in addition to their robes, the girls wear hakama, [1] and these are of a vivid, warm sky-blue. Between the hours of teaching, ten minutes are allowed for play or rest. The little boys play at Demon-Shadows or at blind-man's-buff or at some other funny game: they laugh, leap, shout, race, and wrestle, but, unlike European children, never quarrel or fight. As for the little girls, they get by themselves, and either play at hand-ball, or form into circles to play at some round game, accompanied by song. Indescribably soft and sweet the chorus of those little voices in the round: Kango-kango sho-ya, Naka yoni sho-ya, Don-don to kunde Jizo-San no midzu wo Matsuba no midzu irete, Makkuri kadso. [2] I notice that the young men, as well as the young women, who teach these little folk, are extremely tender to their charges. A child whose kimono is out of order, or dirtied by play, is taken aside and brushed and arranged as carefully as by an elder brother. Besides being trained for their future profession by teaching the children of the elementary school, the girl students of the Shihan-Gakko are also trained to teach in the neighbouring kindergarten. A delightful kindergarten it is, with big cheerful sunny rooms, where stocks of the most ingenious educational toys are piled upon shelves for daily use. Since the above was written I have had two years' experience as a teacher in various large Japanese schools; and I have never had personal knowledge of any serious quarrel between students, and have never even heard of a fight among my pupils. And I have taught some eight hundred boys and young men. Sec. 4 October 1 1890. Nevertheless I am destined to see little of the Normal School. Strictly speaking, I do not belong to its staff: my services being only lent by the Middle School, to which I give most of my time. I see the Normal School students in their class-rooms only, for they are not allowed to go out to visit their teachers' homes in the town. So I can never hope to become as familiar with them as with the students of the Chugakko, who are beginning to call me 'Teacher' instead of 'Sir,' and to treat me as a sort of elder brother. (I objected to the word 'master,' for in Japan the teacher has no need of being masterful.) And I feel less at home in the large, bright, comfortable apartments of the Normal School teachers than in our dingy, chilly teachers' room at the Chugakko, where my desk is next to that of Nishida. On the walls there are maps, crowded with Japanese ideographs; a few large charts representing zoological facts in the light of evolutional science; and an immense frame filled with little black lacquered wooden tablets, so neatly fitted together that the entire surface is uniform as that of a blackboard. On these are written, or rather painted, in white, names of teachers, subjects, classes, and order of teaching hours; and by the ingenious tablet arrangement any change of hours can be represented by simply changing the places of the tablets. As all this is written in Chinese and Japanese characters, it remains to me a mystery, except in so far as the general plan and purpose are concerned. I have learned only to recognize the letters of my own name, and the simpler form of numerals. On every teacher's desk there is a small hibachi of glazed blue-and- white ware, containing a few lumps of glowing charcoal in a bed of ashes. During the brief intervals between classes each teacher smokes his tiny Japanese pipe of brass, iron, or silver. The hibachi and a cup of hot tea are our consolations for the fatigues of the class-room. Nishida and one or two other teachers know a good deal of English, and we chat together sometimes between classes. But more often no one speaks. All are tired after the teaching hour, and prefer to smoke in silence. At such times the only sounds within the room are the ticking of the clock, and the sharp clang of the little pipes being rapped upon the edges of the hibachi to empty out the ashes. Sec. 5 October 15, 1890. To-day I witnessed the annual athletic contests (undo- kwai) of all the schools in Shimane Ken. These games were celebrated in the broad castle grounds of Ninomaru. Yesterday a circular race-track had been staked off, hurdles erected for leaping, thousands of wooden seats prepared for invited or privileged spectators, and a grand lodge built for the Governor, all before sunset. The place looked like a vast circus, with its tiers of plank seats rising one above the other, and the Governor's lodge magnificent with wreaths and flags. School children from all the villages and towns within twenty-five miles had arrived in surprising multitude. Nearly six thousand boys and girls were entered to take part in the contests. Their parents and relatives and teachers made an imposing assembly upon the benches and within the gates. And on the ramparts overlooking the huge inclosure a much larger crowd had gathered, representing perhaps one-third of the population of the city. The signal to begin or to end a contest was a pistol-shot. Four different kinds of games were performed in different parts of the grounds at the same time, as there was room enough for an army; and prizes were awarded to the winners of each contest by the hand of the Governor himself. There were races between the best runners in each class of the different schools; and the best runner of all proved to be Sakane, of our own fifth class, who came in first by nearly forty yards without seeming even to make an effort. He is our champion athlete, and as good as he is strong--so that it made me very happy to see him with his arms full of prize books. He won also a fencing contest decided by the breaking of a little earthenware saucer tied to the left arm of each combatant. And he also won a leaping match between our older boys. But many hundreds of other winners there were too, and many hundreds of prizes were given away. There were races in which the runners were tied together in pairs, the left leg of one to the right leg of the other. There were equally funny races, the winning of which depended on the runner's ability not only to run, but to crawl, to climb, to vault, and to jump alternately. There were races also for the little girls--pretty as butterflies they seemed in their sky-blue hakama and many coloured robes--races in which the contestants had each to pick up as they ran three balls of three different colours out of a number scattered over the turf. Besides this, the little girls had what is called a flag-race, and a contest with battledores and shuttlecocks. Then came the tug-of-war. A magnificent tug-of-war, too--one hundred students at one end of a rope, and another hundred at the other. But the most wonderful spectacles of the day were the dumb-bell exercises. Six thousand boys and girls, massed in ranks about five hundred deep; six thousand pairs of arms rising and falling exactly together; six thousand pairs of sandalled feet advancing or retreating together, at the signal of the masters of gymnastics, directing all from the tops of various little wooden towers; six thousand voices chanting at once the 'one, two, three,' of the dumb-bell drill: 'Ichi, ni,--san, shi,--go, roku,-- shichi, hachi.' Last came the curious game called 'Taking the Castle.' Two models of Japanese towers, about fifteen feet high, made with paper stretched over a framework of bamboo, were set up, one at each end of the field. Inside the castles an inflammable liquid had been placed in open vessels, so that if the vessels were overturned the whole fabric would take fire. The boys, divided into two parties, bombarded the castles with wooden balls, which passed easily through the paper walls; and in a short time both models were making a glorious blaze. Of course the party whose castle was the first to blaze lost the game. The games began at eight o'clock in the morning, and at five in the evening came to an end. Then at a signal fully ten thousand voices pealed out the superb national anthem, 'Kimi ga yo, and concluded it with three cheers for their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of Japan. The Japanese do not shout or roar as we do when we cheer. They chant. Each long cry is like the opening tone of an immense musical chorus: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a..a! Sec. 6 It is no small surprise to observe how botany, geology, and other sciences are daily taught even in this remotest part of Old Japan. Plant physiology and the nature of vegetable tissues are studied under excellent microscopes, and in their relations to chemistry; and at regular intervals the instructor leads his classes into the country to illustrate the lessons of the term by examples taken from the flora of their native place. Agriculture, taught by a graduate of the famous Agricultural School at Sapporo, is practically illustrated upon farms purchased and maintained by the schools for purely educational ends. Each series of lessons in geology is supplemented by visits to the mountains about the lake, or to the tremendous cliffs of the coast, where the students are taught to familiarize themselves with forms of stratification and the visible history of rocks. The basin of the lake, and the country about Matsue, is physiographically studied, after the plans of instruction laid down in Huxley's excellent manual. Natural History, too, is taught according to the latest and best methods, and with the help of the microscope. The results of such teaching are sometimes surprising. I know of one student, a lad of only sixteen, who voluntarily collected and classified more than two hundred varieties of marine plants for a Tokyo professor. Another, a youth of seventeen, wrote down for me in my notebook, without a work of reference at hand, and, as I afterwards discovered, almost without an omission or error, a scientific list of all the butterflies to be found in the neighbourhood of the city. Sec. 7 Through the Minister of Public Instruction, His Imperial Majesty has sent to all the great public schools of the Empire a letter bearing date of the thirteenth day of the tenth month of the twenty-third year of Meiji. And the students and teachers of the various schools assemble to hear the reading of the Imperial Words on Education. At eight o'clock we of the Middle School are all waiting in our own assembly hall for the coming of the Governor, who will read the Emperor's letter in the various schools. We wait but a little while. Then the Governor comes with all the officers of the Kencho and the chief men of the city. We rise to salute him: then the national anthem is sung. Then the Governor, ascending the platform, produces the Imperial Missive--a scroll of Chinese manuscript sheathed in silk. He withdraws it slowly from its woven envelope, lifts it reverentially to his forehead, unrolls it, lifts it again to his forehead, and after a moment's dignified pause begins in that clear deep voice of his to read the melodious syllables after the ancient way, which is like a chant: 'CHO-KU-G U. Chin omommiru ni waga koso koso kuni wo.... 'We consider that the Founder of Our Empire and the ancestors of Our Imperial House placed the foundation of the country on a grand and permanent basis, and established their authority on the principles of profound humanity and benevolence. 'That Our subjects have throughout ages deserved well of the State by their loyalty and piety and by their harmonious co-operation is in accordance with the essential character of Our nation; and on these very same principles Our education has been founded. 'You, Our subjects, be therefore filial to your parents; be affectionate to your brothers; be harmonious as husbands and wives; and be faithful to your friends; conduct yourselves with propriety and carefulness; extend generosity and benevolence towards your neighbours; attend to your studies and follow your pursuits; cultivate your intellects and elevate your morals; advance public benefits and promote social interests; be always found in the good observance of the laws and constitution of the land; display your personal courage and public spirit for the sake of the country whenever required; and thus support the Imperial prerogative, which is coexistent with the Heavens and the Earth. 'Such conduct on your part will not only strengthen the character of Our good and loyal subjects, but conduce also to the maintenance of the fame of your worthy forefathers. 'This is the instruction bequeathed by Our ancestors and to be followed by Our subjects; for it is the truth which has guided and guides them in their own affairs and in their dealings towards aliens. 'We hope, therefore, We and Our subjects will regard these sacred precepts with one and the same heart in order to attain the same ends.' [3] Then the Governor and the Head-master speak a few words--dwelling upon the full significance of His Imperial Majesty's august commands, and exhorting all to remember and to obey them to the uttermost. After which the students have a holiday, to enable them the better to recollect what they have heard. Sec. 8 All teaching in the modern Japanese system of education is conducted with the utmost kindness and gentleness. The teacher is a teacher only: he is not, in the English sense of mastery, a master. He stands to his pupils in the relation of an elder brother. He never tries to impose his will upon them: he never scolds, he seldom criticizes, he scarcely ever punishes. No Japanese teacher ever strikes a pupil: such an act would cost him his post at once. He never loses his temper: to do so would disgrace him in the eyes of his boys and in the judgment of his colleagues. Practically speaking, there is no punishment in Japanese schools. Sometimes very mischievous lads are kept in the schoolhouse during recreation time; yet even this light penalty is not inflicted directly by the teacher, but by the director of the school on complaint of the teacher. The purpose in such cases is not to inflict pain by deprivation of enjoyment, but to give public illustration of a fault; and in the great majority of instances, consciousness of the fault thus brought home to a lad before his comrades is quite enough to prevent its repetition. No such cruel punition as that of forcing a dull pupil to learn an additional task, or of sentencing him to strain his eyes copying four or five hundred lines, is ever dreamed of. Nor would such forms of punishment, in the present state of things, be long tolerated by the pupils themselves. The general policy of the educational authorities everywhere throughout the empire is to get rid of students who cannot be perfectly well managed without punishment; and expulsions, nevertheless, are rare. I often see a pretty spectacle on my way home from the school, when I take the short cut through the castle grounds. A class of about thirty little boys, in kimono and sandals, bareheaded, being taught to march and to sing by a handsome young teacher, also in Japanese dress. While they sing, they are drawn up in line; and keep time with their little bare feet. The teacher has a pleasant high clear tenor: he stands at one end of the rank and sings a single line of the song. Then all the children sing it after him. Then he sings a second line, and they repeat it. If any mistakes are made, they have to sing the verse again. It is the Song of Kusunoki Masashige, noblest of Japanese heroes and patriots. Sec. 9 I have said that severity on the part of teachers would scarcely be tolerated by the students themselves--a fact which may sound strange to English or American ears. Tom Brown's school does not exist in Japan; the ordinary public school much more resembles the ideal Italian institution so charmingly painted for us in the Cuore of De Amicis. Japanese students furthermore claim and enjoy an independence contrary to all Occidental ideas of disciplinary necessity. In the Occident the master expels the pupil. In Japan it happens quite as often that the pupil expels the master. Each public school is an earnest, spirited little republic, to which director and teachers stand only in the relation of president and cabinet. They are indeed appointed by the prefectural government upon recommendation by the Educational Bureau at the capital; but in actual practice they maintain their positions by virtue of their capacity and personal character as estimated by their students, and are likely to be deposed by a revolutionary movement whenever found wanting. It has been alleged that the students frequently abuse their power. But this allegation has been made by European residents, strongly prejudiced in favour of masterful English ways of discipline. (I recollect that an English Yokohama paper, in this connection, advocated the introduction of the birch.) My own observations have convinced me, as larger experience has convinced some others, that in most instances of pupils rebelling against a teacher, reason is upon their side. They will rarely insult a teacher whom they dislike, or cause any disturbance in his class: they will simply refuse to attend school until he be removed. Personal feeling may often be a secondary, but it is seldom, so far as I have been able to learn, the primary cause for such a demand. A teacher whose manners are unsympathetic, or even positively disagreeable, will be nevertheless obeyed and revered while his students remain persuaded of his capacity as a teacher, and his sense of justice; and they are as keen to discern ability as they are to detect partiality. And, on the other hand, an amiable disposition alone will never atone with them either for want of knowledge or for want of skill to impart it. I knew one case, in a neighbouring public school, of a demand by the students for the removal of their professor of chemistry. In making their complaint, they frankly declared: 'We like him. He is kind to all of us; he does the best he can. But he does not know enough to teach us as we wish to be taught. lie cannot answer our questions. He cannot explain the experiments which he shows us. Our former teacher could do all these things. We must have another teacher.' Investigation proved that the lads were quite right. The young teacher had graduated at the university; he had come well recommended: but he had no thorough knowledge of the science which he undertook to impart, and no experience as a teacher. The instructor's success in Japan is not guaranteed by a degree, but by his practical knowledge and his capacity to communicate it simply and thoroughly. Sec. 10 November 3, 1890 To-day is the birthday of His Majesty the Emperor. It is a public holiday throughout Japan; and there will be no teaching this morning. But at eight o'clock all the students and instructors enter the great assembly hall of the Jinjo Chugakko to honour the anniversary of His Majesty's august birth. On the platform of the assembly hall a table, covered with dark silk, has been placed; and upon this table the portraits of Their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and the Empress of Japan, stand side by side upright, framed in gold. The alcove above the platform has been decorated with flags and wreaths. Presently the Governor enters, looking like a French general in his gold-embroidered uniform of office, and followed by the Mayor of the city, the Chief Military Officer, the Chief of Police, and all the officials of the provincial government. These take their places in silence to left and right of the plat form. Then the school organ suddenly rolls out the slow, solemn, beautiful national anthem; and all present chant those ancient syllables, made sacred by the reverential love of a century of generations: Ki-mi ga-a yo-o wa Chi-yo ni-i-i ya-chi-yo ni sa-za-red I-shi-no I-wa o to na-ri-te Ko-ke no Mu-u su-u ma-a-a-de [4] The anthem ceases. The Governor advances with a slow dignified step from the right side of the apartment to the centre of the open space before the platform and the portraits of Their Majesties, turns his face to them, and bows profoundly. Then he takes three steps forward toward the platform, and halts, and bows again. Then he takes three more steps forward, and bows still more profoundly. Then he retires, walking backward six steps, and bows once more. Then he returns to his place. After this the teachers, by parties of six, perform the same beautiful ceremony. When all have saluted the portrait of His Imperial Majesty, the Governor ascends the platform and makes a few eloquent remarks to the students about their duty to their Emperor, to their country, and to their teachers. Then the anthem is sung again; and all disperse to amuse themselves for the rest of the day. Sec. 11 March 1 1891. The majority of the students of the Jinjo Chugakko are day-scholars only (externes, as we would say in France): they go to school in the morning, take their noon meal at home, and return at one o'clock to attend the brief afternoon classes. All the city students live with their own families; but there are many boys from remote country districts who have no city relatives, and for such the school furnishes boarding-houses, where a wholesome moral discipline is maintained by special masters. They are free, however, if they have sufficient means, to choose another boarding-house (provided it be a respectable one), or to find quarters in some good family; but few adopt either course. I doubt whether in any other country the cost of education--education of the most excellent and advanced kind--is so little as in Japan. The Izumo student is able to live at a figure so far below the Occidental idea of necessary expenditure that the mere statement of it can scarcely fail to surprise the reader. A sum equal in American money to about twenty dollars supplies him with board and lodging for one year. The whole of his expenses, including school fees, are about seven dollars a month. For his room and three ample meals a day he pays every four weeks only one yen eighty-five sen--not much more than a dollar and a half in American currency. If very, very poor, he will not be obliged to wear a uniform; but nearly all students of the higher classes do wear uniforms, as the cost of a complete uniform, including cap and shoes of leather, is only about three and a half yen for the cheaper quality. Those who do not wear leather shoes, however, are required, while in the school, to exchange their noisy wooden geta for zori or light straw sandals. Sec. 12 But the mental education so admirably imparted in an ordinary middle school is not, after all, so cheaply acquired by the student as might be imagined from the cost of living and the low rate of school fees. For Nature exacts a heavier school fee, and rigidly collects her debt--in human life. To understand why, one should remember that the modern knowledge which the modern Izumo student must acquire upon a diet of boiled rice and bean-curd was discovered, developed, and synthetised by minds strengthened upon a costly diet of flesh. National underfeeding offers the most cruel problem which the educators of Japan must solve in order that she may become fully able to assimilate the civilization we have thrust upon her. As Herbert Spencer has pointed out, the degree of human energy, physical or intellectual, must depend upon the nutritiveness of food; and history shows that the well-fed races have been the energetic and the dominant. Perhaps mind will rule in the future of nations; but mind is a mode of force, and must be fed--through the stomach. The thoughts that have shaken the world were never framed upon bread and water: they were created by beefsteak and mutton-chops, by ham and eggs, by pork and puddings, and were stimulated by generous wines, strong ales, and strong coffee. And science also teaches us that the growing child or youth requires an even more nutritious diet than the adult; and that the student especially needs strong nourishment to repair the physical waste involved by brain-exertion. And what is the waste entailed upon the Japanese schoolboy's system by study? It is certainly greater than that which the system of the European or American student must suffer at the same period of life. Seven years of study are required to give the Japanese youth merely the necessary knowledge of his own triple system of ideographs--or, in less accurate but plainer speech, the enormous alphabet of his native literature. That literature, also, he must study, and the art of two forms of his language--the written and the spoken: likewise, of course, he must learn native history and native morals. Besides these Oriental studies, his course includes foreign history, geography, arithmetic, astronomy, physics, geometry, natural history, agriculture, chemistry, drawing, and mathematics. Worst of all, he must learn English--a language of which the difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by anyone unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue--a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought. And he must learn all this upon a diet no English boy could live on; and always thinly clad in his poor cotton dress without even a fire in his schoolroom during the terrible winter, only a hibachi containing a few lumps of glowing charcoal in a bed of ashes. [5] Is it to be wondered at that even those Japanese students who pass successfully 'through all the educational courses the Empire can open to them can only in rare instances show results of their long training as large as those manifested by students of the West? Better conditions are coming; but at present, under the new strain, young bodies and young minds too often give way. And those who break down are not the dullards, but the pride of schools, the captains of classes. Sec. 13 Yet, so far as the finances of the schools allow, everything possible is done to make the students both healthy and happy--to furnish them with ample opportunities both for physical exercise and for mental enjoyment. Though the course of study is severe, the hours are not long: and one of the daily five is devoted to military drill--made more interesting to the lads by the use of real rifles and bayonets, furnished by Government. There is a fine gymnastic ground near the school, furnished with trapezes, parallel bars, vaulting horses, etc.; and there are two masters of gymnastics attached to the Middle School alone. There are row-boats, in which the boys can take their pleasure on the beautiful lake whenever the weather permits. There is an excellent fencing-school conducted by the Governor himself, who, although so heavy a man, is reckoned one of the best fencers of his own generation. The style taught is the old one, requiring the use of both hands to wield the sword; thrusting is little attempted, it is nearly all heavy slashing. The foils are made of long splinters of bamboo tied together so as to form something resembling elongated fasces: masks and wadded coats protect the head and body, for the blows given are heavy. This sort of fencing requires considerable agility, and gives more active exercise than our severer Western styles. Yet another form of healthy exercise consists of long journeys on foot to famous places. Special holidays are allowed for these. The students march out of town in military order, accompanied by some of their favourite teachers, and perhaps a servant to cook for them. Thus they may travel for a hundred, or even a hundred and fifty miles and back; but if the journey is to be a very long one, only the strong lads are allowed to go. They walk in waraji, the true straw sandal, closely tied to the naked foot, which it leaves perfectly supple and free, without blistering or producing corns. They sleep at night in Buddhist temples; and their cooking is done in the open fields, like that of soldiers in camp. For those little inclined to such sturdy exercise there is a school library which is growing every year. There is also a monthly school magazine, edited and published by the boys. And there is a Students' Society, at whose regular meetings debates are held upon all conceivable subjects of interest to students. Sec. 14 April 4, 1891. The students of the third, fourth, and fifth year classes write for me once a week brief English compositions upon easy themes which I select for them. As a rule the themes are Japanese. Considering the immense difficulty of the English language to Japanese students, the ability of some of my boys to express their thoughts in it is astonishing. Their compositions have also another interest for me as revelations, not of individual character, but of national sentiment, or of aggregate sentiment of some sort or other. What seems to me most surprising in the compositions of the average Japanese student is that they have no personal cachet at all. Even the handwriting of twenty English compositions will be found to have a curious family resemblance; and striking exceptions are too few to affect the rule. Here is one of the best compositions on my table, by a student at the head of his class. Only a few idiomatic errors have been corrected: THE MOON 'The Moon appears melancholy to those who are sad, and joyous to those who are happy. The Moon makes memories of home come to those who travel, and creates homesickness. So when the Emperor Godaigo, having been banished to Oki by the traitor Hojo, beheld the moonlight upon the seashore, he cried out, "The Moon is heartless!" 'The sight of the Moon makes an immeasurable feeling in our hearts when we look up at it through the clear air of a beauteous night. 'Our hearts ought to be pure and calm like the light of the Moon. 'Poets often compare the Moon to a Japanese [metal] mirror (kagami); and indeed its shape is the same when it is full. 'The refined man amuses himself with the Moon. He seeks some house looking out upon water, to watch the Moon, and to make verses about it. 'The best places from which to see the Moon are Tsukigashi, and the mountain Obasute. 'The light of the Moon shines alike upon foul and pure, upon high and low. That beautiful Lamp is neither yours nor mine, but everybody's. 'When we look at the Moon we should remember that its waxing and its waning are the signs of the truth that the culmination of all things is likewise the beginning of their decline.' Any person totally unfamiliar with Japanese educational methods might presume that the foregoing composition shows some original power of thought and imagination. But this is not the case. I found the same thoughts and comparisons in thirty other compositions upon the same subject. Indeed, the compositions of any number of middle-school students upon the same subject are certain to be very much alike in idea and sentiment--though they are none the less charming for that. As a rule the Japanese student shows little originality in the line of imagination. His imagination was made for him long centuries ago--partly in China, partly in his native land. From his childhood he is trained to see and to feel Nature exactly in the manner of those wondrous artists who, with a few swift brushstrokes, fling down upon a sheet of paper the colour-sensation of a chilly dawn, a fervid noon, an autumn evening. Through all his boyhood he is taught to commit to memory the most beautiful thoughts and comparisons to be found in his ancient native literature. Every boy has thus learned that the vision of Fuji against the blue resembles a white half-opened fan, hanging inverted in the sky. Every boy knows that cherry-trees in full blossom look as if the most delicate of flushed summer clouds were caught in their branches. Every boy knows the comparison between the falling of certain leaves on snow and the casting down of texts upon a sheet of white paper with a brush. Every boy and girl knows the verses comparing the print of cat's-feet on snow to plum-flowers, [6] and that comparing the impression of bokkuri on snow to the Japanese character for the number 'two.' These were thoughts of old, old poets; and it would be very hard to invent prettier ones. Artistic power in composition is chiefly shown by the correct memorising and clever combination of these old thoughts. And the students have been equally well trained to discover a moral in almost everything, animate or inanimate. I have tried them with a hundred subjects--Japanese subjects--for composition; I have never found them to fail in discovering a moral when the theme was a native one. If I suggested 'Fire-flies,' they at once approved the topic, and wrote for me the story of that Chinese student who, being too poor to pay for a lamp, imprisoned many fireflies in a paper lantern, and thus was able to obtain light enough to study after dark, and to become eventually a great scholar. If I said 'Frogs,' they wrote for me the legend of Ono- no-Tofu, who was persuaded to become a learned celebrity by witnessing the tireless perseverance of a frog trying to leap up to a willow- branch. I subjoin a few specimens of the moral ideas which I thus evoked. I have corrected some common mistakes in the originals, but have suffered a few singularities to stand: THE BOTAN 'The botan [Japanese peony] is large and beautiful to see; but it has a disagreeable smell. This should make us remember that what is only outwardly beautiful in human society should not attract us. To be attracted by beauty only may lead us into fearful and fatal misfortune. The best place to see the botan is the island of Daikonshima in the lake Nakaumi. There in the season of its flowering all the island is red with its blossoms. [7] THE DRAGON 'When the Dragon tries to ride the clouds and come into heaven there happens immediately a furious storm. When the Dragon dwells on the ground it is supposed to take the form of a stone or other object; but when it wants to rise it calls a cloud. Its body is composed of parts of many animals. It has the eyes of a tiger and the horns of a deer and the body of a crocodile and the claws of an eagle and two trunks like the trunk of an elephant. It has a moral. We should try to be like the dragon, and find out and adopt all the good qualities of others.' At the close of this essay on the dragon is a note to the teacher, saying: 'I believe not there is any Dragon. But there are many stories and curious pictures about Dragon.' MOSQUITOES 'On summer nights we hear the sound of faint voices; and little things come and sting our bodies very violently. We call .them ka--in English "mosquitoes." I think the sting is useful for us, because if we begin to sleep, the ka shall come and sting us, uttering a small voice; then we shall be bringed back to study by the sting.' The following, by a lad of sixteen, is submitted only as a characteristic expression of half-formed ideas about a less familiar subject: EUROPEAN AND JAPANESE CUSTOMS 'Europeans wear very narrow clothes and they wear shoes always in the house. Japanese wear clothes which are very lenient and they do not shoe except when they walk out-of-the-door. 'What we think very strange is that in Europe every wife loves her husband more than her parents. In Nippon there is no wife who more loves not her parents than her husband. 'And Europeans walk out in the road with their wives, which we utterly refuse to, except on the festival of Hachiman. 'The Japanese woman is treated by man as a servant, while the European woman is respected as a master. I think these customs are both bad. 'We think it is very much trouble to treat European ladies; and we do not know why ladies are so much respected by Europeans.' Conversation in the class-room about foreign subjects is often equally amusing and suggestive: 'Teacher, I have been told that if a European and his father and his wife were all to fall into the sea together, and that he only could swim, he would try to save his wife first. Would he really?' 'Probably,' I reply. 'But why?' 'One reason is that Europeans consider it a man's duty to help the weaker first--especially women and children.' 'And does a European love his wife more than his father and mother?' 'Not always--but generally, perhaps, he does.' 'Why, Teacher, according to our ideas that is very immoral.' 'Teacher, how do European women carry their babies?' 'In their arms.' 'Very tiring! And how far can a woman walk carrying a baby in her arms?' 'A strong woman can walk many miles with a child in her arms.' 'But she cannot use her hands while she is carrying a baby that way, can she?' 'Not very well.' 'Then it is a very bad way to carry babies,' etc. Sec. 15 May 1, 1891. My favourite students often visit me of afternoons. They first send me their cards, to announce their presence. On being told to come in they leave their footgear on the doorstep, enter my little study, prostrate themselves; and we all squat down together on the floor, which is in all Japanese houses like a soft mattress. The servant brings zabuton or small cushions to kneel upon, and cakes, and tea. To sit as the Japanese do requires practice; and some Europeans can never acquire the habit. To acquire it, indeed, one must become accustomed to wearing Japanese costume. But once the habit of thus sitting has been formed, one finds it the most natural and easy of positions, and assumes it by preference for eating, reading, smoking, or chatting. It is not to be recommended, perhaps, for writing with a European pen--as the motion in our Occidental style of writing is from the supported wrist; but it is the best posture for writing with the Japanese fude, in using which the whole arm is unsupported, and the motion from the elbow. After having become habituated to Japanese habits for more than a year, I must confess that I find it now somewhat irksome to use a chair. When we have all greeted each other, and taken our places upon the kneeling cushions, a little polite silence ensues, which I am the first to break. Some of the lads speak a good deal of English. They understand me well when I pronounce every word slowly and distinctly--using simple phrases, and avoiding idioms. When a word with which they are not familiar must be used, we refer to a good English-Japanese dictionary, which gives each vernacular meaning both in the kana and in the Chinese characters. Usually my young visitors stay a long time, and their stay is rarely tiresome. Their conversation and their thoughts are of the simplest and frankest. They do not come to learn: they know that to ask their teacher to teach out of school would be unjust. They speak chiefly of things which they think have some particular interest for me. Sometimes they scarcely speak at all, but appear to sink into a sort of happy reverie. What they come really for is the quiet pleasure of sympathy. Not an intellectual sympathy, but the sympathy of pure goodwill: the simple pleasure of being quite comfortable with a friend. They peep at my books and pictures; and sometimes they bring books and pictures to show me-- delightfully queer things--family heirlooms which I regret much that I cannot buy. They also like to look at my garden, and enjoy all that is in it even more than I. Often they bring me gifts of flowers. Never by any possible chance are they troublesome, impolite, curious, or even talkative. Courtesy in its utmost possible exquisiteness--an exquisiteness of which even the French have no conception--seems natural to the Izumo boy as the colour of his hair or the tint of his skin. Nor is he less kind than courteous. To contrive pleasurable surprises for me is one of the particular delights of my boys; and they either bring or cause to be brought to the house all sorts of strange things. Of all the strange or beautiful things which I am thus privileged to examine, none gives me so much pleasure as a certain wonderful kakemono of Amida Nyorai. It is rather large picture, and has been borrowed from a priest that I may see it. The Buddha stands in the attitude of exhortation, with one, hand uplifted. Behind his head a huge moon makes an aureole and across the face of that moon stream winding lines of thinnest cloud. Beneath his feet, like a rolling of smoke, curl heavier and darker clouds. Merely as a work of colour and design, the thing is a marvel. But the real wonder of it is not in colour or design at all. Minute examination reveals the astonishing fact that every shadow and clouding is formed by a fairy text of Chinese characters so minute that only a keen eye can discern them; and this text is the entire text of two famed sutras--the Kwammu-ryjo-kyo and the Amida-kyo--'text no larger than the limbs of fleas.' And all the strong dark lines of the figure, such as the seams of the Buddha's robe, are formed by the characters of the holy invocation of the Shin-shu sect, repeated thousands of times: 'Namu Amida Butsu!' Infinite patience, tireless silent labour of loving faith, in some dim temple, long ago. Another day one of my boys persuades his father to let him bring to my house a wonderful statue of Koshi (Confucius), made, I am told, in China, toward the close of the period of the Ming dynasty. I am also assured it is the first time the statue has ever been removed from the family residence to be shown to anyone. Previously, whoever desired to pay it reverence had to visit the house. It is truly a beautiful bronze. The figure of a smiling, bearded old man, with fingers uplifted and lips apart as if discoursing. He wears quaint Chinese shoes, and his flowing robes are adorned with the figure of the mystic phoenix. The microscopic finish of detail seems indeed to reveal the wonderful cunning of a Chinese hand: each tooth, each hair, looks as though it had been made the subject of a special study. Another student conducts me to the home of one of his relatives, that I may see a cat made of wood, said to have been chiselled by the famed Hidari Jingoro--a cat crouching and watching, and so life-like that real cats 'have been known to put up their backs and spit at it.' Sec. 16 Nevertheless I have a private conviction that some old artists even now living in Matsue could make a still more wonderful cat. Among these is the venerable Arakawa Junosuke, who wrought many rare things for the Daimyo of Izumo in the Tempo era, and whose acquaintance I have been enabled to make through my school-friends. One evening he brings to my house something very odd to show me, concealed in his sleeve. It is a doll: just a small carven and painted head without a body,--the body being represented by a tiny robe only, attached to the neck. Yet as Arakawa Junosuke manipulates it, it seems to become alive. The back of its head is like the back of a very old man's head; but its face is the face of an amused child, and there is scarcely any forehead nor any evidence of a thinking disposition. And whatever way the head is turned, it looks so funny that one cannot help laughing at it. It represents a kirakubo--what we might call in English 'a jolly old boy,'--one who is naturally too hearty and too innocent to feel trouble of any sort. It is not an original, but a model of a very famous original--whose history is recorded in a faded scroll which Arakawa takes out of his other sleeve, and which a friend translates for me. This little history throws a curious light upon the simple-hearted ways of Japanese life and thought in other centuries: 'Two hundred and sixty years ago this doll was made by a famous maker of No-masks in the city of Kyoto, for the Emperor Go-midzu-no-O. The Emperor used to have it placed beside his pillow each night before he slept, and was very fond of it. And he composed the following poem concerning it: Yo no naka wo Kiraku ni kurase Nani goto mo Omoeba omou Omowaneba koso. [8]' 'On the death of the Emperor this doll became the property of Prince Konoye, in whose family it is said to be still preserved. 'About one hundred and seven years ago, the then Ex-Empress, whose posthumous name is Sei-Kwa-Mon-Yin, borrowed the doll from Prince Konoye, and ordered a copy of it to be made. This copy she kept always beside her, and was very fond of it. 'After the death of the good Empress this doll was given to a lady of the court, whose family name is not recorded. Afterwards this lady, for reasons which are not known, cut off her hair and became a Buddhist nun --taking the name of Shingyo-in. 'And one who knew the Nun Shingyo-in--a man whose name was Kondo-ju- haku-in-Hokyo--had the honour of receiving the doll as a gift. 'Now I, who write this document, at one time fell sick; and my sickness was caused by despondency. And my friend Kondo-ju-haku-in-Hokyo, coming to see me, said: "I have in my house something which will make you well." And he went home and, presently returning, brought to me this doll, and lent it to me--putting it by my pillow that I might see it and laugh at it. 'Afterward, I myself, having called upon the Nun Shingyo-in, whom I now also have the honour to know, wrote down the history of the doll, and make a poem thereupon.' (Dated about ninety years ago: no signature.) Sec. 17 June 1, 1891 I find among the students a healthy tone of scepticism in regard to certain forms of popular belief. Scientific education is rapidly destroying credulity in old superstitions yet current among the unlettered, and especially among the peasantry--as, for instance, faith in mamori and ofuda. The outward forms of Buddhism--its images, its relics, its commoner practices--affect the average student very little. He is not, as a foreigner may be, interested in iconography, or religious folklore, or the comparative study of religions; and in nine cases out of ten he is rather ashamed of the signs and tokens of popular faith all around him. But the deeper religious sense, which underlies all symbolism, remains with him; and the Monistic Idea in Buddhism is being strengthened and expanded, rather than weakened, by the new education. What is true of the effect of the public schools upon the lower Buddhism is equally true of its effect upon the lower Shinto. Shinto the students all sincerely are, or very nearly all; yet not as fervent worshippers of certain Kami, but as rigid observers of what the higher Shinto signifies--loyalty, filial piety, obedience to parents, teachers, and superiors, and respect to ancestors. For Shinto means more than faith. When, for the first time, I stood before the shrine of the Great Deity of Kitzuki, as the first Occidental to whom that privilege had been accorded, not without a sense of awe there came to me the Sec. 'This is the Shrine of the Father of a Race; this is the symbolic centre of a nation's reverence for its past.' And I, too, paid reverence to the memory of the progenitor of this people. As I then felt, so feels the intelligent student of the Meiji era whom education has lifted above the common plane of popular creeds. And Shinto also means for him--whether he reasons upon the question or not-- all the ethics of the family, and all that spirit of loyalty which has become so innate that, at the call of duty, life itself ceases to have value save as an instrument for duty's accomplishment. As yet, this Orient little needs to reason about the origin of its loftier ethics. Imagine the musical sense in our own race so developed that a child could play a complicated instrument so soon as the little fingers gained sufficient force and flexibility to strike the notes. By some such comparison only can one obtain a just idea of what inherent religion and instinctive duty signify in Izumo. Of the rude and aggressive form of scepticism so common in the Occident, which is the natural reaction after sudden emancipation from superstitious belief, I find no trace among my students. But such sentiment may be found elsewhere--especially in Tokyo--among the university students, one of whom, upon hearing the tones of a magnificent temple bell, exclaimed to a friend of mine: 'Is it not a shame that in this nineteenth century we must still hear such a sound?' For the benefit of curious travellers, however, I may here take occasion to observe that to talk Buddhism to Japanese gentlemen of the new school is in just as bad taste as to talk Christianity at home to men of that class whom knowledge has placed above creeds and forms. There are, of course, Japanese scholars willing to aid researches of foreign scholars in religion or in folk-lore; but these specialists do not undertake to gratify idle curiosity of the 'globe-trotting' description. I may also say that the foreigner desirous to learn the religious ideas or superstitions of the common people must obtain them from the people themselves--not from the educated classes. Sec. 18 Among all my favourite students--two or three from each class--I cannot decide whom I like the best. Each has a particular merit of his own. But I think the names and faces of those of whom I am about to speak will longest remain vivid in my remembrance--Ishihara, Otani-Masanobu, Adzukizawa, Yokogi, Shida. Ishihara is a samurai a very influential lad in his class because of his uncommon force of character. Compared with others, he has a somewhat brusque, independent manner, pleasing, however, by its honest manliness. He says everything he thinks, and precisely in the tone that he thinks it, even to the degree of being a little embarrassing sometimes. He does not hesitate, for example, to find fault with a teacher's method of explanation, and to insist upon a more lucid one. He has criticized me more than once; but I never found that he was wrong. We like each other very much. He often brings me flowers. One day that he had brought two beautiful sprays of plum-blossoms, he said to me: 'I saw you bow before our Emperor's picture at the ceremony on the birthday of His Majesty. You are not like a former English teacher we had.' 'How?' 'He said we were savages.' 'Why?' 'He said there is nothing respectable except God--his God--and that only vulgar and ignorant people respect anything else.' 'Where did he come from?' 'He was a Christian clergyman, and said he was an English subject.' 'But if he was an English subject, he was bound to respect Her Majesty the Queen. He could not even enter the office of a British consul without removing his hat.' 'I don't know what he did in the country he came from. But that was what he said. Now we think we should love and honour our Emperor. We think it is a duty. We think it is a joy. We think it is happiness to be able to give our lives for our Emperor. [9] But he said we were only savages-- ignorant savages. What do you think of that?' 'I think, my dear lad, that he himself was a savage--a vulgar, ignorant, savage bigot. I think it is your highest social duty to honour your Emperor, to obey his laws, and to be ready to give your blood whenever he may require it of you for the sake of Japan. I think it is your duty to respect the gods of your fathers, the religion of your country--even if you yourself cannot believe all that others believe. And I think, also, that it is your duty, for your Emperor's sake and for your country's sake, to resent any such wicked and vulgar language as that you have told me of, no matter by whom uttered.' Masanobu visits me seldom and always comes alone. A slender, handsome lad, with rather feminine features, reserved and perfectly self- possessed in manner, refined. He is somewhat serious, does not often smile; and I never heard him laugh. He has risen to the head of his class, and appears to remain there without any extraordinary effort. Much of his leisure time he devotes to botany--collecting and classifying plants. He is a musician, like all the male members of his family. He plays a variety of instruments never seen or heard of in the West, including flutes of marble, flutes of ivory, flutes of bamboo of wonderful shapes and tones, and that shrill Chinese instrument called sho--a sort of mouth-organ consisting of seventeen tubes of different lengths fixed in a silver frame. He first explained to me the uses in temple music of the taiko and shoko, which are drums; of the flutes called fei or teki; of the flageolet termed hichiriki; and of the kakko, which is a little drum shaped like a spool with very narrow waist, On great Buddhist festivals, Masanobu and his father and his brothers are the musicians in the temple services, and they play the strange music called Ojo and Batto--music which at first no Western ear can feel pleasure in, but which, when often heard, becomes comprehensible, and is found to possess a weird charm of its own. When Masanobu comes to the house, it is usually in order to invite me to attend some Buddhist or Shinto festival (matsuri) which he knows will interest me. Adzukizawa bears so little resemblance to Masanobu that one might suppose the two belonged to totally different races. Adzukizawa is large, raw-boned, heavy-looking, with a face singularly like that of a North American Indian. His people are not rich; he can afford few pleasures which cost money, except one--buying books. Even to be able to do this he works in his leisure hours to earn money. He is a perfect bookworm, a natural-born researcher, a collector of curious documents, a haunter of all the queer second-hand stores in Teramachi and other streets where old manuscripts or prints are on sale as waste paper. He is an omnivorous reader, and a perpetual borrower of volumes, which he always returns in perfect condition after having copied what he deemed of most value to him. But his special delight is philosophy and the history of philosophers in all countries. He has read various epitomes of the history of philosophy in the Occident, and everything of modern philosophy which has been translated into Japanese--including Spencer's First Principles. I have been able to introduce him to Lewes and John Fiske--both of which he appreciates,--although the strain of studying philosophy in English is no small one. Happily he is so strong that no amount of study is likely to injure his health, and his nerves are tough as wire. He is quite an ascetic withal. As it is the Japanese custom to set cakes and tea before visitors, I always have both in readiness, and an especially fine quality of kwashi, made at Kitzuki, of which the students are very fond. Adzukizawa alone refuses to taste cakes or confectionery of any kind, saying: 'As I am the youngest brother, I must begin to earn my own living soon. I shall have to endure much hardship. And if I allow myself to like dainties now, I shall only suffer more later on.' Adzukizawa has seen much of human life and character. He is naturally observant; and he has managed in some extraordinary way to learn the history of everybody in Matsue. He has brought me old tattered prints to prove that the opinions now held by our director are diametrically opposed to the opinions he advocated fourteen years ago in a public address. I asked the director about it. He laughed and said, 'Of course that is Adzukizawa! But he is right: I was very young then.' And I wonder if Adzukizawa was ever young. Yokogi, Adzukizawa's dearest friend, is a very rare visitor; for he is always studying at home. He is always first in his class--the third year class--while Adzukizawa is fourth. Adzukizawa's account of the beginning of their acquaintance is this: 'I watched him when he came and saw that he spoke very little, walked very quickly, and looked straight into everybody's eyes. So I knew he had a particular character. I like to know people with a particular character.' Adzukizawa was perfectly right: under a very gentle exterior, Yokogi has an extremely strong character. He is the son of a carpenter; and his parents could not afford to send him to the Middle School. But he had shown such exceptional qualities while in the Elementary School that a wealthy man became interested in him, and offered to pay for his education. [10] He is now the pride of the school. He has a remarkably placid face, with peculiarly long eyes, and a delicious smile. In class he is always asking intelligent questions--questions so original that I am sometimes extremely puzzled how to answer them; and he never ceases to ask until the explanation is quite satisfactory to himself. He never cares about the opinion of his comrades if he thinks he is right. On one occasion when the whole class refused to attend the lectures of a new teacher of physics, Yokogi alone refused to act with them--arguing that although the teacher was not all that could be desired, there was no immediate possibility of his removal, and no just reason for making unhappy a man who, though unskilled, was sincerely doing his best. Adzukizawa finally stood by him. These two alone attended the lectures until the remainder of the students, two weeks later, found that Yokogi's views were rational. On another occasion when some vulgar proselytism was attempted by a Christian missionary, Yokogi went boldly to the proselytiser's house, argued with him on the morality of his effort, and reduced him to silence. Some of his comrades praised his cleverness in the argument. 'I am not clever,' he made answer: 'it does not require cleverness to argue against what is morally wrong; it requires only the knowledge that one is morally right.' At least such is about the translation of what he said as told me by Adzukizawa. Shida, another visitor, is a very delicate, sensitive boy, whose soul is full of art. He is very skilful at drawing and painting; and he has a wonderful set of picture-books by the Old Japanese masters. The last time he came he brought some prints to show me--rare ones--fairy maidens and ghosts. As I looked at his beautiful pale face and weirdly frail fingers, I could not help fearing for him,--fearing that he might soon become a little ghost. I have not seen him now for more than two months. He has been very, very ill; and his lungs are so weak that the doctor has forbidden him to converse. But Adzukizawa has been to visit him, and brings me this translation of a Japanese letter which the sick boy wrote and pasted upon the wall above his bed: 'Thou, my Lord-Soul, dost govern me. Thou knowest that I cannot now govern myself. Deign, I pray thee, to let me be cured speedily. Do not suffer me to speak much. Make me to obey in all things the command of the physician. 'This ninth day of the eleventh month of the twenty-fourth year of Meiji. 'From the sick body of Shida to his Soul.' Sec. 19 September 4, 1891. The long summer vacation is over; a new school year begins. There have been many changes. Some of the boys I taught are dead. Others have graduated and gone away from Matsue for ever. Some teachers, too, have left the school, and their places have been filled; and there is a new Director. And the dear good Governor has gone--been transferred to cold Niigata in the north-west. It was a promotion. But he had ruled Izumo for seven years, and everybody loved him, especially, perhaps, the students, who looked upon him as a father. All the population of the city crowded to the river to bid him farewell. The streets through which he passed on his way to take the steamer, the bridge, the wharves, even the roofs were thronged with multitudes eager to see his face for the last time. Thousands were weeping. And as the steamer glided from the wharf such a cry arose--'A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!' It was intended for a cheer, but it seemed to me the cry of a whole city sorrowing, and so plaintive that I hope never to hear such a cry again. The names and faces of the younger classes are all strange to me. Doubtless this was why the sensation of my first day's teaching in the school came back to me with extraordinary vividness when I entered the class-room of First Division A this morning. Strangely pleasant is the first sensation of a Japanese class, as you look over the ranges of young faces before you. There is nothing in them familiar to inexperienced Western eyes; yet there is an indescribable pleasant something common to all. Those traits have nothing incisive, nothing forcible: compared with Occidental faces they seem but 'half- sketched,' so soft their outlines are--indicating neither aggressiveness nor shyness, neither eccentricity nor sympathy, neither curiosity nor indifference. Some, although faces of youths well grown, have a childish freshness and frankness indescribable; some are as uninteresting as others are attractive; a few are beautifully feminine. But all are equally characterized by a singular placidity--expressing neither love nor hate nor anything save perfect repose and gentleness--like the dreamy placidity of Buddhist images. At a later day you will no longer recognise this aspect of passionless composure: with growing acquaintance each face will become more and more individualised for you by characteristics before imperceptible. But the recollection of that first impression will remain with you and the time will come when you will find, by many varied experiences, how strangely it foreshadowed something in Japanese character to be fully learned only after years of familiarity. You will recognize in the memory of that first impression one glimpse of the race-soul, with its impersonal lovableness and its impersonal weaknesses--one glimpse of the nature of a life in which the Occidental, dwelling alone, feels a psychic comfort comparable only to the nervous relief of suddenly emerging from some stifling atmospheric pressure into thin, clear, free living air. Sec. 20 Was it not the eccentric Fourier who wrote about the horrible faces of 'the _civilizés_'? Whoever it was, would have found seeming confirmation of his physiognomical theory could he have known the effect produced by the first sight of European faces in the most eastern East. What we are taught at home to consider handsome, interesting, or characteristic in physiognomy does not produce the same impression in China or Japan. Shades of facial expression familiar to us as letters of our own alphabet are not perceived at all in Western features by these Orientals at first acquaintance. What they discern at once is the race- characteristic, not the individuality. The evolutional meaning of the deep-set Western eye, protruding brow, accipitrine nose, ponderous jaw-- symbols of aggressive force and habit--was revealed to the gentler race by the same sort of intuition through which a tame animal immediately comprehends the dangerous nature of the first predatory enemy which it sees. To Europeans the smooth-featured, slender, low-statured Japanese seemed like boys; and 'boy' is the term by which the native attendant of a Yokohama merchant is still called. To Japanese the first red-haired, rowdy, drunken European sailors seemed fiends, shojo, demons of the sea; and by the Chinese the Occidentals are still called 'foreign devils.' The great stature and massive strength and fierce gait of foreigners in Japan enhanced the strange impression created by their faces. Children cried for fear on seeing them pass through the streets. And in remoter districts, Japanese children are still apt to cry at the first sight of a European or American face. A lady of Matsue related in my presence this curious souvenir of her childhood: 'When I was a very little girl,' she said, our daimyo hired a foreigner to teach the military art. My father and a great many samurai went to receive the foreigner; and all the people lined the streets to see--for no foreigner had ever come to Izumo before; and we all went to look. The foreigner came by ship: there were no steamboats here then. He was very tall, and walked quickly with long steps; and the children began to cry at the sight of him, because his face was not like the faces of the people of Nihon. My little brother cried out loud, and hid his face in mother's robe; and mother reproved him and said: "This foreigner is a very good man who has come here to serve our prince; and it is very disrespectful to cry at seeing him." But he still cried. I was not afraid; and I looked up at the foreigner's face as he came and smiled. He had a great beard; and I thought his face was good though it seemed to me a very strange face and stern. Then he stopped and smiled too, and put something in my hand, and touched my head and face very softly with his great fingers, and said something I could not understand, and went away. After he had gone I looked at what he put into my hand and found that it was a pretty little glass to look through. If you put a fly under that glass it looks quite big. At that time I thought the glass was a very wonderful thing. I have it still.' She took from a drawer in the room and placed before me a tiny, dainty pocket-microscope. The hero of this little incident was a French military officer. His services were necessarily dispensed with on the abolition of the feudal system. Memories of him still linger in Matsue; and old people remember a popular snatch about him--a sort of rapidly-vociferated rigmarole, supposed to be an imitation of his foreign speech: Tojin no negoto niwa kinkarakuri medagasho, Saiboji ga shimpeishite harishite keisan, Hanryo na Sacr-r-r-r-r-é-na-nom-da-Jiu. Sec. 21 November 2, 1891. Shida will never come to school again. He sleeps under the shadow of the cedars, in the old cemetery of Tokoji. Yokogi, at the memorial service, read a beautiful address (saibun) to the soul of his dead comrade. But Yokogi himself is down. And I am very much afraid for him. He is suffering from some affection of the brain, brought on, the doctor says, by studying a great deal too hard. Even if he gets well, he will always have to be careful. Some of us hope much; for the boy is vigorously built and so young. Strong Sakane burst a blood-vessel last month and is now well. So we trust that Yokogi may rally. Adzukizawa daily brings news of his friend. But the rally never comes. Some mysterious spring in the mechanism of the young life has been broken. The mind lives only in brief intervals between long hours of unconsciousness. Parents watch, and friends, for these living moments to whisper caressing things, or to ask: 'Is there anything thou dost wish?' And one night the answer comes: 'Yes: I want to go to the school; I want to see the school.' Then they wonder if the fine brain has not wholly given way, while they make answer: 'It is midnight past, and there is no moon. And the night is cold.' 'No; I can see by the stars--I want to see the school again.' They make kindliest protests in vain: the dying boy only repeats, with the plaintive persistence of a last--'I want to see the school again; I want to see it now.' So there is a murmured consultation in the neighbouring room; and tansu-drawers are unlocked, warm garments prepared. Then Fusaichi, the strong servant, enters with lantern lighted, and cries out in his kind rough voice: 'Master Tomi will go to the school upon my back: 'tis but a little way; he shall see the school again. Carefully they wrap up the lad in wadded robes; then he puts his arms about Fusaichi's shoulders like a child; and the strong servant bears him lightly through the wintry street; and the father hurries beside Fusaichi, bearing the lantern. And it is not far to the school, over the little bridge. The huge dark grey building looks almost black in the night; but Yokogi can see. He looks at the windows of his own classroom; at the roofed side-door where each morning for four happy years he used to exchange his getas for soundless sandals of straw; at the lodge of the slumbering Kodzukai; [11] at the silhouette of the bell hanging black in its little turret against the stars. Then he murmurs: 'I can remember all now. I had forgotten--so sick I was. I remember everything again: Oh, Fusaichi, you are very good. I am so glad to have seen the school again.' And they hasten back through the long void streets. Sec. 22 November 26 1891. Yokogi will be buried to-morrow evening beside his comrade Shida. When a poor person is about to die, friends and neighbours come to the house and do all they can to help the family. Some bear the tidings to distant relatives; others prepare all necessary things; others, when the death has been announced, summon the Buddhist priests. [12] It is said that the priests know always of a parishioner's death at night, before any messenger is sent to them; for the soul of the dead knocks heavily, once, upon the door of the family temple. Then the priests arise and robe themselves, and when the messenger comes make answer: 'We know: we are ready.' Meanwhile the body is carried out before the family butsudan, and laid upon the floor. No pillow is placed under the head. A naked sword is laid across the limbs to keep evil spirits away. The doors of the butsudan are opened; and tapers are lighted before the tablets of the ancestors; and incense is burned. All friends send gifts of incense. Wherefore a gift of incense, however rare and precious, given upon any other occasion, is held to be unlucky. But the Shinto household shrine must be hidden from view with white paper; and the Shinto ofuda fastened upon the house door must be covered up during all the period of mourning. [13] And in all that time no member of the family may approach a Shinto temple, or pray to the Kami, or even pass beneath a torii. A screen (biobu) is extended between the body and the principal entrance of the death chamber; and the kaimyo, inscribed upon a strip of white paper, is fastened upon the screen. If the dead be young the screen must be turned upside-down; but this is not done in the case of old people. Friends pray beside the corpse. There a little box is placed, containing one thousand peas, to be used for counting during the recital of those one thousand pious invocations, which, it is believed, will improve the condition of the soul on its unfamiliar journey. The priests come and recite the sutras; and then the body is prepared for burial. It is washed in warm water, and robed all in white. But the kimono of the dead is lapped over to the left side. Wherefore it is considered unlucky at any other time to fasten one's kimono thus, even by accident. When the body has been put into that strange square coffin which looks something like a wooden palanquin, each relative puts also into the coffin some of his or her hair or nail parings, symbolizing their blood. And six rin are also placed in the coffin, for the six Jizo who stand at the heads of the ways of the Six Shadowy Worlds. The funeral procession forms at the family residence. A priest leads it, ringing a little bell; a boy bears the ihai of the newly dead. The van of the procession is wholly composed of men--relatives and friends. Some carry hata, white symbolic bannerets; some bear flowers; all carry paper lanterns--for in Izumo the adult dead are buried after dark: only children are buried by day. Next comes the kwan or coffin, borne palanquin-wise upon the shoulders of men of that pariah caste whose office it is to dig graves and assist at funerals. Lastly come the women mourners. They are all white-hooded and white-robed from head to feet, like phantoms. [14] Nothing more ghostly than this sheeted train of an Izumo funeral procession, illuminated only by the glow of paper lanterns, can be imagined. It is a weirdness that, once seen, will often return in dreams. At the temple the kwan is laid upon the pavement before the entrance; and another service is performed, with plaintive music and recitation of sutras. Then the procession forms again, winds once round the temple court, and takes its way to the cemetery. But the body is not buried until twenty-four hours later, lest the supposed dead should awake in the grave. Corpses are seldom burned in Izumo. In this, as in other matters, the predominance of Shinto sentiment is manifest. Sec. 23 For the last time I see his face again, as he lies upon his bed of death--white-robed from neck to feet--white-girdled for his shadowy journey--but smiling with closed eyes in almost the same queer gentle way he was wont to smile at class on learning the explanation of some seeming riddle in our difficult English tongue. Only, methinks, the smile is sweeter now, as with sudden larger knowledge of more mysterious things. So smiles, through dusk of incense in the great temple of Tokoji, the golden face of Buddha. Sec. 24 December 23, 1891. The great bell of Tokoji is booming for the memorial service--for the tsuito-kwai of Yokogi--slowly and regularly as a minute-gun. Peal on peal of its rich bronze thunder shakes over the lake, surges over the roofs of the town, and breaks in deep sobs of sound against the green circle of the hills. It is a touching service, this tsuito-kwai, with quaint ceremonies which, although long since adopted into Japanese Buddhism, are of Chinese origin and are beautiful. It is also a costly ceremony; and the parents of Yokogi are very poor. But all the expenses have been paid by voluntary subscription of students and teachers. Priests from every great temple of the Zen sect in Izumo have assembled at Tokoji. All the teachers of the city and all the students have entered the hondo of the huge temple, and taken their places to the right and to the left of the high altar--kneeling on the matted floor, and leaving, on the long broad steps without, a thousand shoes and sandals. Before the main entrance, and facing the high shrine, a new butsudan has been placed, within whose open doors the ihai of the dead boy glimmers in lacquer and gilding. And upon a small stand before the butsudan have been placed an incense-vessel with bundles of senko-rods and offerings of fruits, confections, rice, and flowers. Tall and beautiful flower- vases on each side of the butsudan are filled with blossoming sprays, exquisitely arranged. Before the honzon tapers burn in massive candelabra whose stems of polished brass are writhing monsters--the Dragon Ascending and the Dragon Descending; and incense curls up from vessels shaped like the sacred deer, like the symbolic tortoise, like the meditative stork of Buddhist legend. And beyond these, in the twilight of the vast alcove, the Buddha smiles the smile of Perfect Rest. Between the butsudan and the honzon a little table has been placed; and on either side of it the priests kneel in ranks, facing each other: rows of polished heads, and splendours of vermilion silks and vestments gold- embroidered. The great bell ceases to peal; the Segaki prayer, which is the prayer uttered when offerings of food are made to the spirits of the dead, is recited; and a sudden sonorous measured tapping, accompanied by a plaintive chant, begins the musical service. The tapping is the tapping of the mokugyo--a huge wooden fish-head, lacquered and gilded, like the head of a dolphin grotesquely idealised--marking the time; and the chant is the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo, with its magnificent invocation: 'O Thou whose eyes are clear, whose eyes are kind, whose eyes are full of pity and of sweetness--O Thou Lovely One, with thy beautiful face, with thy beautiful eye--O Thou Pure One, whose luminosity is without spot, whose knowledge is without shado--O Thou forever shining like that Sun whose glory no power may repel--Thou Sun-like in the course of Thy mercy, pourest Light upon the world!' And while the voices of the leaders chant clear and high in vibrant unison, the multitude of the priestly choir recite in profoundest undertone the mighty verses; and the sound of their recitation is like the muttering of surf. The mokugyo ceases its dull echoing, the impressive chant ends, and the leading officiants, one by one, high priests of famed temples, approach the ihai. Each bows low, ignites an incense-rod, and sets it upright in the little vase of bronze. Each at a time recites a holy verse of which the initial sound is the sound of a letter in the kaimyo of the dead boy; and these verses, uttered in the order of the characters upon the ihai, form the sacred Acrostic whose name is The Words of Perfume. Then the priests retire to their places; and after a little silence begins the reading of the saibun--the reading of the addresses to the soul of the dead. The students speak first--one from each class, chosen by election. The elected rises, approaches the little table before the high altar, bows to the honzon, draws from his bosom a paper and reads it in those melodious, chanting, and plaintive tones which belong to the reading of Chinese texts. So each one tells the affection of the living to the dead, in words of loving grief and loving hope. And last among the students a gentle girl rises--a pupil of the Normal School--to speak in tones soft as a bird's. As each saibun is finished, the reader lays the written paper upon the table before the honzon, and bows; and retires. It is now the turn of the teachers; and an old man takes his place at the little table--old Katayama, the teacher of Chinese, famed as a poet, adored as an instructor. And because the students all love him as a father, there is a strange intensity of silence as he begins-- Ko-Shimane-Ken-Jinjo-Chugakko-yo-nen-sei: 'Here upon the twenty-third day of the twelfth month of the twenty- fourth year of Meiji, I, Katayama Shokei, teacher of the Jinjo Chugakko of Shimane Ken, attending in great sorrow the holy service of the dead [tsui-fuku], do speak unto the soul of Yokogi Tomisaburo, my pupil. 'Having been, as thou knowest, for twice five years, at different periods, a teacher of the school, I have indeed met with not a few most excellent students. But very, very rarely in any school may the teacher find one such as thou--so patient and so earnest, so diligent and so careful in all things--so distinguished among thy comrades by thy blameless conduct, observing every precept, never breaking a rule. 'Of old in the land of Kihoku, famed for its horses, whenever a horse of rarest breed could not be obtained, men were wont to say: "There is no horse." Still there are many line lads among our students--many ryume, fine young steeds; but we have lost the best. 'To die at the age of seventeen--the best period of life for study--even when of the Ten Steps thou hadst already ascended six! Sad is the thought; but sadder still to know that thy last illness was caused only by thine own tireless zeal of study. Even yet more sad our conviction that with those rare gifts, and with that rare character of thine, thou wouldst surely, in that career to which thou wast destined, have achieved good and great things, honouring the names of thine ancestors, couldst thou have lived to manhood. 'I see thee lifting thy hand to ask some question; then bending above thy little desk to make note of all thy poor old teacher was able to tell thee. Again I see thee in the ranks--thy rifle upon thy shoulder-- so bravely erect during the military exercises. Even now thy face is before me, with its smile, as plainly as if thou wert present in the body--thy voice I think I hear distinctly as though thou hadst but this instant finished speaking; yet I know that, except in memory, these never will be seen and heard again. O Heaven, why didst thou take away that dawning life from the world, and leave such a one as I--old Shokei, feeble, decrepit, and of no more use? 'To thee my relation was indeed only that of teacher to pupil. Yet what is my distress! I have a son of twenty-four years; he is now far from me, in Yokohama. I know he is only a worthless youth; [15] yet never for so much as the space of one hour does the thought of him leave his old father's heart. Then how must the father and mother, the brothers and the sisters of this gentle and gifted youth feel now that he is gone! Only to think of it forces the tears from my eyes: I cannot speak --so full my heart is. 'Aa! aa!--thou hast gone from us; thou hast gone from us! Yet though thou hast died, thy earnestness, thy goodness, will long be honoured and told of as examples to the students of our school. 'Here, therefore, do we, thy teachers and thy schoolmates, hold this service in behalf of thy spirit,--with prayer and offerings. Deign thou, 0 gentle Soul, to honour our love by the acceptance of our humble gifts.' Then a sound of sobbing is suddenly whelmed by the resonant booming of the great fish's-head, as the high-pitched voices of the leaders of the chant begin the grand Nehan-gyo, the Sutra of Nirvana, the song of passage triumphant over the Sea of Death and Birth; and deep below those high tones and the hollow echoing of the mokugyo, the surging bass of a century of voices reciting the sonorous words, sounds like the breaking of a sea: 'Sho-gyo mu-jo, je-sho meppo.--Transient are all. They, being born, must die. And being born, are dead. And being dead, are glad to be at rest.' CHAPTER FIVE Two Strange Festivals THE outward signs of any Japanese matsuri are the most puzzling of enigmas to the stranger who sees them for the first time. They are many and varied; they are quite unlike anything in the way of holiday decoration ever seen in the Occident; they have each a meaning founded upon some belief or some tradition--a meaning known to every Japanese child; but that meaning is utterly impossible for any foreigner to guess. Yet whoever wishes to know something of Japanese popular life and feeling must learn the signification of at least the most common among festival symbols and tokens. Especially is such knowledge necessary to the student of Japanese art: without it, not only the delicate humour and charm of countless designs must escape him, but in many instances the designs themselves must remain incomprehensible to him. For hundreds of years the emblems of festivity have been utilised by the Japanese in graceful decorative ways: they figure in metalwork, on porcelain, on the red or black lacquer of the humblest household utensils, on little brass pipes, on the clasps of tobacco-pouches. It may even be said that the majority of common decorative design is emblematical. The very figures of which the meaning seems most obvious--those matchless studies [1] of animal or vegetable life with which the Western curio-buyer is most familiar--have usually some ethical signification which is not perceived at all. Or take the commonest design dashed with a brush upon the fusuma of a cheap hotel--a lobster, sprigs of pine, tortoises waddling in a curl of water, a pair of storks, a spray of bamboo. It is rarely that a foreign tourist thinks of asking why such designs are used instead of others, even when he has seen them repeated, with slight variation, at twenty different places along his route. They have become conventional simply because they are emblems of which the sense is known to all Japanese, however ignorant, but is never even remotely suspected by the stranger. The subject is one about which a whole encyclopaedia might be written, but about which I know very little--much too little for a special essay. But I may venture, by way of illustration, to speak of the curious objects exhibited during two antique festivals still observed in all parts of Japan. Sec. 2 The first is the Festival of the New Year, which lasts for three days. In Matsue its celebration is particularly interesting, as the old city still preserves many matsuri customs which have either become, or are rapidly becoming, obsolete elsewhere. The streets are then profusely decorated, and all shops are closed. Shimenawa or shimekazari--the straw ropes which have been sacred symbols of Shinto from the mythical age-- are festooned along the façades of the dwellings, and so inter-joined that you see to right or left what seems but a single mile-long shimenawa, with its straw pendents and white fluttering paper gohei, extending along either side of the street as far as the eye can reach. Japanese flags--bearing on a white ground the great crimson disk which is the emblem of the Land of the Rising Sun--flutter above the gateways; and the same national emblem glows upon countless paper lanterns strung in rows along the eaves or across the streets and temple avenues. And before every gate or doorway a kadomatsu ('gate pine-tree') has been erected. So that all the ways are lined with green, and full of bright colour. The kadomatsu is more than its name implies. It is a young pine, or part of a pine, conjoined with plum branches and bamboo cuttings. [2] Pine, plum, and bamboo are growths of emblematic significance. Anciently the pine alone was used; but from the era of O-ei, the bamboo was added; and within more recent times the plum-tree. The pine has many meanings. But the fortunate one most generally accepted is that of endurance and successful energy in time of misfortune. As the pine keeps its green leaves when other trees lose their foliage, so the true man keeps his courage and his strength in adversity. The pine is also, as I have said elsewhere, a symbol of vigorous old age. No European could possibly guess the riddle of the bamboo. It represents a sort of pun in symbolism. There are two Chinese characters both pronounced setsu--one signifying the node or joint of the bamboo, and the other virtue, fidelity, constancy. Therefore is the bamboo used as a felicitous sign. The name 'Setsu,' be it observed, is often given to Japanese maidens--just as the names 'Faith,' 'Fidelia,' and 'Constance' are given to English girls. The plum-tree--of whose emblematic meaning I said something in a former paper about Japanese gardens--is not invariably used, however; sometimes sakaki, the sacred plant of Shinto, is substituted for it; and sometimes only pine and bamboo form the kadomatsu. Every decoration used upon the New Year's festival has a meaning of a curious and unfamiliar kind; and the very cornmonest of all--the straw rope--possesses the most complicated symbolism. In the first place it is scarcely necessary to explain that its origin belongs to that most ancient legend of the Sun-Goddess being tempted to issue from the cavern into which she had retired, and being prevented from returning thereunto by a deity who stretched a rope of straw across the entrance--all of which is written in the Kojiki. Next observe that, although the shimenawa may be of any thickness, it must be twisted so that the direction of the twist is to the left; for in ancient Japanese philosophy the left is the 'pure' or fortunate side: owing perhaps to the old belief, common among the uneducated of Europe to this day, that the heart lies to the left. Thirdly, note that the pendent straws, which hang down from the rope at regular intervals, in tufts, like fringing, must be of different numbers according to the place of the tufts, beginning with the number three: so that the first tuft has three straws, the second live, the third seven, the fourth again three, the fifth five, and the sixth seven--and so on, the whole length of the rope. The origin of the pendent paper cuttings (gohei), which alternate with the straw tufts, is likewise to be sought in the legend of the Sun-Goddess; but the gohei also represent offerings of cloth anciently made to the gods according to a custom long obsolete. But besides the gohei, there are many other things attached to the shimenawa of which you could not imagine the signification. Among these are fern-leaves, bitter oranges, yuzuri-leaves, and little bundles of charcoal. Why fern-leaves (moromoki or urajiro)? Because the fern-leaf is the symbol of the hope of exuberant posterity: even as it branches and branches so may the happy family increase and multiply through the generations. Why bitter oranges (daidai)? Because there is a Chinese word daidai signifying 'from generation unto generation.' Wherefore the fruit called daidai has become a fruit of good omen. But why charcoal (sumi)? It signifies 'prosperous changelessness.' Here the idea is decidedly curious. Even as the colour of charcoal cannot be changed, so may the fortunes of those we love remain for ever unchanged In all that gives happiness! The signification of the yuzuri-leaf I explained in a former paper. Besides the great shimenawa in front of the house, shimenawa or shimekazari [3] are suspended above the toko, or alcoves, in each apartment; and over the back gate, or over the entrance to the gallery of the second story (if there be a second story), is hung a 'wajime, which is a very small shimekazari twisted into a sort of wreath, and decorated with fern-leaves, gohei, and yuzuri-leaves. But the great domestic display of the festival is the decoration of the kamidana--the shelf of the Gods. Before the household miya are placed great double rice cakes; and the shrine is beautiful with flowers, a tiny shimekazari, and sprays of sakaki. There also are placed a string of cash; kabu (turnips); daikon (radishes); a tai-fish, which is the 'king of fishes,' dried slices of salt cuttlefish; jinbaso, of 'the Seaweed of the horse of the God'; [4] also the seaweed kombu, which is a symbol of pleasure and of joy, because its name is deemed to be a homonym for gladness; and mochibana, artificial blossoms formed of rice flour and straw. The sambo is a curiously shaped little table on which offer-ings are made to the Shinto gods; and almost every well-to-do household in hzumo has its own sambo--such a family sambo being smaller, however, than sambo used in the temples. At the advent of the New Year's Festival, bitter oranges, rice, and rice-flour cakes, native sardines (iwashi), chikara-iwai ('strength-rice-bread'), black peas, dried chestnuts, and a fine lobster, are all tastefully arranged upon the family sambo. Before each visitor the sambo is set; and the visitor, by saluting it with a prostration, expresses not only his heartfelt wish that all the good- fortune symbolised by the objects upon the sambo may come to the family, but also his reverence for the household gods. The black peas (mame) signify bodily strength and health, because a word similarly pronounced, though written with a different ideograph, means 'robust.' But why a lobster? Here we have another curious conception. The lobster's body is bent double: the body of the man who lives to a very great old age is also bent. Thus the Lobster stands for a symbol of extreme old age; and in artistic design signifies the wish that our friends may live so long that they will become bent like lobsters--under the weight of years. And the dried chestnut (kachiguri) are emblems of success, because the first character of their name in Japanese is the homonym of kachi, which means 'victory,' 'conquest.' There are at least a hundred other singular customs and emblems belonging to the New Year's Festival which would require a large volume to describe. I have mentioned only a few which immediately appear to even casual observation. Sec. 3 The other festival I wish, to refer to is that of the Setsubun, which, according to the ancient Japanese calendar, corresponded with the beginning of the natural year--the period when winter first softens into spring. It is what we might term, according to Professor Chamberlain, 'a sort of movable feast'; and it is chiefly famous for the curious ceremony of the casting out of devils--Oni-yarai. On the eve of the Setsubun, a little after dark, the Yaku-otoshi, or caster-out of devils, wanders through the streets from house to house, rattling his shakujo, [5] and uttering his strange professional cry: 'Oni wa soto!--fuku wa uchi!' [Devils out! Good-fortune in!] For a trifling fee he performs his little exorcism in any house to which he is called. This simply consists in the recitation of certain parts of a Buddhist kyo, or sutra, and the rattling of the shakujo Afterwards dried peas (shiro-mame) are thrown about the house in four directions. For some mysterious reason, devils do not like dried peas--and flee therefrom. The peas thus scattered are afterward swept up and carefully preserved until the first clap of spring thunder is heard, when it is the custom to cook and eat some of them. But just why, I cannot find out; neither can I discover the origin of the dislike of devils for dried peas. On the subject of this dislike, however, I confess my sympathy with devils. After the devils have been properly cast out, a small charm is placed above all the entrances of the dwelling to keep them from coming back again. This consists of a little stick about the length and thickness of a skewer, a single holly-leaf, and the head of a dried iwashi--a fish resembling a sardine. The stick is stuck through the middle of the holly-leaf; and the fish's head is fastened into a split made in one end of the stick; the other end being slipped into some joint of the timber- work immediately above a door. But why the devils are afraid of the holly-leaf and the fish's head, nobody seems to know. Among the people the origin of all these curious customs appears to be quite forgotten; and the families of the upper classes who still maintain such customs believe in the superstitions relating to the festival just as little as Englishmen to-day believe in the magical virtues of mistletoe or ivy. This ancient and merry annual custom of casting out devils has been for generations a source of inspiration to Japanese artists. It is only after a fair acquaintance with popular customs and ideas that the foreigner can learn to appreciate the delicious humour of many art- creations which he may wish, indeed, to buy just because they are so oddly attractive in themselves, but which must really remain enigmas to him, so far as their inner meaning is concerned, unless he knows Japanese life. The other day a friend gave me a little card-case of perfumed leather. On one side was stamped in relief the face of a devil, through the orifice of whose yawning mouth could be seen--painted upon the silk lining of the interior--the laughing, chubby face of Otafuku, joyful Goddess of Good Luck. In itself the thing was very curious and pretty; but the real merit of its design was this comical symbolism of good wishes for the New Year: 'Oni wa soto!--fuku wa uchi!' Sec. 4 Since I have spoken of the custom of eating some of the Setsubun peas at the time of the first spring thunder, I may here take the opportunity to say a few words about superstitions in regard to thunder which have not yet ceased to prevail among the peasantry. When a thunder-storm comes, the big brown mosquito curtains are suspended, and the women and children--perhaps the whole family--squat down under the curtains till the storm is over. From ancient days it has been believed that lightning cannot kill anybody under a mosquito curtain. The Raiju, or Thunder-Animal, cannot pass through a mosquito- curtain. Only the other day, an old peasant who came to the house with vegetables to sell told us that he and his whole family, while crouching under their mosquito-netting during a thunderstorm, actually, saw the Lightning rushing up and down the pillar of the balcony opposite their apartment--furiously clawing the woodwork, but unable to enter because of the mosquito-netting. His house had been badly damaged by a flash; but he supposed the mischief to have been accomplished by the Claws of the Thunder-Animal. The Thunder-Animal springs from tree to tree during a storm, they say; wherefore to stand under trees in time of thunder and lightning is very dangerous: the Thunder-Animal might step on one's head or shoulders. The Thunder-Animal is also alleged to be fond of eating the human navel; for which reason people should be careful to keep their navels well covered during storms, and to lie down upon their stomachs if possible. Incense is always burned during storms, because the Thunder-Animal hates the smell of incense. A tree stricken by lightning is thought to have been torn and scarred by the claws of the Thunder-Animal; and fragments of its bark and wood are carefully collected and preserved by dwellers in the vicinity; for the wood of a blasted tree is alleged to have the singular virtue of curing toothache. There are many stories of the Raiju having been caught and caged. Once, it is said, the Thunder-Animal fell into a well, and got entangled in the ropes and buckets, and so was captured alive. And old Izumo folk say they remember that the Thunder-Animal was once exhibited in the court of the Temple of Tenjin in Matsue, inclosed in a cage of brass; and that people paid one sen each to look at it. It resembled a badger. When the weather was clear it would sleep contentedly in its, cage. But when there was thunder in the air, it would become excited, and seem to obtain great strength, and its eyes would flash dazzlingly. Sec. 5 There is one very evil spirit, however, who is not in the least afraid of dried peas, and who cannot be so easily got rid of as the common devils; and that is Bimbogami. But in Izumo people know a certain household charm whereby Bimbogami may sometimes be cast out. Before any cooking is done in a Japanese kitchen, the little charcoal fire is first blown to a bright red heat with that most useful and simple household utensil called a hifukidake. The hifukidake ('fire- blow-bamboo') is a bamboo tube usually about three feet long and about two inches in diameter. At one end--the end which is to be turned toward the fire--only a very small orifice is left; the woman who prepares the meal places the other end to her lips, and blows through the tube upon the kindled charcoal. Thus a quick fire may be obtained in a few minutes. In course of time the hifukidake becomes scorched and cracked and useless. A new 'fire-blow-tube' is then made; and the old one is used as a charm against Bimbogami. One little copper coin (rin) is put into it, some magical formula is uttered, and then the old utensil, with the rin inside of it, is either simply thrown out through the front gate into the street, or else flung into some neighbouring stream. This--I know not why--is deemed equivalent to pitching Bimbogami out of doors, and rendering it impossible for him to return during a considerable period. It may be asked how is the invisible presence of Bimbogami to be detected. The little insect which makes that weird ticking noise at night called in England the Death-watch has a Japanese relative named by the people Bimbomushi, or the 'Poverty-Insect.' It is said to be the servant of Bimbogami, the God of Poverty; and its ticking in a house is believed to signal the presence of that most unwelcome deity. Sec. 6 One more feature of the Setsubun festival is worthy of mention--the sale of the hitogata ('people-shapes'). These: are little figures, made of white paper, representing men, women, and children. They are cut out with a few clever scissors strokes; and the difference of sex is indicated by variations in the shape of the sleeves and the little paper obi. They are sold in the Shinto temples. The purchaser buys one for every member of the family--the priest writing upon each the age and sex of the person for whom it is intended. These hitogata are then taken home and distributed; and each person slightly rubs his body or her body with the paper, and says a little Shinto prayer. Next day the hitogata are returned to the kannushi, who, after having recited certain formulae over them, burns them with holy fire. [6] By this ceremony it is hoped that all physical misfortunes will be averted from the family during a year. Chapter Six By the Japanese Sea Sec. 1 IT is the fifteenth day of the seventh month--and I am in Hokii. The blanched road winds along a coast of low cliffs--the coast of the Japanese Sea. Always on the left, over a narrow strip of stony land, or a heaping of dunes, its vast expanse appears, blue-wrinkling to that pale horizon beyond which Korea lies, under the same white sun. Sometimes, through sudden gaps in the cliff's verge, there flashes to us the running of the surf. Always upon the right another sea--a silent sea of green, reaching to far misty ranges of wooded hills, with huge pale peaks behind them--a vast level of rice-fields, over whose surface soundless waves keep chasing each other under the same great breath that moves the blue to-day from Chosen to Japan. Though during a week the sky has remained unclouded, the sea has for several days been growing angrier; and now the muttering of its surf sounds far into the land. They say that it always roughens thus during the period of the Festival of the Dead--the three days of the Bon, which are the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth of the seventh month by the ancient calendar. And on the sixteenth day, after the shoryobune, which are the Ships of Souls, have been launched, no one dares to enter it: no boats can then be hired; all the fishermen remain at home. For on that day the sea is the highway of the dead, who must pass back over its waters to their mysterious home; and therefore upon that day is it called Hotoke-umi--the Buddha-Flood--the Tide of the Returning Ghosts. And ever upon the night of that sixteenth day--whether the sea be calm or tumultuous--all its surface shimmers with faint lights gliding out to the open,--the dim fires of the dead; and there is heard a murmuring of voices, like the murmur of a city far-off,--the indistinguishable speech of souls. Sec. 2 But it may happen that some vessel, belated in spite of desperate effort to reach port, may find herself far out at sea upon the night of the sixteenth day. Then will the dead rise tall about the ship, and reach long hands and murmur: 'Tago, tago o-kure!--tago o-kure!' [1] Never may they be refused; but, before the bucket is given, the bottom of it must be knocked out. Woe to all on board should an entire tago be suffered to fall even by accident into the sea!--for the dead would at once use it to fill and sink the ship. Nor are the dead the only powers invisible dreaded in the time of the Hotoke-umi. Then are the Ma most powerful, and the Kappa. [2] But in all times the swimmer fears the Kappa, the Ape of Waters, hideous and obscene, who reaches up from the deeps to draw men down, and to devour their entrails. Only their entrails. The corpse of him who has been seized by the Kappa may be cast on shore after many days. Unless long battered against the rocks by heavy surf, or nibbled by fishes, it will show no outward wound. But it will be light and hollow--empty like a long-dried gourd. Sec. 3 Betimes, as we journey on, the monotony of undulating blue on the left, or the monotony of billowing green upon the right, is broken by the grey apparition of a cemetery--a cemetery so long that our jinricksha men, at full run, take a full quarter of an hour to pass the huge congregation of its perpendicular stones. Such visions always indicate the approach of villages; but the villages prove to be as surprisingly small as the cemeteries are surprisingly large. By hundreds of thousands do the silent populations of the hakaba outnumber the folk of the hamlets to which they belong--tiny thatched settlements sprinkled along the leagues of coast, and sheltered from the wind only by ranks of sombre pines. Legions on legions of stones--a host of sinister witnesses of the cost of the present to the past--and old, old, old!--hundreds so long in place that they have been worn into shapelessness merely by the blowing of sand from the dunes, and their inscriptions utterly effaced. It is as if one were passing through the burial-ground of all who ever lived on this wind-blown shore since the being of the land. And in all these hakaba--for it is the Bon--there are new lanterns before the newer tombs--the white lanterns which are the lanterns of graves. To-night the cemeteries will be all aglow with lights like the fires of a city for multitude. But there are also unnumbered tombs before which no lanterns are--elder myriads, each the token of a family extinct, or of which the absent descendants have forgotten even the name. Dim generations whose ghosts have none to call them back, no local memories to love--so long ago obliterated were all things related to their lives. Sec. 4 Now many of these villages are only fishing settlements, and in them stand old thatched homes of men who sailed away on some eve of tempest, and never came back. Yet each drowned sailor has his tomb in the neighbouring hakaba, and beneath it something of him has been buried. What? Among these people of the west something is always preserved which in other lands is cast away without a thought--the hozo-no-o, the flower- stalk of a life, the navel-string of the newly-born. It is enwrapped carefully in many wrappings; and upon its outermost covering are written the names of the father, the mother, and the infant, together with the date and hour of birth,--and it is kept in the family o-'mamori-bukuro. The daughter, becoming a bride, bears it with her to her new home: for the son it is preserved by his parents. It is buried with the dead; and should one die in a foreign land, or perish at sea, it is entombed in lieu of the body. Sec. 5 Concerning them that go down into the sea in ships, and stay there, strange beliefs prevail on this far coast--beliefs more primitive, assuredly, than the gentle faith which hangs white lanterns before the tombs. Some hold that the drowned never journey to the Meido. They quiver for ever in the currents; they billow in the swaying of tides; they toil in the wake of the junks; they shout in the plunging of breakers. 'Tis their white hands that toss in the leap of the surf; their clutch that clatters the shingle, or seizes the swimmer's feet in the pull of the undertow. And the seamen speak euphemistically of the O-'bake, the honourable ghosts, and fear them with a great fear. Wherefore cats are kept on board! A cat, they aver, has power to keep the O-bake away. How or why, I have not yet found any to tell me. I know only that cats are deemed to have power over the dead. If a cat be left alone with a corpse, will not the corpse arise and dance? And of all cats a mike-neko, or cat of three colours, is most prized on this account by sailors. But if they cannot obtain one--and cats of three colours are rare--they will take another kind of cat; and nearly every trading junk has a cat; and when the junk comes into port, its cat may generally be seen--peeping through some little window in the vessel's side, or squatting in the opening where the great rudder works--that is, if the weather be fair and the sea still. Sec. 6 But these primitive and ghastly beliefs do not affect the beautiful practices of Buddhist faith in the time of the Bon; and from all these little villages the shoryobune are launched upon the sixteenth day. They are much more elaborately and expensively constructed on this coast than in some other parts of Japan; for though made of straw only, woven over a skeleton framework, they are charming models of junks, complete in every detail. Some are between three and four feet long. On the white paper sail is written the kaimyo or soul-name of the dead. There is a small water-vessel on board, filled with fresh water, and an incense- cup; and along the gunwales flutter little paper banners bearing the mystic manji, which is the Sanscrit swastika.[3] The form of the shoryobune and the customs in regard to the time and manner of launching them differ much in different provinces. In most places they are launched for the family dead in general, wherever buried; and they are in some places launched only at night, with small lanterns on board. And I am told also that it is the custom at certain sea-villages to launch the lanterns all by themselves, in lieu of the shoryobune proper--lanterns of a particular kind being manufactured for that purpose only. But on the Izumo coast, and elsewhere along this western shore, the soul-boats are launched only for those who have been drowned at sea, and the launching takes place in the morning instead of at night. Once every year, for ten years after death, a shoryobune is launched; in the eleventh year the ceremony ceases. Several shoryobune which I saw at Inasa were really beautiful, and must have cost a rather large sum for poor fisher-folk to pay. But the ship-carpenter who made them said that all the relatives of a drowned man contribute to purchase the little vessel, year after year. Sec. 7 Near a sleepy little village called Kanii-ichi I make a brief halt in order to visit a famous sacred tree. It is in a grove close to the public highway, but upon a low hill. Entering the grove I find myself in a sort of miniature glen surrounded on three sides by very low cliffs, above which enormous pines are growing, incalculably old. Their vast coiling roots have forced their way through the face of the cliffs, splitting rocks; and their mingling crests make a green twilight in the hollow. One pushes out three huge roots of a very singular shape; and the ends of these have been wrapped about with long white papers bearing written prayers, and with offerings of seaweed. The shape of these roots, rather than any tradition, would seem to have made the tree sacred in popular belief: it is the object of a special cult; and a little torii has been erected before it, bearing a votive annunciation of the most artless and curious kind. I cannot venture to offer a translation of it--though for the anthropologist and folk-lorist it certainly possesses peculiar interest. The worship of the tree, or at least of the Kami supposed to dwell therein, is one rare survival of a phallic cult probably common to most primitive races, and formerly widespread in Japan. Indeed it was suppressed by the Government scarcely more than a generation ago. On the opposite side of the little hollow, carefully posed upon a great loose rock, I see something equally artless and almost equally curious--a kitoja-no-mono, or ex-voto. Two straw figures joined together and reclining side by side: a straw man and a straw woman. The workmanship is childishly clumsy; but still, the woman can be distinguished from the man by .the ingenious attempt to imitate the female coiffure with a straw wisp. And as the man is represented with a queue--now worn only by aged survivors of the feudal era--I suspect that this kitoja-no-mono was made after some ancient and strictly conventional model. Now this queer ex-voto tells its own story. Two who loved each other were separated by the fault of the man; the charm of some joro, perhaps, having been the temptation to faithlessness. Then the wronged one came here and prayed the Kami to dispel the delusion of passion and touch the erring heart. The prayer has been heard; the pair have been reunited; and she has therefore made these two quaint effigies 'with her own hands, and brought them to the Kami of the pine--tokens of her innocent faith and her grateful heart. Sec. 8 Night falls as we reach the pretty hamlet of Hamamura, our last resting- place by the sea, for to-morrow our way lies inland. The inn at which we lodge is very small, but very clean and cosy; and there is a delightful bath of natural hot water; for the yadoya is situated close to a natural spring. This spring, so strangely close to the sea beach, also furnishes, I am told, the baths of all the houses in the village. The best room is placed at our disposal; but I linger awhile to examine a very fine shoryobune, waiting, upon a bench near the street entrance, to be launched to-morrow. It seems to have been finished but a short time ago; for fresh clippings of straw lie scattered around it, and the kaimyo has not yet been written upon its sail. I am surprised to hear that it belongs to a poor widow and her son, both of whom are employed by the hotel. I was hoping to see the Bon-odori at Hamamura, but I am disappointed. At all the villages the police have prohibited the dance. Fear of cholera has resulted in stringent sanitary regulations. In Hamamura the people have been ordered to use no water for drinking, cooking, or washing, except the hot water of their own volcanic springs. A little middle-aged woman, with a remarkably sweet voice, comes to wait upon us at supper-time. Her teeth are blackened and her eyebrows shaved after the fashion of married women twenty years ago; nevertheless her face is still a pleasant one, and in her youth she must have been uncommonly pretty. Though acting as a servant, it appears that she is related to the family owning the inn, and that she is treated with the consideration due to kindred. She tells us that the shoryobune is to be launched for her husband and brother--both fishermen of the village, who perished in sight of their own home eight years ago. The priest of the neighbouring Zen temple is to come in the morning to write the kaimyo upon the sail, as none of the household are skilled in writing the Chinese characters. I make her the customary little gift, and, through my attendant, ask her various questions about her history. She was married to a man much older than herself, with whom she lived very happily; and her brother, a youth of eighteen, dwelt with them. They had a good boat and a little piece of ground, and she was skilful at the loom; so they managed to live well. In summer the fishermen fish at night: when all the fleet is out, it is pretty to see the line of torch-fires in the offing, two or three miles away, like a string of stars. They do not go out when the weather is threatening; but in certain months the great storms (taifu) come so quickly that the boats are overtaken almost before they have time to hoist sail. Still as a temple pond the sea was on the night when her husband and brother last sailed away; the taifu rose before daybreak. What followed, she relates with a simple pathos that I cannot reproduce in our less artless tongue: 'All the boats had come back except my husband's; for' my husband and my brother had gone out farther than the others, so they were not able to return as quickly. And all the people were looking and waiting. And every minute the waves seemed to be growing higher and the wind more terrible; and the other boats had to be dragged far up on the shore to save them. Then suddenly we saw my husband's boat coming very, very quickly. We were so glad! It came quite near, so that I could see the face of my husband and the face of my brother. But suddenly a great wave struck it upon one side, and it turned down into the water and it did not come up again. And then we saw my husband and my brother swimming but we could see them only when the waves lifted them up. Tall like hills the waves were, and the head of my husband, and the head of my brother would go up, up, up, and then down, and each time they rose to the top of a wave so that we could see them they would cry out, "Tasukete! tasukete!" [4] But the strong men were afraid; the sea was too terrible; I was only a woman! Then my brother could not be seen any more. My husband was old, but very strong; and he swam a long time--so near that I could see his face was like the face of one in fear--and he called "Tasukete!" But none could help him; and he also went down at last. And yet I could see his face before he went down. 'And for a long time after, every night, I used to see his face as I saw it then, so that I could not rest, but only weep. And I prayed and prayed to the Buddhas and to the Kami-Sama that I might not dream that dream. Now it never comes; but I can still see his face, even while I speak. . . . In that time my son was only a little child.' Not without sobs can she conclude her simple recital. Then, suddenly bowing her head to the matting, and wiping away her tears with her sleeve, she humbly prays our pardon for this little exhibition of emotion, and laughs--the soft low laugh de rigueur of Japanese politeness. This, I must confess, touches me still more than the story itself. At a fitting moment my Japanese attendant delicately changes the theme, and begins a light chat about our journey, and the danna-sama's interest in the old customs and legends of the coast. And he succeeds in amusing her by some relation of our wanderings in Izumo. She asks whither we are going. My attendant answers probably as far as Tottori. 'Aa! Tottori! So degozarimasu ka? Now, there is an old story--the Story of the Futon of Tottori. But the danna-sama knows that story?' Indeed, the danna-sama does not, and begs earnestly to hear it. And the story is set down somewhat as I learn it through the lips of my interpreter. Sec. 9 Many years ago, a very small yadoya in Tottori town received its first guest, an itinerant merchant. He was received with more than common kindness, for the landlord desired to make a good name for his little inn. It was a new inn, but as its owner was poor, most of its dogu--furniture and utensils--had been purchased from the furuteya. [5] Nevertheless, everything was clean, comforting, and pretty. The guest ate heartily and drank plenty of good warm sake; after which his bed was prepared on the soft floor, and he laid himself down to sleep. [But here I must interrupt the story for a few moments, to say a word about Japanese beds. Never; unless some inmate happen to be sick, do you see a bed in any Japanese house by day, though you visit all the rooms and peep into all the corners. In fact, no bed exists, in the Occidental meaning of the word. That which the Japanese call bed has no bedstead, no spring, no mattress, no sheets, no blankets. It consists of thick quilts only, stuffed, or, rather, padded with cotton, which are called futon. A certain number of futon are laid down upon the tatami (the floor mats), and a certain number of others are used for coverings. The wealthy can lie upon five or six quilts, and cover themselves with as many as they please, while poor folk must content themselves with two or three. And of course there are many kinds, from the servants' cotton futon which is no larger than a Western hearthrug, and not much thicker, to the heavy and superb futon silk, eight feet long by seven broad, which only the kanemochi can afford. Besides these there is the yogi, a massive quilt made with wide sleeves like a kimono, in which you can find much comfort when the weather is extremely cold. All such things are neatly folded up and stowed out of sight by day in alcoves contrived in the wall and closed with fusuma--pretty sliding screen doors covered with opaque paper usually decorated with dainty designs. There also are kept those curious wooden pillows, invented to preserve the Japanese coiffure from becoming disarranged during sleep. The pillow has a certain sacredness; but the origin and the precise nature of the beliefs concerning it I have not been able to learn. Only this I know, that to touch it with the foot is considered very wrong; and that if it be kicked or moved thus even by accident, the clumsiness must be atoned for by lifting the pillow to the forehead with the hands, and replacing it in its original position respectfully, with the word 'go-men,' signifying, I pray to be excused.] Now, as a rule, one sleeps soundly after having drunk plenty of warm sake, especially if the night be cool and the bed very snug. But the guest, having slept but a very little while, was aroused by the sound of voices in his room--voices of children, always asking each other the same questions:--'Ani-San samukaro?' 'Omae samukaro?' The presence of children in his room might annoy the guest, but could not surprise him, for in these Japanese hotels there are no doors, but only papered sliding screens between room and room. So it seemed to him that some children must have wandered into his apartment, by mistake, in the dark. He uttered some gentle rebuke. For a moment only there was silence; then a sweet, thin, plaintive voice queried, close to his ear, 'Ani-San samukaro?' (Elder Brother probably is cold?), and another sweet voice made answer caressingly, 'Omae samukaro?' [Nay, thou probably art cold?] He arose and rekindled the candle in the andon, [6] and looked about the room. There was no one. The shoji were all closed. He examined the cupboards; they were empty. Wondering, he lay down again, leaving the light still burning; and immediately the voices spoke again, complainingly, close to his pillow: 'Ani-San samukaro?' 'Omae samukaro?' Then, for the first time, he felt a chill creep over him, which was not the chill of the night. Again and again he heard, and each time he became more afraid. For he knew that the voices were in the futon! It was the covering of the bed that cried out thus. He gathered hurriedly together the few articles belonging to him, and, descending the stairs, aroused the landlord and told what had passed. Then the host, much angered, made reply: 'That to make pleased the honourable guest everything has been done, the truth is; but the honourable guest too much august sake having drank, bad dreams has seen.' Nevertheless the guest insisted upon paying at once that which he owed, and seeking lodging elsewhere. Next evening there came another guest who asked for a room for the night. At a late hour the landlord was aroused by his lodger with the same story. And this lodger, strange to say, had not taken any sake. Suspecting some envious plot to ruin his business, the landlord answered passionately: 'Thee to please all things honourably have been done: nevertheless, ill-omened and vexatious words thou utterest. And that my inn my means-of-livelihood is--that also thou knowest. Wherefore that such things be spoken, right-there-is-none!' Then the guest, getting into a passion, loudly said things much more evil; and the two parted in hot anger. But after the guest was gone, the landlord, thinking all this very strange, ascended to the empty room to examine the futon. And while there, he heard the voices, and he discovered that the guests had said only the truth. It was one covering--only one--which cried out. The rest were silent. He took the covering into his own room, and for the remainder of the night lay down beneath it. And the voices continued until the hour of dawn: 'Ani-San samukaro?' 'Omae samukaro?' So that he could not sleep. But at break of day he rose up and went out to find the owner of the furuteya at which the futon had been purchased. The dlealer knew nothing. He had bought the futon from a smaller shop, and the keeper of that shop had purchased it from a still poorer dealer dwelling in the farthest suburb of the city. And the innkeeper went from one to the other, asking questions. Then at last it was found that the futon had belonged to a poor family, and had been bought from the landlord of a little house in which the family had lived, in the neighbourhood of the town. And the story of the futon was this:-- The rent of the little house was only sixty sen a month, but even this was a great deal for the poor folks to pay. The father could earn only two or three yen a month, and the mother was ill and could not work; and there were two children--a boy of six years and a boy of eight. And they were strangers in Tottori. One winter's day the father sickened; and after a week of suffering he died, and was buried. Then the long-sick mother followed him, and the children were left alone. They knew no one whom they could ask for aid; and in order to live they began to sell what there was to sell. That was not much: the clothes of the dead father and mother, and most of their own; some quilts of cotton, and a few poor household utensils-- hibachi, bowls, cups, and other trifles. Every day they sold something, until there was nothing left but one futon. And a day came when they had nothing to eat; and the rent was not paid. The terrible Dai-kan had arrived, the season of greatest cold; and the snow had drifted too high that day for them to wander far from the little house. So they could only lie down under their one futon, and shiver together, and compassionate each other in their own childish way --'Ani-San, samukaro?' 'Omae samukaro?' They had no fire, nor anything with which to make fire; and the darkness came; and the icy wind screamed into the little house. They were afraid of the wind, but they were more afraid of the house- owner, who roused them roughly to demand his rent. He was a hard man, with an evil face. And finding there was none to pay him, he turned the children into the snow, and took their one futon away from them, and locked up the house. They had but one thin blue kimono each, for all their other clothes had been sold to buy food; and they had nowhere to go. There was a temple of Kwannon not far away, but the snow was too high for them to reach it. So when the landlord was gone, they crept back behind the house. There the drowsiness of cold fell upon them, and they slept, embracing each other to keep warm. And while they slept, the gods covered them with a new futon--ghostly-white and very beautiful. And they did not feel cold any more. For many days they slept there; then somebody found them, and a bed was made for them in the hakaba of the Temple of Kwannon-of-the- Thousand-Arms. And the innkeeper, having heard these things, gave the futon to the priests of the temple, and caused the kyo to be recited for the little souls. And the futon ceased thereafter to speak. Sec. 10 One legend recalls another; and I hear to-night many strange ones. The most remarkable is a tale which my attendant suddenly remembers--a legend of Izumo. Once there lived in the Izumo village called Mochida-noura a peasant who was so poor that he was afraid to have children. And each time that his wife bore him a child he cast it into the river, and pretended that it had been born dead. Sometimes it was a son, sometimes a daughter; but always the infant was thrown into the river at night. Six were murdered thus. But, as the years passed, the peasant found himself more prosperous. He had been able to purchase land and to lay by money. And at last his wife bore him a seventh--a boy. Then the man said: 'Now we can support a child, and we shall need a son to aid us when we are old. And this boy is beautiful. So we will bring him up.' And the infant thrived; and each day the hard peasant wondered more at his own heart--for each day he knew that he loved his son more. One summer's night he walked out into his garden, carrying his child in his arms. The little one was five months old. And the night was so beautiful, with its great moon, that the peasant cried out--'Aa! kon ya med xurashii e yo da!' [Ah! to-night truly a wondrously beautiful night is!] Then the infant, looking up into his face and speaking the speech of a man, said--'Why, father! the LAST time you threw me away the night was just like this, and the moon looked just the same, did it not?' [7] And thereafter the child remained as other children of the same age, and spoke no word. The peasant became a monk. Sec. 11 After the supper and the bath, feeling too warm to sleep, I wander out alone to visit the village hakaba, a long cemetery upon a sandhill, or rather a prodigious dune, thinly covered at its summit with soil, but revealing through its crumbling flanks the story of its creation by ancient tides, mightier than tides of to-day. I wade to my knees in sand to reach the cemetery. It is a warm moonlight night, with a great breeze. There are many bon-lanterns (bondoro), but the sea-wind has blown out most of them; only a few here and there still shed a soft white glow--pretty shrine-shaped cases of wood, with apertures of symbolic outline, covered with white paper. Visitors beside myself there are none, for it is late. But much gentle work has been done here to-day, for all the bamboo vases have been furnished with fresh flowers or sprays, and the water basins filled with fresh water, and the monuments cleansed and beautified. And in the farthest nook of the cemetery I find, before one very humble tomb, a pretty zen or lacquered dining tray, covered with dishes and bowls containing a perfect dainty little Japanese repast. There is also a pair of new chopsticks, and a little cup of tea, and some of the dishes are still warm. A loving woman's work; the prints of her little sandals are fresh upon the path. Sec. 12 There is an Irish folk-saying that any dream may be remembered if the dreamer, after awakening, forbear to scratch his head in the effort to recall it. But should he forget this precaution, never can the dream be brought back to memory: as well try to re-form the curlings of a smoke- wreath blown away. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of a thousand dreams are indeed hopelessly evaporative. But certain rare dreams, which come when fancy has been strangely impressed by unfamiliar experiences--dreams particularly apt to occur in time of travel--remain in recollection, imaged with all the vividness of real events. Of such was the dream I dreamed at Hamamura, after having seen and heard those things previously written down. Some pale broad paved place--perhaps the thought of a temple court-- tinted by a faint sun; and before me a woman, neither young nor old, seated at the base of a great grey pedestal that supported I know not what, for I could look only at the woman's face. Awhile I thought that I remembered her--a woman of Izumo; then she seemed a weirdness. Her lips were moving, but her eyes remained closed, and I could not choose but look at her. And in a voice that seemed to come thin through distance of years she began a soft wailing chant; and, as I listened, vague memories came to me of a Celtic lullaby. And as she sang, she loosed with one hand her long black hair, till it fell coiling upon the stones. And, having fallen, it was no longer black, but blue--pale day-blue--and was moving sinuously, crawling with swift blue ripplings to and fro. And then, suddenly, I became aware that the ripplings were far, very far away, and that the woman was gone. There was only the sea, blue-billowing to the verge of heaven, with long slow flashings of soundless surf. And wakening, I heard in the night the muttering of the real sea--the vast husky speech of the Hotoke-umi--the Tide of the Returning Ghosts. CHAPTER SEVEN Of a Dancing-Girl NOTHING is more silent than the beginning of a Japanese banquet; and no one, except a native, who observes the opening scene could possibly imagine the tumultuous ending. The robed guests take their places, quite noiselessly and without speech, upon the kneeling-cushions. The lacquered services are laid upon the matting before them by maidens whose bare feet make no sound. For a while there is only smiling and flitting, as in dreams. You are not likely to hear any voices from without, as a banqueting-house is usually secluded from the street by spacious gardens. At last the master of ceremonies, host or provider, breaks the hush with the consecrated formula: 'O-somatsu degozarimasu gal--dozo o-hashi!' whereat all present bow silently, take up their hashi (chopsticks), and fall to. But hashi, deftly used, cannot be heard at all. The maidens pour warm sake into the cup of each guest without making the least sound; and it is not until several dishes have been emptied, and several cups of sake absorbed, that tongues are loosened. Then, all at once, with a little burst of laughter, a number of young girls enter, make the customary prostration of greeting, glide into the open space between the ranks of the guests, and begin to serve the wine with a grace and dexterity of which no common maid is capable. They are pretty; they are clad in very costly robes of silk; they are girdled like queens; and the beautifully dressed hair of each is decked with mock flowers, with wonderful combs and pins, and with curious ornaments of gold. They greet the stranger as if they had always known him; they jest, laugh, and utter funny little cries. These are the geisha, [1] or dancing-girls, hired for the banquet. Samisen [2] tinkle. The dancers withdraw to a clear space at the farther end of the banqueting-hall, always vast enough to admit of many more guests than ever assemble upon common occasions. Some form the orchestra, under the direction of a woman of uncertain age; there are several samisen, and a tiny drum played by a child. Others, singly or in pairs, perform the dance. It may be swift and merry, consisting wholly of graceful posturing--two girls dancing together with such coincidence of step and gesture as only years of training could render possible. But more frequently it is rather like acting than like what we Occidentals call dancing--acting accompanied with extraordinary waving of sleeves and fans, and with a play of eyes and features, sweet, subtle, subdued, wholly Oriental. There are more voluptuous dances known to geisha, but upon ordinary occasions and before refined audiences they portray beautiful old Japanese traditions, like the legend of the fisher Urashima, beloved by the Sea God's daughter; and at intervals they sing ancient Chinese poems, expressing a natural emotion with delicious vividness by a few exquisite words. And always they pour the wine--that warm, pale yellow, drowsy wine which fills the veins with soft contentment, making a faint sense of ecstasy, through which, as through some poppied sleep, the commonplace becomes wondrous and blissful, and the geisha Maids of Paradise, and the world much sweeter than, in the natural order of things, it could ever possibly be. The banquet, at first so silent, slowly changes to a merry tumult. The company break ranks, form groups; and from group to group the girls pass, laughing, prattling--still pouring sake into the cups which are being exchanged and emptied with low bows [3] Men begin to sing old samurai songs, old Chinese poems. One or two even dance. A geisha tucks her robe well up to her knees; and the samisen strike up the quick melody, 'Kompira fund-fund.' As the music plays, she begins to run lightly and swiftly in a figure of 8, and a young man, carrying a sake bottle and cup, also runs in the same figure of 8. If the two meet on a line, the one through whose error the meeting happens must drink a cup of sake. The music becomes quicker and quicker and the runners run faster and faster, for they must keep time to the melody; and the geisha wins. In another part of the room, guests and geisha are playing ken. They sing as they play, facing each other, and clap their hands, and fling out their fingers at intervals with little cries and the samisen keep time. Choito--don-don! Otagaidane; Choito--don-don! Oidemashitane; Choito--don-don! Shimaimashitane. Now, to play ken with a geisha requires a perfectly cool head, a quick eye, and much practice. Having been trained from childhood to play all kinds of ken--and there are many--she generally loses only for politeness, when she loses at all. The signs of the most common ken are a Man, a Fox, and a Gun. If the geisha make the sign of the Gun, you must instantly, and in exact time to the music, make the sign of the Fox, who cannot use the Gun. For if you make the sign of the Man, then she will answer with the sign of the Fox, who can deceive the Man, and you lose. And if she make the sign of the Fox first, then you should make the sign of the Gun, by which the Fox can be killed. But all the while you must watch her bright eyes and supple hands. These are pretty; and if you suffer yourself, just for one fraction of a second, to think how pretty they are, you are bewitched and vanquished. Notwithstanding all this apparent comradeship, a certain rigid decorum between guest and geisha is invariably preserved at a Japanese banquet. However flushed with wine a guest may have become, you will never see him attempt to caress a girl; he never forgets that she appears at the festivities only as a human flower, to be looked at, not to be touched. The familiarity which foreign tourists in Japan frequently permit themselves with geisha or with waiter-girls, though endured with smiling patience, is really much disliked, and considered by native observers an evidence of extreme vulgarity. For a time the merriment grows; but as midnight draws near, the guests begin to slip away, one by one, unnoticed. Then the din gradually dies down, the music stops; and at last the geisha, having escorted the latest of the feasters to the door, with laughing cries of Sayonara, can sit down alone to break their long fast in the deserted hall. Such is the geisha's rôle But what is the mystery of her? What are her thoughts, her emotions, her secret self? What is her veritable existence beyond the night circle of the banquet lights, far from the illusion formed around her by the mist of wine? Is she always as mischievous as she seems while her voice ripples out with mocking sweetness the words of the ancient song? Kimi to neyaru ka, go sengoku toruka? Nanno gosengoku kimi to neyo? [4] Or might we think her capable of keeping that passionate promise she utters so deliciously? Omae shindara tera ewa yaranu! Yaete konishite sake de nomu, [5] 'Why, as for that,' a friend tells me, 'there was O'-Kama of Osaka who realised the song only last year. For she, having collected from the funeral pile the ashes of her lover, mingled them with sake, and at a banquet drank them, in the presence of many guests.' In the presence of many guests! Alas for romance! Always in the dwelling which a band of geisha occupy there is a strange image placed in the alcove. Sometimes it is of clay, rarely of gold, most commonly of porcelain. It is reverenced: offerings are made to it, sweetmeats and rice bread and wine; incense smoulders in front of it, and a lamp is burned before it. It is the image of a kitten erect, one paw outstretched as if inviting--whence its name, 'the Beckoning Kitten.' [6] It is the genius loci: it brings good-fortune, the patronage of the rich, the favour of banquet-givers Now, they who know the soul of the geisha aver that the semblance of the image is the semblance of herself--playful and pretty, soft and young, lithe and caressing, and cruel as a devouring fire. Worse, also, than this they have said of her: that in her shadow treads the God of Poverty, and that the Fox-women are her sisters; that she is the ruin of youth, the waster of fortunes, the destroyer of families; that she knows love only as the source of the follies which are her gain, and grows rich upon the substance of men whose graves she has made; that she is the most consummate of pretty hypocrites, the most dangerous of schemers, the most insatiable of mercenaries, the most pitiless of mistresses. This cannot all be true. Yet thus much is true-- that, like the kitten, the geisha is by profession a creature of prey. There are many really lovable kittens. Even so there must be really delightful dancing-girls. The geisha is only what she has been made in answer to foolish human desire for the illusion of love mixed with youth and grace, but without regrets or responsibilities: wherefore she has been taught, besides ken, to play at hearts. Now, the eternal law is that people may play with impunity at any game in this unhappy world except three, which are called Life, Love, and Death. Those the gods have reserved to themselves, because nobody else can learn to play them without doing mischief. Therefore, to play with a geisha any game much more serious than ken, or at least go, is displeasing to the gods. The girl begins her career as a slave, a pretty child bought from miserably poor parents under a contract, according to which her services may be claimed by the purchasers for eighteen, twenty, or even twenty- five years. She is fed, clothed, and trained in a house occupied only by geisha; and she passes the rest of her childhood under severe discipline. She is taught etiquette, grace, polite speech; she has daily lessons in dancing; and she is obliged to learn by heart a multitude of songs with their airs. Also she must learn games, the service of banquets and weddings, the art of dressing and looking beautiful. Whatever physical gifts she may have are; carefully cultivated. Afterwards she is taught to handle musical instruments: first, the little drum (tsudzumi), which cannot be sounded at all without considerable practice; then she learns to play the samisen a little, with a plectrum of tortoise-shell or ivory. At eight or nine years of age she attends banquets, chiefly as a drum-player. She is then the most charming little creature imaginable, and already knows how to fill your wine-cup exactly full, with a single toss of the bottle and without spilling a drop, between two taps of her drum. Thereafter her discipline becomes more cruel. Her voice may be flexible enough, but lacks the requisite strength. In the iciest hours of winter nights, she must ascend to the roof of her dwelling-house, and there sing and play till the blood oozes from her fingers and the voice dies in her throat. The desired result is an atrocious cold. After a period of hoarse whispering, her voice changes its tone and strengthens. She is ready to become a public singer and dancer. In this capacity she usually makes her first appearance at the age of twelve or thirteen. If pretty and skilful, her services will be much in demand, and her time paid for at the rate of twenty to twenty-five sen per hour. Then only do her purchasers begin to reimburse themselves for the time, expense, and trouble of her training; and they are not apt to be generous. For many years more all that she earns must pass into their hands. She can own nothing, not even her clothes. At seventeen or eighteen she has made her artistic reputation. She has been at many hundreds of entertainments, and knows by sight all the important personages of her city, the character of each, the history of all. Her life has been chiefly a night life; rarely has she seen the sun rise since she became a dancer. She has learned to drink wine without ever losing her head, and to fast for seven or eight hours without ever feeling the worse. She has had many lovers. To a certain extent she is free to smile upon whom she pleases; but she has been well taught, above all else to use her power of charm for her own advantage. She hopes to find Somebody able and willing to buy her freedom--which Somebody would almost certainly thereafter discover many new and excellent meanings in those Buddhist texts that tell about the foolishness of love and the impermanency of all human relationships. At this point of her career we may leave the geisha: there-. after her story is apt to prove unpleasant, unless she die young. Should that happen, she will have the obsequies of her class, and her memory will be preserved by divers curious rites. Some time, perhaps, while wandering through Japanese streets at night, you hear sounds of music, a tinkling of samisen floating through the great gateway of a Buddhist temple together with shrill voices of singing-girls; which may seem to you a strange happening. And the deep court is thronged with people looking and listening. Then, making your way through the press to the temple steps, you see two geisha seated upon the matting within, playing and singing, and a third dancing before a little table. Upon the table is an ihai, or mortuary tablet; in front of the tablet burns a little lamp, and incense in a cup of bronze; a small repast has been placed there, fruits and dainties--such a repast as, upon festival occasions, it is the custom to offer to the dead. You learn that the kaimyo upon the tablet is that of a geisha; and that the comrades of the dead girl assemble in the temple on certain days to gladden her spirit with songs and dances. Then whosoever pleases may attend the ceremony free of charge. But the dancing-girls of ancient times were not as the geisha of to-day. Some of them were called shirabyoshi; and their hearts were not extremely hard. They were beautiful; they wore queerly shaped caps bedecked with gold; they were clad in splendid attire, and danced with swords in the dwellings of princes. And there is an old story about one of them which I think it worth while to tell. Sec. 1 It was formerly, and indeed still is, a custom with young Japanese artists to travel on foot through various parts of the empire, in order to see and sketch the most celebrated scenery as well as to study famous art objects preserved in Buddhist temples, many of which occupy sites of extraordinary picturesqueness. It is to such wanderings, chiefly, that we owe the existence of those beautiful books of landscape views and life studies which are now so curious and rare, and which teach better than aught else that only the Japanese can paint Japanese scenery. After you have become acquainted with their methods of interpreting their own nature, foreign attempts in the same line will seem to you strangely flat and soulless. The foreign artist will give you realistic reflections of what he sees; but he will give you nothing more. The Japanese artist gives you that which he feels--the mood of a season, the precise sensation of an hour and place; his work is qualified by a power of suggestiveness rarely found in the art of the West. The Occidental painter renders minute detail; he satisfies the imagination he evokes. But his Oriental brother either suppresses or idealises detail--steeps his distances in mist, bands his landscapes with cloud, makes of his experience a memory in which only the strange and the beautiful survive, with their sensations. He surpasses imagination, excites it, leaves it hungry with the hunger of charm perceived in glimpses only. Nevertheless, in such glimpses he is able to convey the feeling of a time, the character of a place, after a fashion that seems magical. He is a painter of recollections and of sensations rather than of clear-cut realities; and in this lies the secret of his amazing power--a power not to be appreciated by those who have never witnessed the scenes of his inspiration. He is above all things impersonal. His human figures are devoid of all individuality; yet they have inimitable merit as types embodying the characteristics of a class: the childish curiosity of the peasant, the shyness of the maiden, the fascination of the joro the self-consciousness of the samurai, the funny, placid prettiness of the child, the resigned gentleness of age. Travel and observation were the influences which developed this art; it was never a growth of studios. A great many years ago, a young art student was travelling on foot from Kyoto to Yedo, over the mountains The roads then were few and bad, and travel was so difficult compared to what it is now that a proverb was current, Kawai ko wa tabi wo sase (A pet child should be made to travel). But the land was what it is to-day. There were the same forests of cedar and of pine, the same groves of bamboo, the same peaked villages with roofs of thatch, the same terraced rice-fields dotted with the great yellow straw hats of peasants bending in the slime. From the wayside, the same statues of Jizo smiled upon the same pilgrim figures passing to the same temples; and then, as now, of summer days, one might see naked brown children laughing in all the shallow rivers, and all the rivers laughing to the sun. The young art student, however, was no kawai ko: he had already travelled a great deal, was inured to hard fare and rough lodging, and accustomed to make the best of every situation. But upon this journey he found himself, one evening after sunset, in a region where it seemed possible to obtain neither fare nor lodging of any sort--out of sight of cultivated land. While attempting a short cut over a range to reach some village, he had lost his way. There was no moon, and pine shadows made blackness all around him. The district into which he had wandered seemed utterly wild; there were no sounds but the humming of the wind in the pine-needles, and an infinite tinkling of bell-insects. He stumbled on, hoping to gain some river bank, which he could follow to a settlement. At last a stream abruptly crossed his way; but it proved to be a swift torrent pouring into a gorge between precipices. Obliged to retrace his steps, he resolved to climb to the nearest summit, whence he might be able to discern some sign of human life; but on reaching it he could see about him only a heaping of hills. He had almost resigned himself to passing the night under the stars, when he perceived, at some distance down the farther slope of the hill he had ascended, a single thin yellow ray of light, evidently issuing from some dwelling. He made his way towards it, and soon discerned a small cottage, apparently a peasant's home. The light he had seen still streamed from it, through a chink in the closed storm-doors. He hastened forward, and knocked at the entrance. Not until he had knocked and called several times did he hear any stir within; then a woman 's voice asked what was wanted. The voice was remarkably sweet, and the speech of the unseen questioner surprised him, for she spoke in the cultivated idiom of the capital. He responded that he was a student, who had lost his way in the mountains; that he wished, if possible, to obtain food and lodging for the night; and that if this could not be given, he would feel very grateful for information how to reach the nearest village--adding that he had means enough to pay for the services of a guide. The voice, in return, asked several other questions, indicating extreme surprise that anyone could have reached the dwelling from the direction he had taken. But his answers evidently allayed suspicion, for the inmate exclaimed: 'I will come in a moment. It would be difficult for you to reach any village to-night; and the path is dangerous.' After a brief delay the storm-doors were pushed open, and a woman appeared with a paper lantern, which she so held as to illuminate the stranger's face, while her own remained in shadow. She scrutinised him in silence, then said briefly, 'Wait; I will bring water.' She fetched a wash-basin, set it upon the doorstep, and offered the guest a towel. He removed his sandals, washed from his feet the dust of travel, and was shown into a neat room which appeared to occupy the whole interior, except a small boarded space at the rear, used as a kitchen. A cotton zabuton was laid for him to kneel upon, and a brazier set before him. It was only then that he had a good opportunity of observing his hostess, and he was startled by the delicacy and beauty of her features. She might have been three or four years older than he, but was still in the bloom of youth. Certainly she was not a peasant girl. In the same singularly sweet voice she said to him: 'I am now alone, and I never receive guests here. But I am sure it would be dangerous for you to travel farther tonight. There are some peasants in the neighbourhood, but you cannot find your way to them in the dark without a guide. So I can let you stay here until morning. You will not be comfortable, but I can give you a bed. And I suppose you are hungry. There is only some shojin-ryori, [7]--not at all good, but you are welcome to it.' The traveller was quite hungry, and only too glad of the offer. The young woman kindled a little fire, prepared a few dishes in silence-- stewed leaves of na, some aburage, some kampyo, and a bowl of coarse rice--and quickly set the meal before him, apologising for its quality. But during his repast she spoke scarcely at all, and her reserved manner embarrassed him. As she answered the few questions he ventured upon merely by a bow or by a solitary word, he soon refrained from attempting to press the conversation. Meanwhile he had observed that the small house was spotlessly clean, and the utensils in which his food was served were immaculate. The few cheap objects in the apartment were pretty. The fusuma of the oshiire and zendana [8] were of white paper only, but had been decorated with large Chinese characters exquisitely written, characters suggesting, according to the law of such decoration, the favourite themes of the poet and artist: Spring Flowers, Mountain and Sea, Summer Rain, Sky and Stars, Autumn Moon, River Water, Autumn Breeze. At one side of the apartment stood a kind of low altar, supporting a butsudan, whose tiny lacquered doors, left open, showed a mortuary tablet within, before which a lamp was burning between offerings of wild flowers. And above this household shrine hung a picture of more than common merit, representing the Goddess of Mercy, wearing the moon for her aureole. As the student ended his little meal the young woman observed: I cannot offer you a good bed, and there is only a paper mosquito-curtain The bed and the curtain are mine, but to-night I have many things to do, and shall have no time to sleep; therefore I beg you will try to rest, though I am not able to make you comfortable.' He then understood that she was, for some strange reason, entirely alone, and was voluntarily giving up her only bed to him upon a kindly pretext. He protested honestly against such an excess of hospitality, and assured her that he could sleep quite soundly anywhere on the floor, and did not care about the mosquitoes. But she replied, in the tone of an elder sister, that he must obey her wishes. She really had something to do, and she desired to be left by herself as soon as possible; therefore, understanding him to be a gentleman, she expected he would suffer her to arrange matters in her own way. To this he could offer no objection, as there was but one room. She spread the mattress on the floor, fetched a wooden pillow, suspended her paper mosquito-curtain, unfolded a large screen on the side of the bed toward the butsudan, and then bade him good-night in a manner that assured him she wished him to retire at once; which he did, not without some reluctance at the thought of all the trouble he had unintentionally caused her. Sec. 3 Unwilling as the young traveller felt to accept a kindness involving the sacrifice of another's repose, he found the bed more than comfortable. He was very tired, and had scarcely laid his head upon the wooden pillow before he forgot everything in sleep. Yet only a little while seemed to have passed when he was awakened by a singular sound. It was certainly the sound of feet, but not of feet walking softly. It seemed rather the sound of feet in rapid motion, as of excitement. Then it occurred to him that robbers might have entered the house. As for himself, he had little to fear because he had little to lose. His anxiety was chiefly for the kind person who had granted him hospitality. Into each side of the paper mosquito-curtain a small square of brown netting had been fitted, like a little window, and through one of these he tried to look; but the high screen stood between him and whatever was going on. He thought of calling, but this impulse was checked by the reflection that in case of real danger it would be both useless and imprudent to announce his presence before understanding the situation. The sounds which had made him uneasy continued, and were more and more mysterious. He resolved to prepare for the worst, and to risk his life, if necessary, in order to defend his young hostess. Hastily girding up his robes, he slipped noiselessly from under the paper curtain, crept to the edge of the screen, and peeped. What he saw astonished him extremely. Before her illuminated butsudan the young woman, magnificently attired, was dancing all alone. Her costume he recognised as that of a shirabyoshi, though much richer than any he had ever seen worn by a professional dancer. Marvellously enhanced by it, her beauty, in that lonely time and place, appeared almost supernatural; but what seemed to him even more wonderful was her dancing. For an instant he felt the tingling of a weird doubt. The superstitions of peasants, the legends of Fox-women, flashed before his imagination; but the sight of the Buddhist shrine, of the sacred picture, dissipated the fancy, and shamed him for the folly of it. At the same time he became conscious that he was watching something she had not wished him to see, and that it was his duty, as her guest, to return at once behind the screen; but the spectacle fascinated him. He felt, with not less pleasure than amazement, that he was looking upon the most accomplished dancer he had ever seen; and the more he watched, the more the witchery of her grace grew upon him. Suddenly she paused, panting, unfastened her girdle, turned in the act of doffing her upper robe, and started violently as her eyes encountered his own. He tried at once to excuse himself to her. He said he had been suddenly awakened by the sound of quick feet, which sound had caused him some uneasiness, chiefly for her sake, because of the lateness of the hour and the lonesomeness of the place. Then he confessed his surprise at what he had seen, and spoke of the manner in which it had attracted him. 'I beg you,' he continued, 'to forgive my curiosity, for I cannot help wondering who you are, and how you could have become so marvellous a dancer. All the dancers of Saikyo I have seen, yet I have never seen among the most celebrated of them a girl who could dance like you; and once I had begun to watch you, I could not take away my eyes.' At first she had seemed angry, but before he had ceased to speak her expression changed. She smiled, and seated herself before him.' 'No, I am not angry with you,' she said. 'I am only sorry that you should have watched me, for I am sure you must have thought me mad when you saw me dancing that way, all by myself; and now I must tell you the meaning of what you have seen.' So she related her story. Her name he remembered to have heard as a boy --her professional name, the name of the most famous of shirabyoshi, the darling of the capital, who, in the zenith of her fame and beauty, had suddenly vanished from public life, none knew whither or why. She had fled from wealth and fortune with a youth who loved her. He was poor, but between them they possessed enough means to live simply and happily in the country. They built a little house in the mountains, and there for a number of years they existed only for each other. He adored her. One of his greatest pleasures was to see her dance. Each evening he would play some favourite melody, and she would dance for him. But one long cold winter he fell sick, and, in spite of her tender nursing, died. Since then she had lived alone with the memory of him, performing all those small rites of love and homage with which the dead are honoured. Daily before his tablet she placed the customary offerings, and nightly danced to please him, as of old. And this was the explanation of what the young traveller had seen. It was indeed rude, she continued, to have awakened her tired guest; but she had waited until she thought him soundly sleeping, and then she had tried to dance very, very lightly. So she hoped he would pardon her for having unintentionally disturbed him. When she had told him all, she made ready a little tea, which they drank together; then she entreated him so plaintively to please her by trying to sleep again that he found himself obliged to go back, with many sincere apologies, under the paper mosquito-curtain. He slept well and long; the sun was high before he woke. On rising, he found prepared for him a meal as simple as that of the evening before, and he felt hungry. Nevertheless he ate sparingly, fearing the young woman might have stinted herself in thus providing for him; and then he made ready to depart. But when he wanted to pay her for what he had received, and for all the trouble he had given her, she refused to take anything from him, saying: 'What I had to give was not worth money, and what I did was done for kindness alone. So! pray that you will try to forget the discomfort you suffered here, and will remember only the good-will of one who had nothing to offer.' He still endeavoured to induce her to accept something; but at last, finding that his insistence only gave her pain, he took leave of her with such words as he could find to express his gratitude, and not without a secret regret, for her beauty and her gentleness had charmed him more than he would have liked to acknowledge to any but herself. She indicated to him the path to follow, and watched him descend the mountain until he had passed from sight. An hour later he found himself upon a highway with which he was familiar. Then a sudden remorse touched him: he had forgotten to tell her his name. For an instant he hesitated; then he said to himself, 'What matters it? I shall be always poor.' And he went on. Many years passed by, and many fashions with them; and the painter became old. But ere becoming old he had become famous. Princes, charmed by the wonder of his work, had vied with one another in giving him patronage; so that he grew rich, and possessed a beautiful dwelling of his own in the City of the Emperors. Young artists from many provinces were his pupils, and lived with him, serving him in all things while receiving his instruction; and his name was known throughout the land. Now, there came one day to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with him. The servants, seeing that she was meanly dressed and of miserable appearance, took her to be some common beggar, and questioned her roughly. But when she answered: 'I can tell to no one except your master why I have come,' they believed her mad, and deceived her, saying: 'He is not now in Saikyo, nor do we know how soon he will return.' But the old woman came again and again--day after day, and week after week--each time being told something that was not true: 'To-day he is ill,' or, 'To-day he is very busy,' or, 'To-day he has much company, and therefore cannot see you.' Nevertheless she continued to come, always at the same hour each day, and always carrying a bundle wrapped in a ragged covering; and the servants at last thought it were best to speak to their master about her. So they said to him: 'There is a very old woman, whom we take to be a beggar, at our lord's gate. More than fifty times she has come, asking to see our lord, and refusing to tell us why-- saying that she can tell her wishes only to our lord. And we have tried to discourage her, as she seemed to be mad; but she always comes. Therefore we have presumed to mention the matter to our lord, in order that we may learn what is to be done hereafter.' Then the Master answered sharply: 'Why did none of you tell me of this before?' and went out himself to the gate, and spoke very kindly to the woman, remembering how he also had been poor. And he asked her if she desired alms of him. But she answered that she had no need of money or of food, and only desired that he would paint for her a picture. He wondered at her wish, and bade her enter his house. So she entered into the vestibule, and, kneeling there, began to untie the knots of the bundle she had brought with her. When she had unwrapped it, the painter perceived curious rich quaint garments of silk broidered with designs in gold, yet much frayed and discoloured by wear and time--the wreck of a wonderful costume of other days, the attire of a shirabyoshi. While the old woman unfolded the garments one by one, and tried to smooth them with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred in the Master's brain, thrilled dimly there a little space, then suddenly lighted up. In that soft shock of recollection, he saw again the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated hospitality--the tiny room prepared for his rest, the paper mosquito-curtain, the faintly burning lamp before the Buddhist shrine, the strange beauty of one dancing there alone in the dead of the night. Then, to the astonishment of the aged visitor, he, the favoured of princes, bowed low before her, and said: 'Pardon my rudeness in having forgotten your face for a moment; but it is more than forty years since we last saw each other. Now I remember you well. You received me once at your house. You gave up to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance, and you told me all your story. You had been a shirabyoshi, and I have not forgotten your name.' He uttered it. She, astonished and confused, could not at first reply to him, for she was old and had suffered much, and her memory had begun to fail. But he spoke more and more kindly to her, and reminded her of many things which she had told him, and described to her the house in which she had lived alone, so that at last she also remembered; and she answered, with tears of pleasure: 'Surely the Divine One who looketh down above the sound of prayer has guided me. But when my unworthy home was honoured by the visit of the august Master, I was not as I now am. And it seems to me like a miracle of our Lord Buddha that the Master should remember me.' Then she related the rest of her simple story. In the course of years, she had become, through poverty, obliged to part with her little house; and in her old age she had returned alone to the great city, in which her name had long been forgotten. It had caused her much pain to lose her home; but it grieved her still more that, in becoming weak and old, she could no longer dance each evening before the butsudan, to please the spirit of the dead whom she had loved. Therefore she wanted to have a picture of herself painted, in the costume and the attitude of the dance, that she might suspend it before the butsudan. For this she had prayed earnestly to Kwannon. And she had sought out the Master because of his fame as a painter, since she desired, for the sake of the dead, no common work, but a picture painted with great skill; and she had brought her dancing attire, hoping that the Master might be willing to paint her therein. He listened to all with a kindly smile, and answered her: 'It will be only a pleasure for me to paint the picture which you want. This day I have something to finish which cannot be delayed. But if you will come here to-morrow, I will paint you exactly as you wish, and as well as I am able.' But she said: 'I have not yet told to the Master the thing which most troubles me. And it is this--that I can offer in return for so great a favour nothing except these dancer's clothes; and they are of no value in themselves, though they were costly once. Still, I hoped the Master might be willing to take them, seeing they have become curious; for there are no more shirabyoshi, and the maiko of these times wear no such robes.' 'Of that matter,' the good painter exclaimed, 'you must not think at all! No; I am glad to have this present chance of paying a small part of my old debt to you. So to-morrow I will paint you just as you wish.' She prostrated herself thrice before him, uttering thanks and then said, 'Let my lord pardon, though I have yet something more to say. For I do not wish that he should paint me as I now am, but only as I used to be when I was young, as my lord knew me.' He said: 'I remember well. You were very beautiful.' Her wrinkled features lighted up with pleasure, as she bowed her thanks to him for those words. And she exclaimed: 'Then indeed all that I hoped and prayed for may be done! Since he thus remembers my poor youth, I beseech my lord to paint me, not as I now am, but as he saw me when I was not old and, as it has pleased him generously to say, not uncomely. O Master, make me young again! Make me seem beautiful that I may seem beautiful to the soul of him for whose sake I, the unworthy, beseech this! He will see the Master's work: he will forgive me that I can no longer dance. Once more the Master bade her have no anxiety, and said: 'Come tomorrow, and I will paint you. I will make a picture of you just as you were when I saw you, a young and beautiful shirabyoshi, and I will paint it as carefully and as skilfully as if I were painting the picture of the richest person in the land. Never doubt, but come.' Sec. 5 So the aged dancer came at the appointed hour; and upon soft white silk the artist painted a picture of her. Yet not a picture of her as she seemed to the Master's pupils but the memory of her as she had been in the days of her youth, bright-eyed as a bird, lithe as a bamboo, dazzling as a tennin [9] in her raiment of silk and gold. Under the magic of the Master's brush, the vanished grace returned, the faded beauty bloomed again. When the kakemono had been finished, and stamped with his seal, he mounted it richly upon silken cloth, and fixed to it rollers of cedar with ivory weights, and a silken cord by which to hang it; and he placed it in a little box of white wood, and so gave it to the shirabyoshi. And he would also have presented her with a gift of money. But though he pressed her earnestly, he could not persuade her to accept his help. 'Nay,' she made answer, with tears, 'indeed I need nothing. The picture only I desired. For that I prayed; and now my prayer has been answered, and I know that I never can wish for anything more in this life, and that if I come to die thus desiring nothing, to enter upon the way of Buddha will not be difficult. One thought .alone causes me sorrow--that I have nothing to offer to the Master but this dancer's apparel, which is indeed of little worth, though I beseech him I to accept it; and I will pray each day that his future life may be a life of happiness, because of the wondrous kindness which I he has done me.' 'Nay,' protested the painter, smiling, 'what is it that I have done? Truly nothing. As for the dancer's garments, I will accept them, if that can make you more happy. They will bring back pleasant memories of the night I passed in your home, when you gave up all your comforts for my unworthy sake, and yet would not suffer me to pay for that which I used; and for that kindness I hold myself to be still in your debt. But now tell me where you live, so that I may see the picture in its place.' For he had resolved within himself to place her beyond the reach of want. But she excused herself with humble words, and would not tell him, saying that her dwelling-place was too mean to be looked upon by such as he; and then, with many prostrations, she thanked him again and again, and went away with her treasure, weeping for joy. Then the Master called to one of his pupils: 'Go quickly after that woman, but so that she does not know herself followed, and bring me word where she lives.' So the young man followed her, unperceived. He remained long away, and when he returned he laughed in the manner of one obliged to say something which it is not pleasant to hear, and he said: 'That woman, O Master, I followed out of the city to the dry bed of the river, near to the place where criminals are executed. There I saw a hut such as an Eta might dwell in, and that is where she lives. A forsaken and filthy place, O Master!' 'Nevertheless,' the painter replied, 'to-morrow you will take me to that forsaken and filthy place. What time I live she shall not suffer for food or clothing or comfort.' And as all wondered, he told them the story of the shirabyoshi, after which it did not seem to them that his words were strange. Sec. 6 On the morning of the day following, an hour after sun-rise, the Master and his pupil took their way to the dry bed of the river, beyond the verge of the city, to the place of outcasts. The entrance of the little dwelling they found closed by a single shutter, upon which the Master tapped many times without evoking a response. Then, finding the shutter unfastened from within, he pushed it slightly aside, and called through the aperture. None replied, and he decided to enter. Simultaneously, with extraordinary vividness, there thrilled back to him the sensation of the very instant when, as a tired. lad, he stood pleading for admission to the lonesome little cottage among the hills. Entering alone softly, he perceived that the woman was lying there, wrapped in a single thin and tattered futon, seemingly asleep. On a rude shelf he recognised the butsudan of' forty years before, with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning in front of the kaimyo. The kakemono of the Goddess of Mercy with her lunar aureole was gone, but on the wall facing the shrine he beheld his own dainty gift suspended, and an ofuda beneath it--an ofuda of Hito-koto-Kwannon [10]-- that Kwannon unto whom it is unlawful to pray more than once, as she answers but a single prayer. There was little else in the desolate dwelling; only the garments of a female pilgrim, and a mendicant's staff and bowl. But the Master did not pause to look at these things, for he desired to awaken and to gladden the sleeper, and he called her name cheerily twice and thrice. Then suddenly he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like a ghost of youth, had returned to it; the lines of sorrow had been softened, the wrinkles strangely smoothed, by the touch of a phantom Master mightier than he. CHAPTER EIGHT From Hoki to Oki Sec. 1 I RESOLVED to go to Oki. Not even a missionary had ever been to Oki, and its shores had never been seen by European eyes, except on those rare occasions when men-of- war steamed by them, cruising about the Japanese Sea. This alone would have been a sufficient reason for going there; but a stronger one was furnished for me by the ignorance of the Japanese themselves about Oki. Excepting the far-away Riu-Kiu, or Loo-Choo Islands, inhabited by a somewhat different race with a different language, the least-known portion of the Japanese Empire is perhaps Oki. Since it belongs to the same prefectural district as Izumo, each new governor of Shimane-Ken is supposed to pay one visit to Oki after his inauguration; and the chief of police of the province sometimes goes there upon a tour of inspection. There are also some mercantile houses in Matsue and in other cities which send a commercial traveller to Oki once a year. Furthermore, there is quite a large trade with Oki--almost all carried on by small sailing-vessels. But such official and commercial communications have not been of a nature to make Oki much better known to-day than in the medieval period of Japanese history. There are still current among the common people of the west coast extraordinary stories of Oki much like those about that fabulous Isle of Women, which figures so largely in the imaginative literature of various Oriental races. According to these old legends, the moral notions of the people of Oki were extremely fantastic: the most rigid ascetic could not dwell there and maintain his indifference to earthly pleasures; and, however wealthy at his arrival, the visiting stranger must soon return to his native land naked and poor, because of the seductions of women. I had quite sufficient experiences of travel in queer countries to feel certain that all these marvellous stories signified nothing beyond the bare fact that Oki was a terra incognita; and I even felt inclined to believe that the average morals of the people of Oki--judging by those of the common folk of the western provinces--must be very much better than the morals of our ignorant classes at home. Which I subsequently ascertained to be the case. For some time I could find no one among my Japanese acquaintances to give me any information about Oki, beyond the fact that in ancient times it had been a place of banishment for the Emperors Go-Daigo and Go-Toba, dethroned by military usurpers, and this I already knew. But at last, quite unexpectedly, I found a friend--a former fellow-teacher--who had not only been to Oki, but was going there again within a few days about some business matter. We agreed to go together. His accounts of Oki differed very materially from those of the people who had never been there. The Oki folks, he said, were almost as much civilised as the Izumo folks: they, had nice towns and good public schools. They were very simple and honest beyond belief, and extremely kind to strangers. Their only boast was that of having kept their race unchanged since the time that the Japanese had first come to Japan; or, in more romantic phrase, since the Age of the Gods. They were all Shintoists, members of the Izumo Taisha faith, but Buddhism was also maintained among them, chiefly through the generous subscription of private individuals. And there were very comfortable hotels, so that I would feel quite at home. He also gave me a little book about Oki, printed for the use of the Oki schools, from which I obtained the following brief summary of facts: Sec. 2 Oki-no-Kuni, or the Land of Oki, consists of two groups of small islands in the Sea of Japan, about one hundred miles from the coast of Izumo. Dozen, as the nearer group is termed, comprises, besides various islets, three islands lying close together: Chiburishima, or the Island of Chiburi (sometimes called Higashinoshima, or Eastern Island); Nishinoshima, or the Western Island, and Nakanoshima, or the Middle Island. Much larger than any of these is the principal island, Dogo, which together with various islets, mostly uninhabited, form the remaining group. It is sometimes called Oki--though the name Oki is more generally used for the whole archipelago. [1] Officially, Oki is divided into four kori or counties. Chiburi and Nishinoshima together form Chiburigori; Nakanoshima, with an islet, makes Amagori, and Dogo is divided into Ochigori and Sukigori. All these islands are very mountainous, and only a small portion of their area has ever been cultivated. Their chief sources of revenue are their fisheries, in which nearly the whole population has always been engaged from the most ancient times. During the winter months the sea between Oki and the west coast is highly dangerous for small vessels, and in that season the islands hold little communication with the mainland. Only one passenger steamer runs to Oki from Sakai in Hoki In a direct line, the distance from Sakai in Hoki to Saigo, the chief port of Oki, is said to be thirty-nine ri; but the steamer touches at the other islands upon her way thither. There are quite a number of little towns, or rather villages, in Oki, of which forty-five belong to Dogo. The villages are nearly all situated upon the coast. There are large schools in the principal towns. The population of the islands is stated to be 30,196, but the respective populations of towns and villages are not given. Sec. 3 From Matsue in Izumo to Sakai in Hoki is a trip of barely two hours by steamer. Sakai is the chief seaport of Shimane-Ken. It is an ugly little town, full of unpleasant smells; it exists only as a port; it has no industries, scarcely any shops, and only one Shinto temple of small dimensions and smaller interest. Its principal buildings are warehouses, pleasure resorts for sailors, and a few large dingy hotels, which are always overcrowded with guests waiting for steamers to Osaka, to Bakkan, to Hamada, to Niigata, and various other ports. On this coast no steamers run regularly anywhere; their owners attach no business value whatever to punctuality, and guests have usually to wait for a much longer time than they could possibly have expected, and the hotels are glad. But the harbour is beautiful--a long frith between the high land of Izumo and the low coast of Hoki. It is perfectly sheltered from storms, and deep enough to admit all but the largest steamers. The ships can lie close to the houses, and the harbour is nearly always thronged with all sorts of craft, from junks to steam packets of the latest construction. My friend and I were lucky enough to secure back rooms at the best hotel. Back rooms are the best in nearly all Japanese buildings: at Sakai they have the additional advantage of overlooking the busy wharves and the whole luminous bay, beyond which the Izumo hills undulate in huge green billows against the sky. There was much to see and to be amused at. Steamers and sailing craft of all sorts were lying two and three deep before the hotel, and the naked dock labourers were loading and unloading in their own peculiar way. These men are recruited from among the strongest peasantry of Hoki and of Izumo, and some were really fine men, over whose brown backs the muscles rippled at every movement. They were assisted by boys of fifteen or sixteen apparently--apprentices learning the work, but not yet strong enough to bear heavy burdens. I noticed that nearly all had bands of blue cloth bound about their calves to keep the veins from bursting. And all sang as they worked. There was one curious alternate chorus, in which the men in the hold gave the signal by chanting 'dokoe, dokoel' (haul away!) and those at the hatch responded by improvisations on the appearance of each package as it ascended: Dokoe, dokoe! Onnago no ko da. Dokoe, dokoe! Oya dayo, oya dayo. Dokoe, dokoel Choi-choi da, choi-choi da. Dokoe, dokoe! Matsue da, Matsueda. Dokoe, dokoe! Koetsumo Yonago da, [20] etc. But this chant was for light quick work. A very different chant accompanied the more painful and slower labour of loading heavy sacks and barrels upon the shoulders of the stronger men:-- Yan-yui! Yan-yui! Yan-yui! Yan-yui! Yoi-ya-sa-a-a-no-do-koe-shi! [3] Three men always lifted the weight. At the first yan-yui all stooped; at the second all took hold; the third signified ready; at the fourth the weight rose from the ground; and with the long cry of yoiyasa no dokoeshi it was dropped on the brawny shoulder waiting to receive it. Among the workers was a naked laughing boy, with a fine contralto that rang out so merrily through all the din as to create something of a sensation in the hotel. A young woman, one of the guests, came out upon the balcony to look, and exclaimed: 'That boy's voice is RED'--whereat everybody smiled. Under the circumstances I thought the observation very expressive, although it recalled a certain famous story about scarlet and the sound of a trumpet, which does not seem nearly so funny now as it did at a time when we knew less about the nature of light and sound. The Oki steamer arrived the same afternoon, but she could not approach the wharf, and I could only obtain a momentary glimpse of her stern through a telescope, with which I read the name, in English letters of gold--OKI-SARGO. Before I could obtain any idea of her dimensions, a huge black steamer from Nagasaki glided between, and moored right in the way. I watched the loading and unloading, and listened to the song of the boy with the red voice, until sunset, when all quit work; and after that I watched the Nagasaki steamer. She had made her way to our wharf as the other vessels moved out, and lay directly under the balcony. The captain and crew did not appear to be in a hurry about anything. They all squatted down together on the foredeck, where a feast was spread for them by lantern-light. Dancing-girls climbed on board and feasted with them, and sang to the sound of the samisen, and played with them the game of ken. Late into the night the feasting and the fun continued; and although an alarming quantity of sake was consumed, there was no roughness or boisterousness. But sake is the most soporific of wines; and by midnight only three of the men remained on deck. One of these had not taken any sake at all, but still desired to eat. Happily for him there climbed on board a night-walking mochiya with a box of mochi, which are cakes of rice-flour sweetened with native sugar. The hungry one bought all, and reproached the mochiya because there were no more, and offered, nevertheless, to share the mochi with his comrades. Whereupon the first to whom the offer was made answered somewhat after this manner: 'I-your-servant mochi-for this-world-in no-use-have. Sake alone this- life-in if-there-be, nothing-beside-desirable-is. 'For me-your-servant,' spake the other, 'Woman this-fleeting-life-in the-supreme-thing is; mochi-or-sake-for earthly-use have-I-none.' But, having made all the mochi to disappear, he that had been hungry turned himself to the mochiya, and said:--'O Mochiya San, I-your-servant Woman-or-sake-for earthly-requirement have-none. Mochi-than things better this-life-of-sorrow-in existence-have-not !' Sec. 4 Early in the morning we were notified that the Oki-Saigo would start at precisely eight o'clock, and that we had better secure our tickets at once. The hotel-servant, according to Japanese custom, relieved us of all anxiety about baggage, etc., and bought our tickets: first-class fare, eighty sen. And after a hasty breakfast the hotel boat came under the window to take us away. Warned by experience of the discomforts of European dress on Shimane steamers, I adopted Japanese costume and exchanged my shoes for sandals. Our boatmen sculled swiftly through the confusion of shipping and junkery; and as we cleared it I saw, far out in midstream, the joki waiting for us. Joki is a Japanese name for steam-vessel. The word had not yet impressed me as being capable of a sinister interpretation. She seemed nearly as long as a harbour tug, though much more squabby; and she otherwise so much resembled the Lilliputian steamers of Lake Shinji, that I felt somewhat afraid of her, even for a trip of one hundred miles. But exterior inspection afforded no clue to the mystery of her inside. We reached her and climbed into her starboard through a small square hole. At once I found myself cramped in a heavily-roofed gangway, four feet high and two feet wide, and in the thick of a frightful squeeze--passengers stifling in the effort to pull baggage three feet in diameter through the two-foot orifice. It was impossible to advance or retreat; and behind me the engine-room gratings were pouring wonderful heat into this infernal corridor. I had to wait with the back of my head pressed against the roof until, in some unimaginable way, all baggage and passengers had squashed and squeezed through. Then, reaching a doorway, I fell over a heap of sandals and geta, into the first-class cabin. It was pretty, with its polished woodwork and mirrors; it was surrounded by divans five inches wide; and in the centre it was nearly six feet high. Such altitude would have been a cause for comparative happiness, but that from various polished bars of brass extended across the ceiling all kinds of small baggage, including two cages of singing-crickets (chongisu), had been carefully suspended. Furthermore the cabin was already extremely occupied: everybody, of course, on the floor, and nearly everybody lying at extreme length; and the heat struck me as being supernatural. Now they that go down to the sea in ships, out of Izumo and such places, for the purpose of doing business in great waters, are never supposed to stand up, but to squat in the ancient patient manner; and coast, or lake steamers are constructed with a view to render this attitude only possible. Observing an open door in the port side of the cabin, I picked my way over a tangle of bodies and limbs--among them a pair of fairy legs belonging to a dancing-girl--and found myself presently in another gangway, also roofed, and choked up to the roof with baskets of squirming eels. Exit there was none: so I climbed back over all the legs and tried the starboard gangway a second time. Even during that short interval, it had been half filled with baskets of unhappy chickens. But I made a reckless dash over them, in spite of frantic cacklings which hurt my soul, and succeeded in finding a way to the cabin-roof. It was entirely occupied by water-melons, except one corner, where there was a big coil of rope. I put melons inside of the rope, and sat upon them in the sun. It was not comfortable; but I thought that there I might have some chance for my life in case of a catastrophe, and I was sure that even the gods could give no help to those below. During the squeeze I had got separated from my companion, but I was afraid to make any attempt to find him. Forward I saw the roof of the second cabin crowded with third- class passengers squatting round a hibachi. To pass through them did not seem possible, and to retire would have involved the murder of either eels or chickens. Wherefore I sat upon the melons. And the boat started, with a stunning scream. In another moment her funnel began to rain soot upon me--for the so-called first-class cabin was well astern--and then came small cinders mixed with the soot, and the cinders were occasionally red-hot. But I sat burning upon the water- melons for some time longer, trying to imagine a way of changing my position without committing another assault upon the chickens. Finally, I made a desperate endeavour to get to leeward of the volcano, and it was then for the first time that I began to learn the peculiarities of the joki. What I tried to sit on turned upside down, and what I tried to hold by instantly gave way, and always in the direction of overboard. Things clamped or rigidly braced to outward seeming proved, upon cautious examination, to be dangerously mobile; and things that, according to Occidental ideas, ought to have been movable, were fixed like the roots of the perpetual hills. In whatever direction a rope or stay could possibly have been stretched so as to make somebody unhappy, it was there. In the midst of these trials the frightful little craft began to swing, and the water-melons began to rush heavily to and fro, and I came to the conclusion that this joki had been planned and constructed by demons. Which I stated to my friend. He had not only rejoined me quite unexpectedly, but had brought along with him one of the ship's boys to spread an awning above ourselves and the watermelons, so as to exclude cinders and sun. 'Oh, no!' he answered reproachfully 'She was designed and built at Hyogo, and really she might have been made much worse. . . ' 'I beg your pardon,' I interrupted; 'I don't agree with you at all.' 'Well, you will see for yourself,' he persisted. 'Her hull is good steel, and her little engine is wonderful; she can make her hundred miles in five hours. She is not very comfortable, but she is very swift and strong.' 'I would rather be in a sampan,' I protested, 'if there were rough weather.' 'But she never goes to sea in rough weather. If it only looks as if there might possibly be some rough weather, she stays in port. Sometimes she waits a whole month. She never runs any risks.' I could not feel sure of it. But I soon forgot all discomforts, even the discomfort of sitting upon water-melons, in the delight of the divine day and the magnificent view that opened wider and wider before us, as we rushed from the long frith into the Sea of Japan, following the Izumo coast. There was no fleck in the soft blue vastness above, not one flutter on the metallic smoothness of the all-reflecting sea; if our little steamer rocked, it was doubtless because she had been overloaded. To port, the Izumo hills were flying by, a long, wild procession of' broken shapes, sombre green, separating at intervals to form mysterious little bays, with fishing hamlets hiding in them. Leagues away to starboard, the Hoki shore receded into the naked white horizon, an ever- diminishing streak of warm blue edged with a thread-line of white, the gleam of a sand beach; and beyond it, in the centre, a vast shadowy pyramid loomed up into heaven--the ghostly peak of Daisen. My companion touched my arm to call my attention to a group of pine- trees on the summit of a peak to port, and laughed and sang a Japanese song. How swiftly we had been travelling I then for the first time understood, for I recognised the four famous pines of Mionoseki, on the windy heights above the shrine of Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami. There used to be five trees: one was uprooted by a storm, and some Izumo poet wrote about the remaining four the words which my friend had sung: Seki no gohon matsu Ippun kirya, shihon; Ato wa kirarenu Miyoto matsu. Which means: 'Of the five pines of Seki one has been cut, and four remain; and of these no one must now be cut--they are wedded pairs.' And in Mionoseki there are sold beautiful little sake cups and sake bottles, upon which are pictures of the four pines, and above the pictures, in spidery text of gold, the verses, 'Seki no gohon matsu.' These are for keepsakes, and there are many other curious and pretty souvenirs to buy in those pretty shops; porcelains bearing the picture of the Mionoseki temple, and metal clasps for tobacco pouches representing Koto-shiro- nushi-no-Kami trying to put a big tai-fish into a basket too small for it, and funny masks of glazed earthenware representing the laughing face of the god. For a jovial god is this Ebisu, or Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, patron of honest labour and especially of fishers, though less of a laughter-lover than his father, the Great Deity of Kitzuki, about whom 'tis said: 'Whenever the happy laugh, the God rejoices.' We passed the Cape--the Miho of the Kojiki--and the harbour of Mionoseki opened before us, showing its islanded shrine of Benten in the midst, and the crescent of quaint houses with their feet in the water, and the great torii and granite lions of the far-famed temple. Immediately a number of passengers rose to their feet, and, turning their faces toward the torii began to clap their hands in Shinto prayer. I said to my friend: 'There are fifty baskets full of chickens in the gangway; and yet these people are praying to Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami that nothing horrible may happen to this boat.' 'More likely,' he answered, 'they are praying for good-fortune; though there is a saying: "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." But of the Great Deity of Mionoseki there is a good story told. Once there was a very lazy man who went to Mionoseki and prayed to become rich. And the same night he saw the god in a dream; and the god laughed, and took off one of his own divine sandals, and told him to examine it. And the man saw that it was made of solid brass, but had a big hole worn through the sole of it. Then said the god: "You want to have money without working for it. I am a god; but I am never lazy. See! my sandals are of brass: yet I have worked and walked so much that they are quite worn out."' Sec. 5 The beautiful bay of Mionoseki opens between two headlands: Cape Mio (or Miho, according to the archaic spelling) and the Cape of Jizo (Jizo- zaki), now most inappropriately called by the people 'The Nose of Jizo' (Jizo-no-hana). This Nose of Jizo is one of the most dangerous points of the coast in time of surf, and the great terror of small ships returning from Oki. There is nearly always a heavy swell there, even in fair weather. Yet as we passed the ragged promontory I was surprised to see the water still as glass. I felt suspicious of that noiseless sea: its soundlessness recalled the beautiful treacherous sleep of waves and winds which precedes a tropical hurricane. But my friend said: 'It may remain like this for weeks. In the sixth month and in the beginning of the seventh, it is usually very quiet; it is not likely to become dangerous before the Bon. But there was a little squall last week at Mionoseki; and the people said that it was caused by the anger of the god.' 'Eggs?' I queried. 'No: a Kudan.' 'What is a Kudan?' 'Is it possible you never heard of the Kudan? The Kudan has the face of a man, and the body of a bull. Sometimes it is born of a cow, and that is a Sign-of-things-going-to-happen. And the Kudan always tells the truth. Therefore in Japanese letters and documents it is customary to use the phrase, Kudanno-gotoshi--"like the Kudan"--or "on the truth of the Kudan."' [4] 'But why was the God of Mionoseki angry about the Kudan?' 'People said it was a stuffed Kudan. I did not see it, so I cannot tell you how it was made. There was some travelling showmen from Osaka at Sakai. They had a tiger and many curious animals and the stuffed Kudan; and they took the Izumo Maru for Mionoseki. As the steamer entered the port a sudden squall came; and the priests of the temple said the god was angry because things impure--bones and parts of dead animals--had been brought to the town. And the show people were not even allowed to land: they had to go back to Sakai on the same steamer. And as soon as they had gone away, the sky became clear again, and the wind stopped blowing: so that some people thought what the priests had said was true.' Sec. 6 Evidently there was much more moisture in the atmosphere than I had supposed. On really clear days Daisen can be distinctly seen even from Oki; but we had scarcely passed the Nose of Jizo when the huge peak began to wrap itself in vapour of the same colour as the horizon; and in a few minutes it vanished, as a spectre might vanish. The effect of this sudden disappearance was very extraordinary; for only the peak passed from sight, and that which had veiled it could not be any way distinguished from horizon and sky. Meanwhile the Oki-Saigo, having reached the farthest outlying point of the coast upon her route began to race in straight line across the Japanese Sea. The green hills of Izumi fled away and turned blue, and the spectral shores of Hoki began to melt into the horizon, like bands of cloud. Then was obliged to confess my surprise at the speed of the horrid little steamer. She moved, too, with scarcely any sound, smooth was the working of her wonderful little engine. But she began to swing heavily, with deep, slow swingings. To the eye, the sea looked level as oil; but there were long invisible swells--ocean-pulses--that made themselves felt beneath the surface. Hoki evaporated; the Izumo hills turned grey, a their grey steadily paled as I watched them. They grew more and more colourless--seemed to become transparent. And then they were not. Only blue sky and blue sea, welded together in the white horizon. It was just as lonesome as if we had been a thousand leagues from land. And in that weirdness we were told some very lonesome things by an ancient mariner who found leisure join us among the water-melons. He talked of the Hotoke-umi and the ill-luck of being at sea on the sixteenth day of the seventh month. He told us that even the great steamers never went to sea during the Bon: no crew would venture to take ship out then. And he related the following stories with such simple earnestness that I think he must have believed what said: 'The first time I was very young. From Hokkaido we had sailed, and the voyage was long, and the winds turned against us. And the night of the sixteenth day fell, as we were working on over this very sea. 'And all at once in the darkness we saw behind us a great junk--all white--that we had not noticed till she was quite close to us. It made us feel queer, because she seemed to have come from nowhere. She was so near us that we could hear voices; and her hull towered up high above us. She seemed to be sailing very fast; but she came no closer. We shouted to her; but we got no answer. And while we were watching her, all of us became afraid, because she did not move like a real ship. The sea was terrible, and we were lurching and plunging; but that great junk never rolled. Just at the same moment that we began to feel afraid she vanished so quickly that we could scarcely believe we had really seen her at all. 'That was the first time. But four years ago I saw something still more strange. We were bound for Oki, in a junk, and the wind again delayed us, so that we were at sea on the sixteenth day. It was in the morning, a little before midday; the sky was dark and the sea very ugly. All at once we saw a steamer running in our track, very quickly. She got so close to us that we could hear her engines--katakata katakata!--but we saw nobody on deck. Then she began to follow us, keeping exactly at the same distance, and whenever we tried to get out of her way she would turn after us and keep exactly in our wake. And then we suspected what she was. But we were not sure until she vanished. She vanished like a bubble, without making the least sound. None of us could say exactly when she disappeared. None of us saw her vanish. The strangest thing was that after she was gone we could still hear her engines working behind us--katakata, katakata, katakata! 'That is all I saw. But I know others, sailors like myself, who have seen more. Sometimes many ships will follow you--though never at the same time. One will come close and vanish, then another, and then another. As long as they come behind you, you need never be afraid. But if you see a ship of that sort running before you, against the wind, that is very bad! It means that all on board will be drowned.' Sec. 7 The luminous blankness circling us continued to remain unflecked for less than an hour. Then out of the horizon toward which we steamed, a small grey vagueness began to grow. It lengthened fast, and seemed a cloud. And a cloud it proved; but slowly, beneath it, blue filmy shapes began to define against the whiteness, and sharpened into a chain of mountains. They grew taller and bluer--a little sierra, with one paler shape towering in the middle to thrice the height of the rest, and filleted with cloud--Takuhizan, the sacred mountain of Oki, in the island Nishinoshima. Takuhizan has legends, which I learned from my friend. Upon its summit stands an ancient shrine of the deity Gongen-Sama. And it is said that upon the thirty-first night of the twelfth month three ghostly fires arise from the sea and ascend to the place of the shrine, and enter the stone lanterns which stand before it, and there remain, burning like lamps. These lights do not arise at once, but separately, from the sea, and rise to the top of the peak one by one. The people go out in boats to see the lights mount from the water. But only those whose hearts are pure can see them; those who have evil thoughts or desires look for the holy fires in vain. Before us, as we steamed on, the sea-surface appeared to become suddenly speckled with queer craft previously invisible--light, long fishing- boats, with immense square sails of a beautiful yellow colour. I could not help remarking to my comrade how pretty those sails were; he laughed, and told me they were made of old tatami. [5] I examined them through a telescope, and found that they were exactly what he had said-- woven straw coverings of old floor-mats. Nevertheless, that first tender yellow sprinkling of old sails over the soft blue water was a charming sight. They fleeted by, like a passing of yellow butterflies, and the sea was void again. Gradually, a little to port, a point in the approaching line of blue cliffs shaped itself and changed colour--dull green above, reddish grey below; it defined into a huge rock, with a dark patch on its face, but the rest of the land remained blue. The dark patch blackened as we came nearer--a great gap full of shadow. Then the blue cliffs beyond also turned green, and their bases reddish grey. We passed to the right of the huge rock, which proved to be a detached and uninhabited islet, Hakashima; and in another moment we were steaming into the archipelago of Oki, between the lofty islands Chiburishima and Nakashima. Sec. 8 The first impression was almost uncanny. Rising sheer from the flood on either hand, the tall green silent hills stretched away before us, changing tint through the summer vapour, to form a fantastic vista of blue cliffs and peaks and promontories. There was not one sign of human life. Above their pale bases of naked rock the mountains sloped up beneath a sombre wildness of dwarf vegetation. There was absolutely no sound, except the sound of the steamer's tiny engine--poum-poum, poum! poum-poum, poum! like the faint tapping of a geisha's drum. And this savage silence continued for miles: only the absence of lofty timber gave evidence that those peaked hills had ever been trodden by human foot. But all at once, to the left, in a mountain wrinkle, a little grey hamlet appeared; and the steamer screamed and stopped, while the hills repeated the scream seven times. This settlement was Chiburimura, of Chiburishima (Nakashima being the island to starboard)--evidently nothing more than a fishing station. First a wharf of uncemented stone rising from the cove like a wall; then great trees through which one caught sight of a torii before some Shinto shrine, and of a dozen houses climbing the hollow hill one behind another, roof beyond roof; and above these some terraced patches of tilled ground in the midst of desolation: that was all. The packet halted to deliver mail, and passed on. But then, contrary to expectation, the scenery became more beautiful. The shores on either side at once receded and heightened: we were traversing an inland sea bounded by three lofty islands. At first the way before us had seemed barred by vapoury hills; but as these, drawing nearer, turned green, there suddenly opened magnificent chasms between them on both sides--mountain-gates revealing league-long wondrous vistas of peaks and cliffs and capes of a hundred blues, ranging away from velvety indigo into far tones of exquisite and spectral delicacy. A tinted haze made dreamy all remotenesses, an veiled with illusions of colour the rugged nudities of rock. The beauty of the scenery of Western and Central Japan is not as the beauty of scenery in other lands; it has a peculiar character of its own. Occasionally the foreigner may find memories of former travel suddenly stirred to life by some view on a mountain road, or some stretch of beetling coast seen through a fog of spray. But this illusion of resemblance vanishes as swiftly as it comes; details immediately define into strangeness, and you become aware that the remembrance was evoked by form only, never by colour. Colours indeed there are which delight the eye, but not colours of mountain verdure, not colours of the land. Cultivated plains, expanses of growing rice, may offer some approach to warmth of green; but the whole general tone of this nature is dusky; the vast forests are sombre; the tints of grasses are harsh or dull. Fiery greens, such as burn in tropical scenery, do not exist; and blossom-bursts take a more exquisite radiance by contrast with the heavy tones of the vegetation out of which they flame. Outside of parks and gardens and cultivated fields, there is a singular absence of warmth and tenderness in the tints of verdure; and nowhere need you hope to find any such richness of green as that which makes the loveliness of an English lawn. Yet these Oriental landscapes possess charms of colour extraordinary, phantom-colour delicate, elfish, indescribable--created by the wonderful atmosphere. Vapours enchant the distances, bathing peaks in bewitchments of blue and grey of a hundred tones, transforming naked cliffs to amethyst, stretching spectral gauzes across the topazine morning, magnifying the splendour of noon by effacing the horizon, filling the evening with smoke of gold, bronzing the waters, banding the sundown with ghostly purple and green of nacre. Now, the Old Japanese artists who made those marvellous ehon--those picture-books which have now become so rare--tried to fix the sensation of these enchantments in colour, and they were successful in their backgrounds to a degree almost miraculous. For which very reason some of their foregrounds have been a puzzle to foreigners unacquainted with certain features of Japanese agriculture. You will see blazing saffron-yellow fields, faint purple plains, crimson and snow-white trees, in those old picture-books; and perhaps you will exclaim: 'How absurd!' But if you knew Japan you would cry out: 'How deliciously real!' For you would know those fields of burning yellow are fields of flowering rape, and the purple expanses are fields of blossoming miyako, and the snow-white or crimson trees are not fanciful, but represent faithfully certain phenomena of efflorescence peculiar to the plum-trees and the cherry-trees of the country. But these chromatic extravaganzas can be witnessed only during very brief periods of particular seasons: throughout the greater part of the year the foreground of an inland landscape is apt to be dull enough in the matter of colour. It is the mists that make the magic of the backgrounds; yet even without them there is a strange, wild, dark beauty in Japanese landscapes, a beauty not easily defined in words. The secret of it must be sought in the extraordinary lines of the mountains, in the strangely abrupt crumpling and jagging of the ranges; no two masses closely resembling each other, every one having a fantasticality of its own. Where the chains reach to any considerable height, softly swelling lines are rare: the general characteristic is abruptness, and the charm is the charm of Irregularity. Doubtless this weird Nature first inspired the Japanese with their unique sense of the value of irregularity in decoration--taught them that single secret of composition which distinguishes their art from all other art, and which Professor Chamberlain has said it is their special mission to teach to the Occident. [6] Certainly, whoever has once learned to feel the beauty and significance of the Old Japanese decorative art can find thereafter little pleasure in the corresponding art of the West. What he has really learned is that Nature's greatest charm is irregularity. And perhaps something of no small value might be written upon the question whether the highest charm of human life and work is not also irregularity. Sec. 9 From Chiburimura we made steam west for the port of Urago, which is in the island of Nishinoshima. As we approached it Takuhizan came into imposing view. Far away it had seemed a soft and beautiful shape; but as its blue tones evaporated its aspect became rough and even grim: an enormous jagged bulk all robed in sombre verdure, through which, as through tatters, there protruded here and there naked rock of the wildest shapes. One fragment, I remember, as it caught the slanting sun upon the irregularities of its summit, seemed an immense grey skull. At the base of this mountain, and facing the shore of Nakashima, rises a pyramidal mass of rock, covered with scraggy undergrowth, and several hundred feet in height--Mongakuzan. On its desolate summit stands a little shrine. 'Takuhizan' signifies The Fire-burning Mountain--a name due perhaps either to the legend of its ghostly fires, or to some ancient memory of its volcanic period. 'Mongakuzan' means The Mountain of Mongaku--Mongaku Shonin, the great monk. It is said that Mongaku Shonin fled to Oki, and that he dwelt alone upon the top of that mountain many years, doing penance for his deadly sin. Whether he really ever visited Oki, I am not able to say; there are traditions which declare the contrary. But the peaklet has borne his name for hundreds of years. Now this is the story of Mongaku Shonin: Many centuries ago, in the city of Kyoto, there was a captain of the garrison whose name was Endo Morito. He saw and loved the wife of a noble samurai; and when she refused to listen to his desires, he vowed that he would destroy her family unless she consented to the plan which he submitted to her. The plan was that upon a certain night she should suffer him to enter her house and to kill her husband; after which she was to become his wife. But she, pretending to consent, devised a noble stratagem to save her honour. For, after having persuaded her husband to absent himself from the city, she wrote to Endo a letter, bidding him come upon a certain night to the house. And on that night she clad herself in her husband's robes, and made her hair like the hair of a man, and laid herself down in her husband's place, and pretended to sleep. And Endo came in the dead of the night with his sword drawn, and smote off the head of the sleeper at a blow, and seized it by the hair and lifted it up and saw it was the head of the woman he had loved and wronged. Then a great remorse came upon him, and hastening to a neighbouring temple, he confessed his sin, and did penance and cut off his hair, and became a monk, taking the name of Mongaku. And in after years he attained to great holiness, so that folk still pray to him, and his memory is venerated throughout the land. Now at Asakusa in Tokyo, in one of the curious little streets which lead to the great temple of Kwannon the Merciful, there are always wonderful images to be seen--figures that seem alive, though made of wood only-- figures illustrating the ancient legends of Japan. And there you may see Endo standing: in his right hand the reeking sword; in his left the head of a beautiful woman. The face of the woman you may forget soon, because it is only beautiful. But the face of Endo you will not forget, because it is naked hell. Sec. 10 Urago is a queer little town, perhaps quite as large as Mionoseki, and built, like Mionoseki, on a narrow ledge at the base of a steep semicircle of hills. But it is much more primitive and colourless than Mionoseki; and its houses are still more closely cramped between cliffs and water, so that its streets, or rather alleys, are no wider than gangways. As we cast anchor, my attention was suddenly riveted by a strange spectacle--a white wilderness of long fluttering vague shapes, in a cemetery on the steep hillside, rising by terraces high above the roofs of the town. The cemetery was full of grey haka and images of divinities; and over every haka there was a curious white paper banner fastened to a thin bamboo pole. Through a glass one could see that these banners were inscribed with Buddhist texts--'Namur-myo-ho-renge-kyo'; 'Namu Amida Butsu'; 'Namu Daiji Dai-hi Kwan-ze-on Bosats,'--and other holy words. Upon inquiry I learned that it was an Urago custom to place these banners every year above the graves during one whole month preceding the Festival of the Dead, together with various other ornamental or symbolic things. The water was full of naked swimmers, who shouted laughing welcomes; and a host of light, swift boats, sculled by naked fishermen, darted out to look for passengers and freight. It was my first chance to observe the physique of Oki islanders; and I was much impressed by the vigorous appearance of both men and boys. The adults seemed to me of a taller and more powerful type than the men of the Izumo coast; and not a few of those brown backs and shoulders displayed, in the motion of sculling what is comparatively rare in Japan, even among men picked for heavy labour--a magnificent development of muscles. As the steamer stopped an hour at Urago, we had time to dine ashore in the chief hotel. It was a very clean and pretty hotel, and the fare infinitely superior to that of the hotel at Sakai. Yet the price charged was only seven sen; and the old landlord refused to accept the whole of the chadai-gift offered him, retaining less than half, and putting back the rest, with gentle force, into the sleeve of my yukata. Sec. 11 From Urago we proceeded to Hishi-ura, which is in Nakanoshima, and the scenery grew always more wonderful as we steamed between the islands. The channel was just wide enough to create the illusion of a grand river flowing with the stillness of vast depth between mountains of a hundred forms. The long lovely vision was everywhere walled in by peaks, bluing through sea-haze, and on either hand the ruddy grey cliffs, sheering up from profundity, sharply mirrored their least asperities in the flood with never a distortion, as in a sheet of steel. Not until we reached Hishi-ura did the horizon reappear; and even then it was visible only between two lofty headlands, as if seen through a river's mouth. Hishi-ura is far prettier than Urago, but it is much less populous, and has the aspect of a prosperous agricultural town, rather than of a fishing station. It bends round a bay formed by low hills which slope back gradually toward the mountainous interior, and which display a considerable extent of cultivated surface. The buildings are somewhat scattered and in many cases isolated by gardens; and those facing the water are quite handsome modern constructions. Urago boasts the best hotel in all Oki; and it has two new temples--one a Buddhist temple of the Zen sect, one a Shinto temple of the Izumo Taisha faith, each the gift of a single person. A rich widow, the owner of the hotel, built the Buddhist temple; and the wealthiest of the merchants contributed the other--one of the handsomest miya for its size that I ever saw. Sec. 12 Dogo, the main island of the Oki archipelago, sometimes itself called 'Oki,' lies at a distance of eight miles, north-east of the Dozen group, beyond a stretch of very dangerous sea. We made for it immediately after leaving Urago; passing to the open through a narrow and fantastic strait between Nakanoshima and Nishinoshima, where the cliffs take the form of enormous fortifications--bastions and ramparts, rising by tiers. Three colossal rocks, anciently forming but a single mass, which would seem to have been divided by some tremendous shock, rise from deep water near the mouth of the channel, like shattered towers. And the last promontory of Nishinoshima, which we pass to port, a huge red naked rock, turns to the horizon a point so strangely shaped that it has been called by a name signifying 'The Hat of the Shinto Priest.' As we glide out into the swell of the sea other extraordinary shapes appear, rising from great depths. Komori, 'The Bat,' a ragged silhouette against the horizon, has a great hole worn through it, which glares like an eye. Farther out two bulks, curved and pointed, and almost joined at the top, bear a grotesque resemblance to the uplifted pincers of a crab; and there is also visible a small dark mass which, until closely approached, seems the figure of a man sculling a boat. Beyond these are two islands: Matsushima, uninhabited and inaccessible, where there is always a swell to beware of; Omorishima, even loftier, which rises from the ocean in enormous ruddy precipices. There seemed to be some grim force in those sinister bulks; some occult power which made our steamer reel and shiver as she passed them. But I saw a marvellous effect of colour under those formidable cliffs of Omorishima. They were lighted by a slanting sun; and where the glow of the bright rock fell upon the water, each black-blue ripple flashed bronze: I thought of a sea of metallic violet ink. From Dozen the cliffs of Dogo can be clearly seen when the weather is not foul: they are streaked here and there with chalky white, which breaks through their blue, even in time of haze. Above them a vast bulk is visible--a point-de-repère for the mariners of Hoki--the mountain of Daimanji. Dogo, indeed, is one great cluster of mountains. Its cliffs rapidly turned green for us, and we followed them eastwardly for perhaps half an hour. Then they opened unexpectedly and widely, revealing a superb bay, widening far into the land, surrounded by hills, and full of shipping. Beyond a confusion of masts there crept into view a long grey line of house-fronts at the base of a crescent of cliffs-- the city of Saigo; and in a little while we touched a wharf of stone. There I bade farewell for a month to the Oki-Saigo. Sec. 13 Saigo was a great surprise. Instead of the big fishing village I had expected to see, I found a city much larger and handsomer and in all respects more modernised than Sakai; a city of long streets full of good shops; a city with excellent public buildings; a city of which the whole appearance indicated commercial prosperity. Most of the edifices were roomy two story dwellings of merchants, and everything had a bright, new look. The unpainted woodwork of the houses had not yet darkened into grey; the blue tints of the tiling were still fresh. I learned that this was because the town had been recently rebuilt, after a conflagration, and rebuilt upon a larger and handsomer plan. Saigo seems still larger than it really is. There are about one thousand houses, which number in any part of Western Japan means a population of at least five thousand, but must mean considerably more in Saigo. These form three long streets--Nishimachi, Nakamachi, and Higashimachi (names respectively signifying the Western, Middle, and Eastern Streets), bisected by numerous cross-streets and alleys. What makes the place seem disproportionately large is the queer way the streets twist about, following the irregularities of the shore, and even doubling upon themselves, so as to create from certain points of view an impression of depth which has no existence. For Saigo is peculiarly, although admirably situated. It fringes both banks of a river, the Yabigawa, near its mouth, and likewise extends round a large point within the splendid bay, besides stretching itself out upon various tongues of land. But though smaller than it looks, to walk through all its serpentine streets is a good afternoon's work. Besides being divided by the Yabigawa, the town is intersected by various water-ways, crossed by a number of bridges. On the hills behind it stand several large buildings, including a public school, with accommodation for three hundred students; a pretty Buddhist temple (quite new), the gift of a rich citizen; a prison; and a hospital, which deserves its reputation of being for its size the handsomest Japanese edifice not only in Oki, but in all Shimane-Ken; and there are several small but very pretty gardens. As for the harbour, you can count more than three hundred ships riding there of a summer's day. Grumblers, especially of the kind who still use wooden anchors, complain of the depth; but the men-of-war do not. Sec. 14 Never, in any part of Western Japan, have I been made more comfortable than at Saigo. My friend and myself were the only guests at the hotel to which we had been recommended. The broad and lofty rooms of the upper floor which we occupied overlooked the main street on one side, and on the other commanded a beautiful mountain landscape beyond the mouth of the Yabigawa, which flowed by our garden. The sea breeze never failed by day or by night, and rendered needless those pretty fans which it is the Japanese custom to present to guests during the hot season. The fare was astonishingly good and curiously varied; and I was told that I might order Seyoryori (Occidental cooking) if I wished--beefsteak with fried potatoes, roast chicken, and so forth. I did not avail myself of the offer, as I make it a rule while travelling to escape trouble by keeping to a purely Japanese diet; but it was no small surprise to be offered in Saigo what is almost impossible to obtain in any other Japanese town of five thousand inhabitants. From a romantic point of view, however, this discovery was a disappointment. Having made my way into the most primitive region of all Japan, I had imagined myself far beyond the range of all modernising influences; and the suggestion of beefsteak with fried potatoes was a disillusion. Nor was I entirely consoled by the subsequent discovery that there were no newspapers or telegraphs. But there was one serious hindrance to the enjoyment of these comforts: an omnipresent, frightful, heavy, all-penetrating smell, the smell of decomposing fish, used as a fertiliser. Tons and tons of cuttlefish entrails are used upon the fields beyond the Yabigawa, and the never- sleeping sea wind blows the stench into every dwelling. Vainly do they keep incense burning in most of the houses during the heated term. After having remained three or four days constantly in the city you become better able to endure this odour; but if you should leave town even for a few hours only, you will be astonished on returning to discover how much your nose had been numbed by habit and refreshed by absence. Sec. 15 On the morning of the day after my arrival at Saigo, a young physician called to see me, and requested me to dine with him at his house. He explained very frankly that as I was the first foreigner who had ever stopped in Saigo, it would afford much pleasure both to his family and to himself to have a good chance to see me; but the natural courtesy of the man overcame any scruple I might have felt to gratify the curiosity of strangers. I was not only treated charmingly at his beautiful home, but actually sent away loaded with presents, most of which I attempted to decline in vain. In one matter, however, I remained obstinate, even at the risk of offending--the gift of a wonderful specimen of bateiseki (a substance which I shall speak of hereafter). This I persisted in refusing to take, knowing it to be not only very costly, but very rare. My host at last yielded, but afterwards secretly sent to the hotel two smaller specimens, which Japanese etiquette rendered it impossible to return. Before leaving Saigo, I experienced many other unexpected kindnesses from the same gentleman. Not long after, one of the teachers of the Saigo public school paid me a visit. He had heard of my interest in Oki, and brought with him two fine maps of the islands made by himself, a little book about Saigo, and, as a gift, a collection of Oki butterflies and insects which he had made. It is only in Japan that one is likely to meet with these wonderful exhibitions of pure goodness on the part of perfect strangers. A third visitor, who had called to see my friend, performed an action equally characteristic, but which caused me not a little pain. We squatted down to smoke together. He drew from his girdle a remarkably beautiful tobacco-pouch and pipe-case, containing a little silver pipe, which he began to smoke. The pipe-case was made of a sort of black coral, curiously carved, and attached to the tabako-ire, or pouch, by a heavy cord of plaited silk of three colours, passed through a ball of transparent agate. Seeing me admire it, he suddenly drew a knife from his sleeve, and before I could prevent him, severed the pipe-case from the pouch, and presented it to me. I felt almost as if he had cut one of his own nerves asunder when he cut that wonderful cord; and, nevertheless, once this had been done, to refuse the gift would have been rude in the extreme. I made him accept a present in return; but after that experience I was careful never again while in Oki to admire anything in the presence of its owner. Sec. 16 Every province of Japan has its own peculiar dialect; and that of Oki, as might be expected in a country so isolated, is particularly distinct. In Saigo, however, the Izumo dialect is largely used. The townsfolk in their manners and customs much resemble Izumo country-folk; indeed, there are many Izumo people among them, most of the large businesses being in the hands of strangers. The women did not impress me as being so attractive as those of Izumo: I saw several very pretty girls, but these proved to be strangers. However, it is only in the country that one can properly study the physical characteristics of a population. Those of the Oki islanders may best be noted at the fishing villages many of which I visited. Everywhere I saw fine strong men and vigorous women; and it struck me that the extraordinary plenty and cheapness of nutritive food had quite as much to do with this robustness as climate and constant exercise. So easy, indeed, is it to live in Oki, that men of other coasts, who find existence difficult, emigrate to Oki if they can get a chance to work there, even at less remuneration. An interesting spectacle to me were the vast processions of fishing-vessels which always, weather permitting, began to shoot out to sea a couple of hours before sundown. The surprising swiftness with which those light craft were impelled by their sinewy scullers--many of whom were women--told of a skill acquired only through the patient experience of generations. Another matter that amazed me was the number of boats. One night in the offing I was able to count three hundred and five torch-fires in sight, each one signifying a crew; and I knew that from almost any of the forty-five coast villages I might see the same spectacle at the same time. The main part of the population, in fact, spends its summer nights at sea. It is also a revelation to travel from Izumo to Hamada by night upon a swift steamer during the fishing season. The horizon for a hundred miles is alight with torch-fires; the toil of a whole coast is revealed in that vast illumination. Although the human population appears to have gained rather than lost vigour upon this barren soil, the horses and cattle of the country seem to have degenerated. They are remarkably diminutive. I saw cows not much bigger than Izumo calves, with calves about the size of goats. The horses, or rather ponies, belong to a special breed of which Oki is rather proud--very small, but hardy. I was told that there were larger horses, but I saw none, and could not learn whether they were imported. It seemed to me a curious thing, when I saw Oki ponies for the first time, that Sasaki Takatsuna's battle-steed--not less famous in Japanese story than the horse Kyrat in the ballads of Kurroglou--is declared by the islanders to have been a native of Oki. And they have a tradition that it once swam from Oki to Mionoseki. Sec. 17 Almost every district and town in Japan has its meibutsu or its kembutsu. The meibutsu of any place are its special productions, whether natural or artificial. The kembutsu of a town or district are its sights--its places worth visiting for any reason--religious, traditional, historical, or pleasurable. Temples and gardens, remarkable trees and curious rocks, are kembutsu. So, likewise, are any situations from which beautiful scenery may be looked at, or any localities where one can enjoy such charming spectacles as the blossoming of cherry-trees in spring, the flickering of fireflies in summer nights, the flushing of maple-leaves in autumn, or even that long snaky motion of moonlight upon water to which Chinese poets have given the delightful name of Kinryo, 'the Golden Dragon.' The great meibutsu of Oki is the same as that of Hinomisaki--dried cuttlefish; an article of food much in demand both in China and Japan. The cuttlefish of Oki and Hinomisaki and Mionoseki are all termed ika (a kind of sepia); but those caught at Mionoseki are white and average fifteen inches in length, while those of Oki and Hinomisaki rarely exceed twelve inches and have a reddish tinge. The fisheries of Mionoseki and Hinomisaki are scarcely known; but the fisheries of Oki are famed not only throughout Japan, but also in Korea and China. It is only through the tilling of the sea that the islands have become prosperous and capable of supporting thirty thousand souls upon a coast of which but a very small portion can be cultivated at all. Enormous quantities of cuttlefish are shipped to the mainland; but I have been told that the Chinese are the best customers of Oki for this product. Should the supply ever fail, the result would be disastrous beyond conception; but at present it seems inexhaustible, though the fishing has been going on for thousands of years. Hundreds of tons of cuttlefish are caught, cured, and prepared for exportation month after month; and many hundreds of acres are fertilised with the entrails and other refuse. An officer of police told me several strange facts about this fishery. On the north-eastern coast of Saigo it is no uncommon thing for one fisherman to capture upwards of two thousand cuttlefish in a single night. Boats have been burst asunder by the weight of a few hauls, and caution has to be observed in loading. Besides the sepia, however, this coast swarms with another variety of cuttlefish which also furnishes a food-staple--the formidable tako, or true octopus. Tako weighing fifteen kwan each, or nearly one hundred and twenty-five pounds, are sometimes caught near the fishing settlement of Nakamura. I was surprised to learn that there was no record of any person having been injured by these monstrous creatures. Another meibutsu of Oki is much less known than it deserves to be--the beautiful jet-black stone called bateiseki, or 'horsehoof stone.' [7] It is found only in Dogo, and never in large masses. It is about as heavy as flint, and chips like flint; but the polish which it takes is like that of agate. There are no veins or specks in it; the intense black colour never varies. Artistic objects are made of bateiseki: ink- stones, wine-cups, little boxes, small dai, or stands for vases or statuettes; even jewellery, the material being worked in the same manner as the beautiful agates of Yumachi in Izumo. These articles are comparatively costly, even in the place of their manufacture. There is an odd legend about the origin of the bateiseki. It owes its name to some fancied resemblance to a horse's hoof, either in colour, or in the semicircular marks often seen upon the stone in its natural state, and caused by its tendency to split in curved lines. But the story goes that the bateiseki was formed by the touch of the hoofs of a sacred steed, the wonderful mare of the great Minamoto warrior, Sasaki Takatsuna. She had a foal, which fell into a deep lake in Dogo, and was drowned. She plunged into the lake herself, but could not find her foal, being deceived by the reflection of her own head in the water. For a long time she sought and mourned in vain; but even the hard rocks felt for her, and where her hoofs touched them beneath the water they became changed into bateiseki. [8] Scarcely less beautiful than bateiseki, and equally black, is another Oki meibutsu, a sort of coralline marine product called umi-matsu, or 'sea-pine.' Pipe-cases, brush-stands, and other small articles are manufactured from it; and these when polished seem to be covered with black lacquer. Objects of umimatsu are rare and dear. Nacre wares, however, are very cheap in Oki; and these form another variety of meibutsu. The shells of the awabi, or 'sea-ear,' which reaches a surprising size in these western waters, are converted by skilful polishing and cutting into wonderful dishes, bowls, cups, and other articles, over whose surfaces the play of iridescence is like a flickering of fire of a hundred colours. Sec. 18 According to a little book published at Matsue, the kembutsu of Oki-no- Kuni are divided among three of the four principal islands; Chiburishima only possessing nothing of special interest. For many generations the attractions of Dogo have been the shrine of Agonashi Jizo, at Tsubamezato; the waterfall (Dangyo-taki) at Yuenimura; the mighty cedar- tree (sugi) before the shrine of Tama-Wakusa-jinja at Shimomura, and the lakelet called Sai-no-ike where the bateiseki is said to be found. Nakanoshima possesses the tomb of the exiled Emperor Go-Toba, at Amamura, and the residence of the ancient Choja, Shikekuro, where he dwelt betimes, and where relics of him are kept even to this day. Nishinoshima possesses at Beppu a shrine in memory of the exiled Emperor Go-Daigo, and on the summit of Takuhizan that shrine of Gongen-Sama, from the place of which a wonderful view of the whole archipelago is said to be obtainable on cloudless days. Though Chiburishima has no kembutsu, her poor little village of Chiburi--the same Chiburimura at which the Oki steamer always touches on her way to Saigo--is the scene of perhaps the most interesting of all the traditions of the archipelago. Five hundred and sixty years ago, the exiled Emperor Go-Daigo managed to escape from the observation of his guards, and to flee from Nishinoshima to Chiburi. And the brown sailors of that little hamlet offered to serve him, even with their lives if need be. They were loading their boats with 'dried fish,' doubtless the same dried cuttlefish which their descendants still carry to Izumo and to Hoki. The emperor promised to remember them, should they succeed in landing him either in Hoki or in Izumo; and they put him in a boat. But when they had sailed only a little way they saw the pursuing vessels. Then they told the emperor to lie down, and they piled the dried fish high above him. The pursuers came on board and searched the boat, but they did not even think of touching the strong-smelling cuttlefish. And when the men of Chiburi were questioned they invented a story, and gave to the enemies of the emperor a false clue to follow. And so, by means of the cuttlefish, the good emperor was enabled to escape from banishment. Sec. 19 I found there were various difficulties in the way of becoming acquainted with some of the kembutsu. There are no roads, properly speaking, in all Oki, only mountain paths; and consequently there are no jinricksha, with the exception of one especially imported by the leading physician of Saigo, and available for use only in the streets. There are not even any kago, or palanquins, except one for the use of the same physician. The paths are terribly rough, according to the testimony of the strong peasants themselves; and the distances, particularly in the hottest period of the year, are disheartening. Ponies can be hired; but my experiences of a similar wild country in western Izumo persuaded me that neither pleasure nor profit was to be gained by a long and painful ride over pine-covered hills, through slippery gullies and along torrent-beds, merely to look at a waterfall. I abandoned the idea of visiting Dangyotaki, but resolved, if possible, to see Agonashi-Jizo. I had first heard in Matsue of Agonashi-Jizo, while suffering from one of those toothaches in which the pain appears to be several hundred miles in depth--one of those toothaches which disturb your ideas of space and time. And a friend who sympathised said: 'People who have toothache pray to Agonashi-Jizo. Agonashi-Jizo is in Oki, but Izumo people pray to him. When cured they go to Lake Shinji, to the river, to the sea, or to any running stream, and drop into the water twelve pears (nashi), one for each of the twelve months. And they believe the currents will carry all these to Oki across the sea. 'Now, Agonashi-Jizo means 'Jizo-who-has-no-jaw.' For it is said that in one of his former lives Jizo had such a toothache in his lower jaw that he tore off his jaw, and threw it away, and died. And he became a Bosatsu. And the people of Oki made a statue of him without a jaw; and all who suffer toothache pray to that Jizo of Oki.' This story interested me for more than once I had felt a strong desire to do like Agonashi-Jizo, though lacking the necessary courage and indifference to earthly consequences. Moreover, the tradition suggested so humane and profound a comprehension of toothache, and so large a sympathy with its victims, that I felt myself somewhat consoled. Nevertheless, I did not go to see Agonashi-Jizo, because I found out there was no longer any Agonashi-Jizo to see. The news was brought one evening by some friends, shizoku of Matsue, who had settled in Oki, a young police officer and his wife. They had walked right across the island to see us, starting before daylight, and crossing no less than thirty-two torrents on their way. The wife, only nineteen, was quite slender and pretty, and did not appear tired by that long rough journey. What we learned about the famous Jizo was this: The name Agonashi-Jizo was only a popular corruption of the true name, Agonaoshi-Jizo, or 'Jizo-the-Healer-of-jaws.' The little temple in which the statue stood had been burned, and the statue along with it, except a fragment of the lower part of the figure, now piously preserved by some old peasant woman. It was impossible to rebuild the temple, as the disestablishment of Buddhism had entirely destroyed the resources of that faith in Oki. But the peasantry of Tsubamezato had built a little Shinto miya on the sight of the temple, with a torii before it, and people still prayed there to Agonaoshi-Jizo. This last curious fact reminded me of the little torii I had seen erected before the images of Jizo in the Cave of the Children's Ghosts. Shinto, in these remote districts of the west, now appropriates the popular divinities of Buddhism, just as of old Buddhism used to absorb the divinities of Shinto in other parts of Japan. Sec. 20 I went to the Sai-no-ike, and to Tama-Wakasu-jinja, as these two kembutsu can be reached by boat. The Sai-no-ike, however, much disappointed me. It can only be visited in very calm weather, as the way to it lies along a frightfully dangerous coast, nearly all sheer precipice. But the sea is beautifully clear and the eye can distinguish forms at an immense depth below the surface. After following the cliffs for about an hour, the boat reaches a sort of cove, where the beach is entirely corn posed of small round boulders. They form a long ridge, the outer verge of which is always in motion, rolling to and fro with a crash like a volley of musketry at the rush and ebb of every wave. To climb over this ridge of moving stone balls is quite disagreeable; but after that one has only about twenty yards to walk, and the Sai-no-ike appears, surrounded on sides by wooded hills. It is little more than a large freshwater pool, perhaps fifty yards wide, not in any way wonderful You can see no rocks under the surface--only mud and pebbles That any part of it was ever deep enough to drown a foal is hard to believe. I wanted to swim across to the farther side to try the depth, but the mere proposal scandalised the boat men. The pool was sacred to the gods, and was guarded by invisible monsters; to enter it was impious and dangerous I felt obliged to respect the local ideas on the subject, and contented myself with inquiring where the bateiseki was found. They pointed to the hill on the western side of the water. This indication did not tally with the legend. I could discover no trace of any human labour on that savage hillside; there was certainly no habitation within miles of the place; it was the very abomination of desolation. [9] It is never wise for the traveller in Japan to expect much on the strength of the reputation of kembutsu. The interest attaching to the vast majority of kembutsu depends altogether upon the exercise of imagination; and the ability to exercise such imagination again depends upon one's acquaintance with the history and mythology of the country. Knolls, rocks, stumps of trees, have been for hundreds of years objects of reverence for the peasantry, solely because of local traditions relating to them. Broken iron kettles, bronze mirrors covered with verdigris, rusty pieces of sword blades, fragments of red earthenware, have drawn generations of pilgrims to the shrines in which they are preserved. At various small temples which I visited, the temple treasures consisted of trays full of small stones. The first time I saw those little stones I thought that the priests had been studying geology or mineralogy, each stone being labelled in Japanese characters. On examination, the stones proved to be absolutely worthless in themselves, even as specimens of neighbouring rocks. But the stories which the priests or acolytes could tell about each and every stone were more than interesting. The stones served as rude beads, in fact, for the recital of a litany of Buddhist legends. After the experience of the Sai-no-ike, I had little reason to expect to see anything extraordinary at Shimonishimura. But this time I was agreeably mistaken. Shimonishimura is a pretty fishing village within an hour's row from Saigo. The boat follows a wild but beautiful coast, passing one singular truncated hill, Oshiroyama, upon which a strong castle stood in ancient times. There is now only a small Shinto shrine there, surrounded by pines. From the hamlet of Shimonishimura to the Temple of Tama-Wakasu-jinja is a walk of twenty minutes, over very rough paths between rice-fields and vegetable gardens. But the situation of the temple, surrounded by its sacred grove, in the heart of a landscape framed in by mountain ranges of many colours, is charmingly impressive. The edifice seems to have once been a Buddhist temple; it is now the largest Shinto structure in Oki. Before its gate stands the famous cedar, not remarkable for height, but wonderful for girth. Two yards above the soil its circumference is forty-five feet. It has given its name to the holy place; the Oki peasantry scarcely ever speak of Tama- Wakasu-jinja, but only of 'O-Sugi,' the Great Cedar. Tradition avers that this tree was planted by a Buddhist nun more than eight hundred years ago. And it is alleged that whoever eats with chopsticks made from the wood of that tree will never have the toothache, and will live to become exceedingly old.[10] Sec. 21 The shrine dedicated to the spirit of the Emperor Go-Daigo is in Nishinoshima, at Beppu, a picturesque fishing village composed of one long street of thatched cottages fringing a bay at the foot of a demilune of hills. The simplicity of manners and the honest healthy poverty of the place are quite wonderful even for Oki. There is a kind of inn for strangers at which hot water is served instead of tea, and dried beans instead of kwashi, and millet instead of rice. The absence of tea, however, is much more significant than that of rice. But the people of Beppu do not suffer for lack of proper nourishment, as their robust appearance bears witness: there are plenty of vegetables, all raised in tiny gardens which the women and children till during the absence of the boats; and there is abundance of fish. There is no Buddhist temple, but there is an ujigami. The shrine of the emperor is at the top of a hill called Kurokizan, at one end of the bay. The hill is covered with tall pines, and the path is very steep, so that I thought it prudent to put on straw sandals, in which one never slips. I found the shrine to be a small wooden miya, scarcely three feet high, and black with age. There were remains of other miya, much older, lying in some bushes near by. Two large stones, unhewn and without inscriptions of any sort, have been placed before the shrine. I looked into it, and saw a crumbling metal-mirror, dingy paper gohei attached to splints of bamboo, two little o-mikidokkuri, or Shinto sake-vessels of red earthenware, and one rin. There was nothing else to see, except, indeed, certain delightful glimpses of coast and peak, visible in the bursts of warm blue light which penetrated the consecrated shadow, between the trunks of the great pines. Only this humble shrine commemorates the good emperor's sojourn among the peasantry of Oki. But there is now being erected by voluntary subscription, at the little village of Gosen-goku-mura, near Yonago in Tottori, quite a handsome monument of stone to the memory of his daughter, the princess Hinako-Nai-Shinno who died there while attempting to follow her august parent into exile. Near the place of her rest stands a famous chestnut-tree, of which this story is told: While the emperor's daughter was ill, she asked for chestnuts; and some were given to her. But she took only one, and bit it a little, and threw it away. It found root and became a grand tree. But all the chestnuts of that tree bear marks like the marks of little teeth; for in Japanese legend even the trees are loyal, and strive to show their loyalty in all sorts of tender dumb ways. And that tree is called Hagata-guri-no-ki, which signifies: 'The Tree-of-the-Tooth-marked-Chestnuts.' Sec. 22 Long before visiting Oki I had heard that such a crime as theft was unknown in the little archipelago; that it had never been found necessary there to lock things up; and that, whenever weather permitted, the people slept with their houses all open to the four winds of heaven. And after careful investigation, I found these surprising statements were, to a great extent, true. In the Dozen group, at least, there are no thieves, and practically no crime. Ten policemen are sufficient to control the whole of both Dozen and Dogo, with their population of thirty thousand one hundred and ninety-six souls. Each policeman has under his inspection a number of villages, which he visits on regular days; and his absence for any length of time from one of these seems never to be taken advantage of. His work is mostly confined to the enforcement of hygienic regulations, and to the writing of reports. It is very seldom that he finds it necessary to make an arrest, for the people scarcely ever quarrel. In the island of Dogo alone are there ever any petty thefts, and only in that part of Oki do the people take any precautions against thieves. Formerly there was no prison, and thefts were never heard of; and the people of Dogo still claim that the few persons arrested in their island for such offences are not natives of Oki, but strangers from the mainland. What appears to be quite true is that theft was unknown in Oki before the port of Saigo obtained its present importance. The whole trade of Western Japan has been increased by the rapid growth of steam communications with other parts of the empire; and the port of Saigo appears to have gained commercially, but to have lost morally, by the new conditions. Yet offences against the law are still surprisingly few, even in Saigo. Saigo has a prison; and there were people in it during my stay in the city; but the inmates had been convicted only of such misdemeanours as gambling (which is strictly prohibited in every form by Japanese law), or the violation of lesser ordinances. When a serious offence is committed, the offender is not punished in Oki, but is sent to the great prison at Matsue, in Izumo. The Dozen islands, however, perfectly maintain their ancient reputation for irreproachable honesty. There have been no thieves in those three islands within the memory of man; and there are no serious quarrels, no fighting, nothing to make life miserable for anybody. Wild and bleak as the land is, all can manage to live comfortably enough; food is cheap and plenty, and manners and customs have retained their primitive simplicity. Sec. 23 To foreign eyes the defences of even an Izumo dwelling against thieves seem ludicrous. Chevaux-de-frise of bamboo stakes are used extensively in eastern cities of the empire, but in Izumo these are not often to be seen, and do not protect the really weak points of the buildings upon which they are placed. As for outside walls and fences, they serve only for screens, or for ornamental boundaries; anyone can climb over them. Anyone can also cut his way into an ordinary Japanese house with a pocket-knife. The amado are thin sliding screens of soft wood, easy to break with a single blow; and in most Izumo homes there is not a lock which could resist one vigorous pull. Indeed, the Japanese themselves are so far aware of the futility of their wooden panels against burglars that all who can afford it build kura--small heavy fire-proof and (for Japan) almost burglar-proof structures, with very thick earthen walls, a narrow ponderous door fastened with a gigantic padlock, and one very small iron-barred window, high up, near the roof. The kura are whitewashed, and look very neat. They cannot be used for dwellings, however, as they are mouldy and dark; and they serve only as storehouses for valuables. It is not easy to rob a kura. But there is no trouble in 'burglariously' entering an Izumo dwelling unless there happen to be good watchdogs on the premises. The robber knows the only difficulties in the way of his enterprise are such as he is likely to encounter after having effected an entrance. In view of these difficulties, he usually carries a sword. Nevertheless, he does not wish to find himself in any predicament requiring the use of a sword; and to avoid such an unpleasant possibility he has recourse to magic. He looks about the premises for a tarai--a kind of tub. If he finds one, he performs a nameless operation in a certain part of the yard, and covers the spot with the tub, turned upside down. He believes if he can do this that a magical sleep will fall upon all the inmates of the house, and that he will thus be able to carry away whatever he pleases, without being heard or seen. But every Izumo household knows the counter-charm. Each evening, before retiring, the careful wife sees that a hocho, or kitchen knife, is laid upon the kitchen floor, and covered with a kanadarai, or brazen wash- basin, on the upturned bottom of which is placed a single straw sandal, of the noiseless sort called zori, also turned upside down. She believes this little bit of witchcraft will not only nullify the robber's spell, but also render it impossible for him--even should he succeed in entering the house without being seen or heard--to carry anything whatever away. But, unless very tired indeed, she will also see that the tarai is brought into the house before the amado are closed for the night. If through omission of these precautions (as the good wife might aver), or in despite of them, the dwelling be robbed while the family are asleep, search is made early in the morning for the footprints of the burglar; and a moxa [11] is set burning upon each footprint. By this operation it is hoped or believed that the burglar's feet will be made so sore that he cannot run far, and that the police may easily overtake him. Sec. 24 It was in Oki that I first heard of an extraordinary superstition about the cause of okori (ague, or intermittent fever), mild forms of which prevail in certain districts at certain seasons; but I have since learned that this quaint belief is an old one in Izumo and in many parts of the San-indo. It is a curious example of the manner in which Buddhism has been used to explain all mysteries. Okori is said to be caused by the Gaki-botoke, or hungry ghosts. Strictly speaking, the Gaki-botoke are the Pretas of Indian Buddhism, spirits condemned to sojourn in the Gakido, the sphere of the penance of perpetual hunger and thirst. But in Japanese Buddhism, the name Gaki is given also to those souls who have none among the living to remember them, and to prepare for them the customary offerings of food and tea. These suffer, and seek to obtain warmth and nutriment by entering into the bodies of the living. The person into whom a gaki enters at first feels intensely cold and shivers, because the gaki is cold. But the chill is followed by a feeling of intense heat, as the gaki becomes warm. Having warmed itself and absorbed some nourishment at the expense of its unwilling host, the gaki goes away, and the fever ceases for a time. But at exactly the same hour upon another day the gaki will return, and the victim must shiver and burn until the haunter has become warm and has satisfied its hunger. Some gaki visit their patients every day; others every alternate day, or even less often. In brief: the paroxysms of any form of intermittent fever are explained by the presence of the gaki, and the intervals between the paroxysms by its absence. Sec. 25 Of the word hotoke (which becomes botoke in such com-pounds as nure- botoke, [12] gaki-botoke) there is something curious to say. Hotoke signifies a Buddha. Hotoke signifies also the Souls of the Dead--since faith holds that these, after worthy life, either enter upon the way to Buddhahood, or become Buddhas. Hotoke, by euphemism, has likewise come to mean a corpse: hence the verb hotoke-zukuri, 'to look ghastly,' to have the semblance of one long dead. And Hotoke-San is the name of the Image of a Face seen in the pupil of the eye--Hotoke-San, 'the Lord Buddha.' Not the Supreme of the Hokkekyo, but that lesser Buddha who dwelleth in each one of us,--the Spirit. [13] Sang Rossetti: 'I looked and saw your heart in the shadow of your eyes.' Exactly converse is the Oriental thought. A Japanese lover would have said: 'I looked and saw my own Buddha in the shadow of your eyes. What is the psychical theory connected with so singular a belief? [14] I think it might be this: The Soul, within its own body, always remains viewless, yet may reflect itself in the eyes of another, as in the mirror of a necromancer. Vainly you gaze into the eyes of the beloved to discern her soul: you see there only your own soul's shadow, diaphanous; and beyond is mystery alone--reaching to the Infinite. But is not this true? The Ego, as Schopenhauer wonderfully said, is the dark spot in consciousness, even as the point whereat the nerve of sight enters the eye is blind. We see ourselves in others only; only through others do we dimly guess that which we are. And in the deepest love of another being do we not indeed love ourselves? What are the personalities, the individualities of us but countless vibrations in the Universal Being? Are we not all One in the unknowable Ultimate? One with the inconceivable past? One with the everlasting future? Sec. 26 In Oki, as in Izumo, the public school is slowly but surely destroying many of the old superstitions. Even the fishermen of the new generation laugh at things in which their fathers believed. I was rather surprised to receive from an intelligent young sailor, whom I had questioned through an interpreter about the ghostly fire of Takuhizan, this scornful answer: 'Oh, we used to believe those things when we were savages; but we are civilised now!' Nevertheless, he was somewhat in advance of his time. In the village to which he belonged I discovered that the Fox-.superstition prevails to a degree scarcely paralleled in any part of Izumo. The history of the village was quite curious. From time immemorial it had been reputed a settlement of Kitsune-mochi: in other words, all its inhabitants were commonly believed, and perhaps believed themselves, to be the owners of goblin-foxes. And being all alike kitsune-mochi, they could eat and drink together, and marry and give in marriage among themselves without affliction. They were feared with a ghostly fear by the neighbouring peasantry, who obeyed their demands both in matters reasonable and unreasonable. They prospered exceedingly. But some twenty years ago an Izumo stranger settled among them. He was energetic, intelligent, and possessed of some capital. He bought land, made various shrewd investments, and in a surprisingly short time became the wealthiest citizen in the place. He built a very pretty Shinto temple and presented it to the community. There was only one obstacle in the way of his becoming a really popular person: he was not a kitsune-mochi, and he had even said that he hated foxes. This singularity threatened to beget discords in the mura, especially as he married his children to strangers, and thus began in the midst of the kitsune-mochi to establish a sort of anti-Fox-holding colony. Wherefore, for a long time past, the Fox-holders have been trying to force their superfluous goblins upon him. Shadows glide about the gate of his dwelling on moonless nights, muttering: 'Kaere! kyo kara kokoye: kuruda!' [Be off now! from now hereafter it is here that ye must dwell: go!] Then are the upper shoji violently pushed apart; and the voice of the enraged house owner is heard: 'Koko Wa kiraida! modori!' [Detestable is that which ye do! get ye gone!] And the Shadows flee away.[15] Sec. 27 Because there were no cuttlefish at Hishi-ura, and no horrid smells, I enjoyed myself there more than I did anywhere else in Oki. But, in any event, Hishi-ura would have interested me more than Saigo. The life of the pretty little town is peculiarly old-fashioned; and the ancient domestic industries, which the introduction of machinery has almost destroyed in Izumo and elsewhere, still exist in Hishi-ura. It was pleasant to watch the rosy girls weaving robes of cotton and robes of silk, relieving each other whenever the work became fatiguing. All this quaint gentle life is open to inspection, and I loved to watch it. I had other pleasures also: the bay is a delightful place for swimming, and there were always boats ready to take me to any place of interest along the coast. At night the sea breeze made the rooms which I occupied deliciously cool; and from the balcony I could watch the bay-swell breaking in slow, cold fire on the steps of the wharves--a beautiful phosphorescence; and I could hear Oki mothers singing their babes to sleep with one of the oldest lullabys in the world: Nenneko, O-yama no Usagi. no ko, Naze mata O-mimi ga Nagai e yara? Okkasan no O-nak ni Oru toku ni, BiWa no ha, Sasa no ha, Tabeta sona; Sore de O-mimi ga Nagai e sona. [16] The air was singularly sweet and plaintive, quite different from that to which the same words are sung in Izumo, and in other parts of Japan. One morning I had hired a boat to take me to Beppu, and was on the point of leaving the hotel for the day, when the old landlady, touching my arm, exclaimed: 'Wait a little while; it is not good to cross a funeral.' I looked round the corner, and saw the procession coming along the shore. It was a Shinto funeral--a child's funeral. Young lads came first, carrying Shinto emblems--little white flags, and branches of the sacred sakaki; and after the coffin the mother walked, a young peasant, crying very loud, and wiping her eyes with the long sleeves of her coarse blue dress. Then the old woman at my side murmured: 'She sorrows; but she is very young: perhaps It will come back to her.' For she was a pious Buddhist, my good old landlady, and doubtless supposed the mother's belief like her own, although the funeral was conducted according to the Shinto rite. Sec. 28 There are in Buddhism certain weirdly beautiful consolations unknown to Western faith. The young mother who loses her first child may at least pray that it will come back to her out of the night of death--not in dreams only, but through reincarnation. And so praying, she writes within the hand of the little corpse the first ideograph of her lost darling's name. Months pass; she again becomes a mother. Eagerly she examines the flower-soft hand of the infant. And lo! the self-same ideograph is there--a rosy birth-mark on the tender palm; and the Soul returned looks out upon her through the eyes of the newly-born with the gaze of other days. Sec. 29 While on the subject of death I may speak of a primitive but touching custom which exists both in Oki and Izumo--that of calling the name of the dead immediately after death. For it is thought that the call may be heard by the fleeting soul, which might sometimes be thus induced to return. Therefore, when a mother dies, the children should first call her, and of all the children first the youngest (for she loved that one most); and then the husband and all those who loved the dead cry to her in turn. And it is also the custom to call loudly the name of one who faints, or becomes insensible from any cause; and there are curious beliefs underlying this custom. It is said that of those who swoon from pain or grief especially, many approach very nearly to death, and these always have the same experience. 'You feel,' said one to me in answer to my question about the belief, 'as if you were suddenly somewhere else, and quite happy-- only tired. And you know that you want to go to a Buddhist temple which is quite far away. At last you reach the gate of the temple court, and you see the temple inside, and it is wonderfully large and beautiful. And you pass the gate and enter the court to go to the temple. But suddenly you hear voices of friends far behind you calling your name-- very, very earnestly. So you turn back, and all at once you come to yourself again. At least it is so if your heart cares to live. But one who is really tired of living will not listen to the voices, and walks on to the temple. And what there happens no man knows, for they who enter that temple never return to their friends. 'That is why people call loudly into the ear of one who swoons. 'Now, it is said that all who die, before going to the Meido, make one pilgrimage to the great temple of Zenkoji, which is in the country of Shinano, in Nagano-Ken. And they say that whenever the priest of that temple preaches, he sees the Souls gather there in the hondo to hear him, all with white wrappings about their heads. So Zenkoji might be the temple which is seen by those who swoon. But I do not know.' Sec. 30 I went by boat from Hishi-ura to Amamura, in Nakanoshima, to visit the tomb of the exiled Emperor Go-Toba. The scenery along the way was beautiful, and of softer outline than I had seen on my first passage through the archipelago. Small rocks rising from the water were covered with sea-gulls and cormorants, which scarcely took any notice of the boat, even when we came almost within an oar's length. This fearlessness of wild creatures is one of the most charming impressions of travel in these remoter parts of Japan, yet unvisited by tourists with shotguns. The early European and American hunters in Japan seem to have found no difficulty and felt no compunction in exterminating what they considered 'game' over whole districts, destroying life merely for the wanton pleasure of destruction. Their example is being imitated now by 'Young Japan,' and the destruction of bird life is only imperfectly checked by game laws. Happily, the Government does interfere sometimes to check particular forms of the hunting vice. Some brutes who had observed the habits of swallows to make their nests in Japanese houses, last year offered to purchase some thousands of swallow-skins at a tempting price. The effect of the advertisement was cruel enough; but the police were promptly notified to stop the murdering, which they did. About the same time, in one of the Yokohama papers, there appeared a letter from some holy person announcing, as a triumph of Christian sentiment, that a 'converted' fisherman had been persuaded by foreign proselytisers to kill a turtle, which his Buddhist comrades had vainly begged him to spare. Amarnura, a very small village, lies in a narrow plain of rice-fields extending from the sea to a range of low hills. From the landing-place to the village is about a quarter of a mile. The narrow path leading to it passes round the base of a small hill, covered with pines, on the outskirts of the village. There is quite a handsome Shinto temple on the hill, small, but admirably constructed, approached by stone steps and a paved walk. There are the usual lions and lamps of stone, and the ordinary simple offerings of paper and women's hair before the shrine. But I saw among the ex-voto a number of curious things which I had never seen in Izumo-- tiny miniature buckets, well-buckets, with rope and pole complete, neatly fashioned out of bamboo. The boatman said that farmers bring these to the shrine when praying for rain. The deity was called Suwa- Dai-Myojin. It was at the neighbouring village, of which Suwa-Dai-Myojin seems to be the ujigami, that the Emperor Go-Toba is said to have dwelt, in the house of the Choja Shikekuro. The Shikekuro homestead remains, and still belongs to the Choja'sa descendants, but they have become very poor. I asked permission to see the cups from which the exiled emperor drank, and other relics of his stay said to be preserved by the family; but in consequence of illness in the house I could not be received. So I had only a glimpse of the garden, where there is a celebrated pond--a kembutsu. The pond is called Shikekuro's Pond,--Shikekuro-no-ike. And for seven hundred years, 'tis said, the frogs of that pond have never been heard to croak. For the Emperor Go-Toba, having one night been kept awake by the croaking of the frogs in that pond, arose and went out and commanded them, saying: 'Be silent!' Wherefore they have remained silent through all the centuries even unto this day. Near the pond there was in that time a great pine-tree, of which the rustling upon windy nights disturbed the emperor's rest. And he spoke to the pine-tree, and said to it: 'Be still!' And never thereafter was that tree heard to rustle, even in time of storms. But that tree has ceased to be. Nothing remains of it but a few fragments of its wood and hark, which are carefully preserved as relics by the ancients of Oki. Such a fragment was shown to me in the toko of the guest chamber of the dwelling of a physician of Saigo--the same gentleman whose kindness I have related elsewhere. The tomb of the emperor lies on the slope of a low hill, at a distance of about ten minutes' walk from the village. It is far less imposing than the least of the tombs of the Matsudaira at Matsue, in the grand old courts of Gesshoji; but it was perhaps the best which the poor little country of Oki could furnish. This is not, however, the original place of the tomb, which was moved by imperial order in the sixth year of Meiji to its present site. A lofty fence, or rather stockade of heavy wooden posts, painted black, incloses a piece of ground perhaps one hundred and fifty feet long, by about fifty broad, and graded into three levels, or low terraces. All the space within is shaded by pines. In the centre of the last and highest of the little terraces the tomb is placed: a single large slab of grey rock laid horizontally. A narrow paved walk leads from the gate to the tomb; ascending each terrace by three or four stone steps. A little within this gateway, which is opened to visitors only once a year, there is a torii facing the sepulchre; and before the highest terrace there are a pair of stone lamps. All this is severely simple, but effective in a certain touching way. The country stillness is broken only by the shrilling of the semi and the tintinnabulation of that strange little insect, the suzumushi, whose calling sounds just like the tinkling of the tiny bells which are shaken by the miko in her sacred dance. Sec. 31 I remained nearly eight days at Hishi-ura on the occasion of my second visit there, but only three at Urago. Urago proved a less pleasant place to stay in--not because its smells were any stronger than those of Saigo, but for other reasons which shall presently appear. More than one foreign man-of-war has touched at Saigo, and English and Russian officers of the navy have been seen in the streets. They were tall, fair-haired, stalwart men; and the people of Oki still imagine that all foreigners from the West have the same stature and complexion. I was the first foreigner who ever remained even a night in the town, and I stayed there two weeks; but being small and dark, and dressed like a Japanese, I excited little attention among the common people: it seemed to them that I was only a curious-looking Japanese from some remote part of the empire. At Hishi-ura the same impression prevailed for a time; and even after the fact of my being a foreigner had become generally known, the population caused me no annoyance whatever: they had already become accustomed to see me walking about the streets or swimming across the bay. But it was quite otherwise at Urago. The first time I landed there I had managed to escape notice, being in Japanese costume, and wearing a very large Izumo hat, which partly concealed my face. After I left for Saigo, the people must have found out that a foreigner--the very first ever seen in Dozen--had actually been in Urago without their knowledge; for my second visit made a sensation such as I had never been the cause of anywhere else, except at Kaka-ura. I had barely time to enter the hotel, before the street became entirely blockaded by an amazing crowd desirous to see. The hotel was unfortunately situated on a corner, so that it was soon besieged on two sides. I was shown to a large back room on the second floor; and I had no sooner squatted down on my mat, than the people began to come upstairs quite noiselessly, all leaving their sandals at the foot of the steps. They were too polite to enter the room; but four or five would put their heads through the doorway at once, and bow, and smile, and look, and retire to make way for those who filled the stairway behind them. It was no easy matter for the servant to bring me my dinner. Meanwhile, not only had the upper rooms of the houses across the way become packed with gazers, but all the roofs--north, east, and south-- which commanded a view of my apartment had been occupied by men and boys in multitude. Numbers of lads had also climbed (I never could imagine how) upon the narrow eaves over the galleries below my windows; and all the openings of my room, on three sides, were full of faces. Then tiles gave way, and boys fell, but nobody appeared to be hurt. And the queerest fact was that during the performance of these extraordinary gymnastics there was a silence of death: had I not seen the throng, I might have supposed there was not a soul in the street. The landlord began to scold; but, finding scolding of no avail, he summoned a policeman. The policeman begged me to excuse the people, who had never seen a foreigner before; and asked me if I wished him to clear the street. He could have done that by merely lifting his little finger; but as the scene amused me, I begged him not to order the people away, but only to tell the boys not to climb upon the awnings, some of which they had already damaged. He told them most effectually, speaking in a very low voice. During all the rest of the time I was in Urago, no one dared to go near the awnings. A Japanese policeman never speaks more than once about anything new, and always speaks to the purpose. The public curiosity, however, lasted without abate for three days, and would have lasted longer if I had not fled from Urago. Whenever I went out I drew the population after me with a pattering of geta like the sound of surf moving shingle. Yet, except for that particular sound, there was silence. No word was spoken. Whether this was because the whole mental faculty was so strained by the intensity of the desire to see that speech became impossible, I am not able to decide. But there was no roughness in all that curiosity; there was never anything approaching rudeness, except in the matter of ascending to my room without leave; and that was done so gently that I could not wish the intruders rebuked. Nevertheless, three days of such experience proved trying. Despite the heat, I had to close the doors and windows at night to prevent myself being watched while asleep. About my effects I had no anxiety at all: thefts are never committed in the island. But that perpetual silent crowding about me became at last more than embarrassing. It was innocent, but it was weird. It made me feel like a ghost--a new arrival in the Meido, surrounded by shapes without voice. Sec. 32 There is very little privacy of any sort in Japanese life. Among the people, indeed, what we term privacy in the Occident does not exist. There are only walls of paper dividing the lives of men; there are only sliding screens instead of doors; there are neither locks nor bolts to be used by day; and whenever weather permits, the fronts, and perhaps even the sides of the house are literally removed, and its interior widely opened to the air, the light, and the public gaze. Not even the rich man closes his front gate by day. Within a hotel or even a common dwelling-house, nobody knocks before entering your room: there is nothing to knock at except a shoji or fusuma, which cannot be knocked upon without being broken. And in this world of paper walls and sunshine, nobody is afraid or ashamed of fellow-men or fellow-women. Whatever is done, is done, after a fashion, in public. Your personal habits, your idiosyncrasies (if you have any), your foibles, your likes and dislikes, your loves or your hates, must be known to everybody. Neither vices nor virtues can be hidden: there is absolutely nowhere to hide them. And this condition has lasted from the most ancient time. There has never been, for the common millions at least, even the idea of living unobserved. Life can be comfortably and happily lived in Japan only upon the condition that all matters relating to it are open to the inspection of the community. Which implies exceptional moral conditions, such as have no being in the West. It is perfectly comprehensible only to those who know by experience the extraordinary charm of Japanese character, the infinite goodness of the common people, their instinctive politeness, and the absence among them of any tendencies to indulge in criticism, ridicule, irony, or sarcasm. No one endeavours to expand his own individuality by belittling his fellow; no one tries to make himself appear a superior being: any such attempt would be vain in a community where the weaknesses of each are known to all, where nothing can be concealed or disguised, and where affectation could only be regarded as a mild form of insanity. Sec. 33 Some of the old samurai of Matsue are living in the Oki Islands. When the great military caste was disestablished, a few shrewd men decided to try their fortunes in the little archipelago, where customs remained old-fashioned and lands were cheap. Several succeeded--probably because of the whole-souled honesty and simplicity of manners in the islands; for samurai have seldom elsewhere been able to succeed in business of any sort when obliged to compete with experienced traders, Others failed, but were able to adopt various humble occupations which gave them the means to live. Besides these aged survivors of the feudal period, I learned there were in Oki several children of once noble families--youths and maidens of illustrious extraction--bravely facing the new conditions of life in this remotest and poorest region of the empire. Daughters of men to whom the population of a town once bowed down were learning the bitter toil of the rice-fields. Youths, who might in another era have aspired to offices of State, had become the trusted servants of Oki heimin. Others, again, had entered the police, [17] and rightly deemed themselves fortunate. No doubt that change of civilisation forced upon Japan by Christian bayonets, for the holy motive of gain, may yet save the empire from perils greater than those of the late social disintegration; but it was cruelly sudden. To imagine the consequence of depriving the English landed gentry of their revenues would not enable one to realise exactly what a similar privation signified to the Japanese samurai. For the old warrior caste knew only the arts of courtesy and the arts of war. And hearing of these things, I could not help thinking about a strange pageant at the last great Izumo festival of Rakuzan-jinja. Sec. 34 The hamlet of Rakuzan, known only for its bright yellow pottery and its little Shinto temple, drowses at the foot of a wooded hill about one ri from Matsue, beyond a wilderness of rice-fields. And the deity of Rakuzan-jinja is Naomasa, grandson of Iyeyasu, and father of the Daimyo of Matsue. Some of the Matsudaira slumber in Buddhist ground, guarded by tortoises and lions of stone, in the marvellous old courts of Gesshoji. But Naomasa, the founder of their long line, is enshrined at Rakuzan; and the Izumo peasants still clap their hands in prayer before his miya, and implore his love and protection. Now formerly upon each annual matsuri, or festival, of Rakuzan-jinja, it was customary to carry the miya of Naomasa-San from the village temple to the castle of Matsue. In solemn procession it was borne to .those strange old family temples in the heart of the fortress-grounds--Go-jo- naiInari-Daimyojin, and Kusunoki-Matauhira-Inari-Daimyojin--whose mouldering courts, peopled with lions and foxes of stone, are shadowed by enormous trees. After certain Shinto rites had been performed at both temples, the miya was carried back in procession to Rakuzan. And this annual ceremony was called the miyuki or togyo--'the August Going,' or Visit, of the ancestor to the ancestral home. But the revolution changed all things. The daimyo passed away; the castles fell to ruin; the samurai caste was abolished and dispossessed. And the miya of Lord Naomasa made no August Visit to the home of the Mataudaira for more than thirty years. But it came to pass a little time ago, that certain old men of Matsue bethought them to revive once more the ancient customs of the Rakuzan matauri. And there was a miyuki. The miya of Lord Naomasa was placed within a barge, draped and decorated, and so conveyed by river and canal to the eastern end of the old Mataubara road, along whose pine-shaded way the daimyo formerly departed to Yedo on their annual visit, or returned therefrom. All those who rowed the barge were aged samurai who had been wont in their youth to row the barge of Matsudaira-Dewa-no-Kami, the last Lord of Izumo. They wore their ancient feudal costume; and they tried to sing their ancient boat-song--o-funa-uta. But more than a generation had passed since the last time they had sung it; and some of them had lost their teeth, so that they could not pronounce the words well; and all, being aged, lost breath easily in the exertion of wielding the oars. Nevertheless they rowed the barge to the place appointed. Thence the shrine was borne to a spot by the side of the Mataubara road, where anciently stood an August Tea-House, O-Chaya, at which the daimyo, returning from the Shogun's capital, were accustomed to rest and to receive their faithful retainers, who always came in procession to meet them. No tea-house stands there now; but, in accord with old custom, the shrine and its escort waited at the place among the wild flowers and the pines. And then was seen a strange sight. For there came to meet the ghost of the great lord a long procession of shapes that seemed ghosts also--shapes risen out of the dust of cemeteries: warriors in created helmets and masks of iron and breastplates of steel, girded with two swords; and spearmen wearing queues; and retainers in kamishimo; and bearers of hasami-bako. Yet ghosts these were not, but aged samurai of Matsue, who had borne arms in the service of the last of the daimyo. And among them appeared his surviving ministers, the venerable karo; and these, as the procession turned city-ward, took their old places of honour, and marched before the shrine valiantly, though bent with years. How that pageant might have impressed other strangers I do not know. For me, knowing something of the history of each of those aged men, the scene had a significance apart from its story of forgotten customs, apart from its interest as a feudal procession. To-day each and all of those old samurai are unspeakably poor. Their beautiful homes vanished long ago; their gardens have been turned into rice-fields; their household treasures were cruelly bargained for, and bought for almost nothing by curio-dealers to be resold at high prices to foreigners at the open ports. And yet what they could have obtained considerable money for, and what had ceased to be of any service to them, they clung to fondly through all their poverty and humiliation. Never could they be induced to part with their armour and their swords, even when pressed by direst want, under the new and harder conditions of existence. The river banks, the streets, the balconies, and blue-tiled roofs were thronged. There was a great quiet as the procession passed. Young people gazed in hushed wonder, feeling the rare worth of that chance to look upon what will belong in the future to picture-books only and to the quaint Japanese stage. And old men wept silently, remembering their youth. Well spake the ancient thinker: 'Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers, and that which is remembered.' Sec. 35 Once more, homeward bound, I sat upon the cabin-roof of the Oki-Saigo-- this time happily unencumbered by watermelons--and tried to explain to myself the feeling of melancholy with which I watched those wild island- coasts vanishing over the pale sea into the white horizon. No doubt it was inspired partly by the recollection of kindnesses received from many whom I shall never meet again; partly, also, by my familiarity with the ancient soil itself, and remembrance of shapes and places: the long blue visions down channels between islands--the faint grey fishing hamlets hiding in stony bays--the elfish oddity of narrow streets in little primitive towns--the forms and tints of peak and vale made lovable by daily intimacy--the crooked broken paths to shadowed shrines of gods with long mysterious names--the butterfly-drifting of yellow sails out of the glow of an unknown horizon. Yet I think it was due much more to a particular sensation in which every memory was steeped and toned, as a landscape is steeped in the light and toned in the colours of the morning: the sensation of conditions closer to Nature's heart, and farther from the monstrous machine-world of Western life than any into which I had ever entered north of the torrid zone. And then it seemed to me that I loved Oki--in spite of the cuttlefish--chiefly because of having felt there, as nowhere else in Japan, the full joy of escape from the far-reaching influences of high-pressure civilisation--the delight of knowing one's self, in Dozen at least, well beyond the range of everything artificial in human existence. Chapter Nine Of Souls Kinjuro, the ancient gardener, whose head shines like an ivory ball, sat him down a moment on the edge of the ita-no-ma outside my study to smoke his pipe at the hibachi always left there for him. And as he smoked he found occasion to reprove the boy who assists him. What the boy had been doing I did not exactly know; but I heard Kinjuro bid him try to comport himself like a creature having more than one Soul. And because those words interested me I went out and sat down by Kinjuro. 'O Kinjuro,' I said, 'whether I myself have one or more Souls I am not sure. But it would much please me to learn how many Souls have you.' 'I-the-Selfish-One have only four Souls,' made answer Kinjuro, with conviction imperturbable. 'Four? re-echoed I, feeling doubtful of having understood 'Four,' he repeated. 'But that boy I think can have only one Soul, so much is he wanting in patience.' 'And in what manner,' I asked, 'came you to learn that you have four Souls?' 'There are wise men,' made he answer, while knocking the ashes out of his little silver pipe, 'there are wise men who know these things. And there is an ancient book which discourses of them. According to the age of a man, and the time of his birth, and the stars of heaven, may the number of his Souls be divined. But this is the knowledge of old men: the young folk of these times who learn the things of the West do not believe.' 'And tell me, O Kinjuro, do there now exist people having more Souls than you?' 'Assuredly. Some have five, some six, some seven, some eight Souls. But no one is by the gods permitted to have more Souls than nine.' [Now this, as a universal statement, I could not believe, remembering a woman upon the other side of the world who possessed many generations of Souls, and knew how to use them all. She wore her Souls just as other women wear their dresses, and changed them several times a day; and the multitude of dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to the multitude of this wonderful person's Souls. For which reason she never appeared the same upon two different occasions; and she changed her thought and her voice with her Souls. Sometimes she was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and people doubted their own senses when they saw these things; and they tried to find out the truth by begging photographs of her, and then comparing them. Now the photographers rejoiced to photograph her because she was more than fair; but presently they also were confounded by the discovery that she was never the same subject twice. So the men who most admired her could not presume to fall in love with her because that would have been absurd. She had altogether too many Souls. And some of you who read this I have written will bear witness to the verity thereof.] 'Concerning this Country of the Gods, O Kinjuro, that which you say may be true. But there are other countries having only gods made of gold; and in those countries matters are not so well arranged; and the inhabitants thereof are plagued with a plague of Souls. For while some have but half a Soul, or no Soul at all, others have Souls in multitude thrust upon them, for which neither nutriment nor employ can be found. And Souls thus situated torment exceedingly their owners. . . . .That is to say, Western Souls. . . . But tell me, I pray you, what is the use of having more than one or two Souls?' 'Master, if all had the same number and quality of Souls, all would surely be of one mind. But that people are different from each other is apparent; and the differences among them are because of the differences in the quality and the number of their Souls.' 'And it is better to have many Souls than a few?' 'It is better.' 'And the man having but one Soul is a being imperfect?' 'Very imperfect.' 'Yet a man very imperfect might have had an ancestor perfect?' 'That is true.' 'So that a man of to-day possessing but one Soul may have had an ancestor with nine Souls?' 'Yes.' 'Then what has become of those other eight Souls which the ancestor possessed, but which the descendant is without?' 'Ah! that is the work of the gods. The gods alone fix the number of Souls for each of us. To the worthy are many given; to the unworthy few.' 'Not from the parents, then, do the Souls descend?' 'Nay! Most ancient the Souls are: innumerable, the years of them.' 'And this I desire to know: Can a man separate his Souls? Can he, for instance, have one Soul in Kyoto and one in Tokyo and one in Matsue, all at the same time?' 'He cannot; they remain always together.' 'How? One within the other--like the little lacquered boxes of an inro?' 'Nay: that none but the gods know.' 'And the Souls are never separated?' 'Sometimes they may be separated. But if the Souls of a man be separated, that man becomes mad. Mad people are those who have lost one of their Souls.' 'But after death what becomes of the Souls?' 'They remain still together. . . . When a man dies his Souls ascend to the roof of the house. And they stay upon the roof for the space of nine and forty days.' 'On what part of the roof?' 'On the yane-no-mune--upon the Ridge of the Roof they stay.' 'Can they be seen?' 'Nay: they are like the air is. To and fro upon the Ridge of the Roof they move, like a little wind.' 'Why do they not stay upon the roof for fifty days instead of forty- nine?' 'Seven weeks is the time allotted them before they must depart: seven weeks make the measure of forty-nine days. But why this should be, I cannot tell.' I was not unaware of the ancient belief that the spirit of a dead man haunts for a time the roof of his dwelling, because it is referred to quite impressively in many Japanese dramas, among others in the play called Kagami-yama, which makes the people weep. But I had not before heard of triplex and quadruplex and other yet more highly complex Souls; and I questioned Kinjuro vainly in the hope of learning the authority for his beliefs. They were the beliefs of his fathers: that was all he knew. [1] Like most Izumo folk, Kinjuro was a Buddhist as well as a Shintoist. As the former he belonged to the Zen-shu, as the latter to the Izumo- Taisha. Yet his ontology seemed to me not of either. Buddhism does not teach the doctrine of compound-multiple Souls. There are old Shinto books inaccessible to the multitude which speak of a doctrine very remotely akin to Kinjuro's; but Kinjuro had never seen them. Those books say that each of us has two souls--the Ara-tama or Rough Soul, which is vindictive; and the Nigi-tama, or Gentle Soul, which is all-forgiving. Furthermore, we are all possessed by the spirit of Oho-maga-tsu-hi-no- Kami, the 'Wondrous Deity of Exceeding Great Evils'; also by the spirit of Oho-naho-bi-no-Kami, the 'Wondrous Great Rectifying Deity,' a counteracting influence. These were not exactly the ideas of Kinjuro. But I remembered something Hirata wrote which reminded me of Kinjuro's words about a possible separation of souls. Hirata's teaching was that the ara-tama of a man may leave his body, assume his shape, and without his knowledge destroy a hated enemy. So I asked Kinjuro about it. He said he had never heard of a nigi-tama or an ara-tama; but he told me this: 'Master, when a man has been discovered by his wife to be secretly enamoured of another, it sometimes happens that the guilty woman is seized with a sickness that no physician can cure. For one of the Souls of the wife, moved exceedingly by anger, passes into the body of that woman to destroy her. But the wife also sickens, or loses her mind awhile, because of the absence of her Soul. 'And there is another and more wonderful thing known to us of Nippon, which you, being of the West, may never have heard. By the power of the gods, for a righteous purpose, sometimes a Soul may be withdrawn a little while from its body, and be made to utter its most secret thought. But no suffering to the body is then caused. And the wonder is wrought in this wise: 'A man loves a beautiful girl whom he is at liberty to marry; but he doubts whether he can hope to make her love him in return. He seeks the kannushi of a certain Shinto temple, [2] and tells of his doubt, and asks the aid of the gods to solve it. Then the priests demand, not his name, but his age and the year and day and hour of his birth, which they write down for the gods to know; and they bid the man return to the temple after the space of seven days. 'And during those seven days the priests offer prayer to the gods that the doubt may be solved; and one of them each morning bathes all his body in cold, pure water, and at each repast eats only food prepared with holy fire. And on the eighth day the man returns to the temple, and enters an inner chamber where the priests receive him. 'A ceremony is performed, and certain prayers are said, after which all wait in silence. And then, the priest who has performed the rites of purification suddenly begins to tremble violently in all his body, like one trembling with a great fever. And this is because, by the power of the gods, the Soul of the girl whose love is doubted has entered, all fearfully, into the body of that priest. She does not know; for at that time, wherever she may be, she is in a deep sleep from which nothing can arouse her. But her Soul, having been summoned into the body of the priest, can speak nothing save the truth; and It is made to tell all Its thought. And the priest speaks not with his own voice, but with the voice of the Soul; and he speaks in the person of the Soul, saying: "I love," or "I hate," according as the truth may be, and in the language of women. If there be hate, then the reason of the hate is spoken; but if the answer be of love, there is little to say. And then the trembling of the priest stops, for the Soul passes from him; and he falls forward upon his face like one dead, and long so--remains. 'Tell me, Kinjuro,' I asked, after all these queer things had been related to me, 'have you yourself ever known of a Soul being removed by the power of the gods, and placed in the heart of a priest?' 'Yes: I myself have known it.' I remained silent and waited. The old man emptied his little pipe, threw it down beside the hibachi, folded his hands, and looked at the lotus- flowers for some time before he spoke again. Then he smiled and said: 'Master, I married when I was very young. For many years we had no children: then my wife at last gave me a son, and became a Buddha. But my son lived and grew up handsome and strong; and when the Revolution came, he joined the armies of the Son of Heaven; and he died the death of a man in the great war of the South, in Kyushu. I loved him; and I wept with joy when I heard that he had been able to die for our Sacred Emperor: since there is no more noble death for the son of a samurai. So they buried my boy far away from me in Kyushu, upon a hill near Kumamoto, which is a famous city with a strong garrison; and I went there to make his tomb beautiful. But his name is here also, in Ninomaru, graven on the monument to the men of Izumo who fell in the good fight for loyalty and honour in our emperor's holy cause; and when I see his name there, my heart laughs, and I speak to him, and then it seems as if he were walking beside me again, under the great pines. . . But all that is another matter. 'I sorrowed for my wife. All the years we had dwelt together no unkind word had ever been uttered between us. And when she died, I thought never to marry again. But after two more years had passed, my father and mother desired a daughter in the house, and they told me of their wish, and of a girl who was beautiful and of good family, though poor. The family were of our kindred, and the girl was their only support: she wove garments of silk and garments of cotton, and for this she received but little money. And because she was filial and comely, and our kindred not fortunate, my parents desired that I should marry her and help her people; for in those days we had a small income of rice. Then, being accustomed to obey my parents, I suffered them to do what they thought best. So the nakodo was summoned, and the arrangements for the wedding began. 'Twice I was able to see the girl in the house of her parents. And I thought myself fortunate the first time I looked upon her; for she was very comely and young. But the second time, I perceived she had been weeping, and that her eyes avoided mine. Then my heart sank; for I thought: She dislikes me; and they are forcing her to this thing. Then I resolved to question the gods; and I caused the marriage to be delayed; and I went to the temple of Yanagi-no-Inari-Sama, which is in the Street Zaimokucho. 'And when the trembling came upon him, the priest, speaking with the Soul of that maid, declared to me: "My heart hates you, and the sight of your face gives me sickness, because I love another, and because this marriage is forced upon me. Yet though my heart hates you, I must marry you because my parents are poor and old, and I alone cannot long continue to support them, for my work is killing me. But though I may strive to be a dutiful wife, there never will be gladness in your house because of me; for my heart hates you with a great and lasting hate; and the sound of your voice makes a sickness in my breast (koe kiite mo mune ga waruku naru); and only to see your face makes me wish that I were dead (kao miru to shinitaku naru)." 'Thus knowing the truth, I told it to my parents; and I wrote a letter of kind words to the maid, praying pardon for the pain I had unknowingly caused her; and I feigned long illness, that the marriage might be broken off without gossip; and we made a gift to that family; and the maid was glad. For she was enabled at a later time to marry the young man she loved. My parents never pressed me again to take a wife; and since their death I have lived alone. . . . O Master, look upon the extreme wickedness of that boy!' Taking advantage of our conversation, Kinjuro's young assistant had improvised a rod and line with a bamboo stick and a bit of string; and had fastened to the end of the string a pellet of tobacco stolen from the old man's pouch. With this bait he had been fishing in the lotus pond; and a frog had swallowed it, and was now suspended high above the pebbles, sprawling in rotary motion, kicking in frantic spasms of disgust and despair. 'Kaji!' shouted the gardener. The boy dropped his rod with a laugh, and ran to us unabashed; while the frog, having disgorged the tobacco, plopped back into the lotus pond. Evidently Kaji was not afraid of scoldings. 'Gosho ga waruil' declared the old man, shaking his ivory head. 'O Kaji, much I fear that your next birth will be bad! Do I buy tobacco for frogs? Master, said I not rightly this boy has but one Soul?' CHAPTER TEN Of Ghosts and Goblins Sec. 1 THERE was a Buddha, according to the Hokkekyo who 'even assumed the shape of a goblin to preach to such as were to be converted by a goblin.' And in the same Sutra may be found this promise of the Teacher: 'While he is dwelling lonely in the wilderness, I will send thither goblins in great number to keep him company.' The appalling character of this promise is indeed somewhat modified by the assurance that gods also are to be sent. But if ever I become a holy man, I shall take heed not to dwell in the wilderness, because I have seen Japanese goblins, and I do not like them. Kinjuro showed them to me last night. They had come to town for the matsuri of our own ujigami, or parish-temple; and, as there were many curious things to be seen at the night festival, we started for the temple after dark, Kinjuro carrying a paper lantern painted with my crest. It had snowed heavily in the morning; but now the sky and the sharp still air were clear as diamond; and the crisp snow made a pleasant crunching sound under our feet as we walked; and it occurred to me to say: 'O Kinjuro, is there a God of Snow?' 'I cannot tell,' replied Kinjuro. 'There be many gods I do not know; and there is not any man who knows the names of all the gods. But there is the Yuki-Onna, the Woman of the Snow.' 'And what is the Yuki-Onna?' 'She is the White One that makes the Faces in the snow. She does not any harm, only makes afraid. By day she lifts only her head, and frightens those who journey alone. But at night she rises up sometimes, taller than the trees, and looks about a little while, and then falls back in a shower of snow.' [1] 'What is her face like?' 'It is all white, white. It is an enormous face. And it is a lonesome face.' [The word Kinjuro used was samushii. Its common meaning is 'lonesome'; but he used it, I think, in the sense of 'weird.'] 'Did you ever see her, Kinjuro?' 'Master, I never saw her. But my father told me that once when he was a child, he wanted to go to a neighbour's house through the snow to play with another little boy; and that on the way he saw a great white Face rise up from the snow and look lonesomely about, so that he cried for fear and ran back. Then his people all went out and looked; but there was only snow; and then they knew that he had seen the Yuki-Onna.' 'And in these days, Kinjuro, do people ever see her?' 'Yes. Those who make the pilgrimage to Yabumura, in the period called Dai-Kan, which is the Time of the Greatest Cold, [2] they sometimes see her.' 'What is there at Yabumura, Kinjuro?' 'There is the Yabu-jinja, which is an ancient and famous temple of Yabu- no-Tenno-San--the God of Colds, Kaze-no-Kami. It is high upon a hill, nearly nine ri from Matsue. And the great matsuri of that temple is held upon the tenth and eleventh days of the Second Month. And on those days strange things may be seen. For one who gets a very bad cold prays to the deity of Yabu-jinja to cure it, and takes a vow to make a pilgrimage naked to the temple at the time of the matsuri.' 'Naked?' 'Yes: the pilgrims wear only waraji, and a little cloth round their loins. And a great many men and women go naked through the snow to the temple, though the snow is deep at that time. And each man carries a bunch of gohei and a naked sword as gifts to the temple; and each woman carries a metal mirror. And at the temple, the priests receive them, performing curious rites. For the priests then, according to ancient custom, attire themselves like sick men, and lie down and groan, and drink, potions made of herbs, prepared after the Chinese manner.' 'But do not some of the pilgrims die of cold, Kinjuro?' 'No: our Izumo peasants are hardy. Besides, they run swiftly, so that they reach the temple all warm. And before returning they put on thick warm robes. But sometimes, upon the way, they see the Yuki-Onna.' Sec. 2 Each side of the street leading to the miya was illuminated with a line of paper lanterns bearing holy symbols; and the immense court of the temple had been transformed into a town of booths, and shops, and temporary theatres. In spite of the cold, the crowd was prodigious. There seemed to be all the usual attractions of a matsuri, and a number of unusual ones. Among the familiar lures, I missed at this festival only the maiden wearing an obi of living snakes; probably it had become too cold for the snakes. There were several fortune-tellers and jugglers; there were acrobats and dancers; there was a man making pictures out of sand; and there was a menagerie containing an emu from Australia, and a couple of enormous bats from the Loo Choo Islands--bats trained to do several things. I did reverence to the gods, and bought some extraordinary toys; and then we went to look for the goblins. They were domiciled in a large permanent structure, rented to showmen on special occasions. Gigantic characters signifying 'IKI-NINGYO,' painted upon the signboard at the entrance, partly hinted the nature of the exhibition. Iki-ningyo ('living images') somewhat correspond to our Occidental 'wax figures'; but the equally realistic Japanese creations are made of much cheaper material. Having bought two wooden tickets for one sen each, we entered, and passed behind a curtain to find ourselves in a long corridor lined with booths, or rather matted compartments, about the size of small rooms. Each space, decorated with scenery appropriate to the subject, was occupied by a group of life-size figures. The group nearest the entrance, representing two men playing samisen and two geisha dancing, seemed to me without excuse for being, until Kinjuro had translated a little placard before it, announcing that one of the figures was a living person. We watched in vain for a wink or palpitation. Suddenly one of the musicians laughed aloud, shook his head, and began to play and sing. The deception was perfect. The remaining groups, twenty-four in number, were powerfully impressive in their peculiar way, representing mostly famous popular traditions or sacred myths. Feudal heroisms, the memory of which stirs every Japanese heart; legends of filial piety; Buddhist miracles, and stories of emperors were among the subjects. Sometimes, however, the realism was brutal, as in one scene representing the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood, with brains scattered by a sword stroke. Nor was this unpleasantness altogether atoned for by her miraculous resuscitation in the adjoining compartment, where she reappeared returning thanks in a Nichiren temple, and converting her slaughterer, who happened, by some extraordinary accident, to go there at the same time. At the termination of the corridor there hung a black curtain behind which screams could be heard. And above the black curtain was a placard inscribed with the promise of a gift to anybody able to traverse the mysteries beyond without being frightened. 'Master,' said Kinjuro, 'the goblins are inside.' We lifted the veil, and found ourselves in a sort of lane between hedges, and behind the hedges we saw tombs; we were in a graveyard. There were real weeds and trees, and sotoba and haka, and the effect was quite natural. Moreover, as the roof was very lofty, and kept invisible by a clever arrangement of lights, all seemed darkness only; and this gave one a sense of being out under the night, a feeling accentuated by the chill of the air. And here and there we could discern sinister shapes, mostly of superhuman stature, some seeming to wait in dim places, others floating above the graves. Quite near us, towering above the hedge on our right, was a Buddhist priest, with his back turned to us. 'A yamabushi, an exorciser?' I queried of Kinjuro. 'No,' said Kinjuro; 'see how tall he is. I think that must be a Tanuki- Bozu.' The Tanuki-Bozu is the priestly form assumed by the goblin-badger (tanuki) for the purpose of decoying belated travellers to destruction. We went on, and looked up into his face. It was a nightmare--his face. 'In truth a Tanuki-Bozu,' said Kinjuro. 'What does the Master honourably think concerning it?' Instead of replying, I jumped back; for the monstrous thing had suddenly reached over the hedge and clutched at me, with a moan. Then it fell back, swaying and creaking. It was moved by invisible strings. 'I think, Kinjuro, that it is a nasty, horrid thing. . . . But I shall not claim the present.' We laughed, and proceeded to consider a Three-Eyed Friar (Mitsu-me- Nyudo). The Three-Eyed Friar also watches for the unwary at night. His face is soft and smiling as the face of a Buddha, but he has a hideous eye in the summit of his shaven pate, which can only be seen when seeing it does no good. The Mitsu-me-Nyudo made a grab at Kinjuro, and startled him almost as much as the Tanuki-Bozu had startled me. Then we looked at the Yama-Uba--the 'Mountain Nurse.' She catches little children and nurses them for a while, and then devours them. In her face she has no mouth; but she has a mouth in the top of her head, under her hair. The YamaUba did not clutch at us, because her hands were occupied with a nice little boy, whom she was just going to eat. The child had been made wonderfully pretty to heighten the effect. Then I saw the spectre of a woman hovering in the air above a tomb at some distance, so that I felt safer in observing it. It had no eyes; its long hair hung loose; its white robe floated light as smoke. I thought of a statement in a composition by one of my pupils about ghosts: 'Their greatest Peculiarity is that They have no feet.' Then I jumped again, for the thing, quite soundlessly but very swiftly, made through the air at me. And the rest of our journey among the graves was little more than a succession of like experiences; but it was made amusing by the screams of women, and bursts of laughter from people who lingered only to watch the effect upon others of what had scared themselves. Sec. 3 Forsaking the goblins, we visited a little open-air theatre to see two girls dance. After they had danced awhile, one girl produced a sword and cut off the other girl's head, and put it upon a table, where it opened its mouth and began to sing. All this was very prettily done; but my mind was still haunted by the goblins. So I questioned Kinjuro: 'Kinjuro, those goblins of which we the ningyo have seen--do folk believe in the reality, thereof?' 'Not any more,' answered Kinjuro--'not at least among the people of the city. Perhaps in the country it may not be so. We believe in the Lord Buddha; we believe in the ancient gods; and there be many who believe the dead sometimes return to avenge a cruelty or to compel an act of justice. But we do not now believe all that was believed in ancient time. . . .Master,' he added, as we reached another queer exhibition, 'it is only one sen to go to hell, if the Master would like to go--'Very good, Kinjuro,' I made reply. 'Pay two sen that we may both go to hell.' Sec. 4 And we passed behind a curtain into a big room full of curious clicking and squeaking noises. These noises were made by unseen wheels and pulleys moving a multitude of ningyo upon a broad shelf about breast- high, which surrounded the apartment upon three sides. These ningyo were not ikiningyo, but very small images--puppets. They represented all things in the Under-World. The first I saw was Sozu-Baba, the Old Woman of the River of Ghosts, who takes away the garments of Souls. The garments were hanging upon a tree behind her. She was tall; she rolled her green eyes and gnashed her long teeth, while the shivering of the little white souls before her was as a trembling of butterflies. Farther on appeared Emma Dai-O, great King of Hell, nodding grimly. At his right hand, upon their tripod, the heads of Kaguhana and Mirume, the Witnesses, whirled as upon a wheel. At his left, a devil was busy sawing a Soul in two; and I noticed that he used his saw like a Japanese carpenter--pulling it towards him instead of pushing it. And then various exhibitions of the tortures of the damned. A liar bound to a post was having his tongue pulled out by a devil-- slowly, with artistic jerks; it was already longer than the owner's body. Another devil was pounding another Soul in a mortar so vigorously that the sound of the braying could be heard above all the din of the machinery. A little farther on was a man being eaten alive by two serpents having women's faces; one serpent was white, the other blue. The white had been his wife, the blue his concubine. All the tortures known to medieval Japan were being elsewhere deftly practised by swarms of devils. After reviewing them, we visited the Sai-no-Kawara, and saw Jizo with a child in his arms, and a circle of other children running swiftly around him, to escape from demons who brandished their clubs and ground their teeth. Hell proved, however, to be extremely cold; and while meditating on the partial inappropriateness of the atmosphere, it occurred to me that in the common Buddhist picture-books of the Jigoku I had never noticed any illustrations of torment by cold. Indian Buddhism, indeed, teaches the existence of cold hells. There is one, for instance, where people's lips are frozen so that they can say only 'Ah-ta-ta!'--wherefore that hell is called Atata. And there is the hell where tongues are frozen, and where people say only 'Ah-baba!' for which reason it is called Ababa. And there is the Pundarika, or Great White-Lotus hell, where the spectacle of the bones laid bare by the cold is 'like a blossoming of white lotus- flowers.' Kinjuro thinks there are cold hells according to Japanese Buddhism; but he is not sure. And I am not sure that the idea of cold could be made very terrible to the Japanese. They confess a general liking for cold, and compose Chinese poems about the loveliness of ice and snow. Sec. 5 Out of hell, we found our way to a magic-lantern show being given in a larger and even much colder structure. A Japanese magic-lantern show is nearly always interesting in more particulars than one, but perhaps especially as evidencing the native genius for adapting Western inventions to Eastern tastes. A Japanese magic-lantern show is essentially dramatic. It is a play of which the dialogue is uttered by invisible personages, the actors and the scenery being only luminous shadows. 'Wherefore it is peculiarly well suited to goblinries and weirdnesses of all kinds; and plays in which ghosts figure are the favourite subjects. As the hall was bitterly cold, I waited only long enough to see one performance--of which the following is an epitome: SCENE 1.--A beautiful peasant girl and her aged mother, squatting together at home. Mother weeps violently, gesticulates agonisingly. From her frantic speech, broken by wild sobs, we learn that the girl must be sent as a victim to the Kami-Sama of some lonesome temple in the mountains. That god is a bad god. Once a year he shoots an arrow into the thatch of some farmer's house as a sign that he wants a girl--to eat! Unless the girl be sent to him at once, he destroys the crops and the cows. Exit mother, weeping and shrieking, and pulling out her grey hair. Exit girl, with downcast head, and air of sweet resignation. SCENE II.--Before a wayside inn; cherry-trees in blossom. Enter coolies carrying, like a palanquin, a large box, in which the girl is supposed to be. Deposit box; enter to eat; tell story to loquacious landlord. Enter noble samurai, with two swords. Asks about box. Hears the story of the coolies repeated by loquacious landlord. Exhibits fierce indignation; vows that the Kami-Sama are good--do not eat girls. Declares that so-called Kami-Sama to be a devil. Observes that devils must be killed. Orders box opened. Sends girl home. Gets into box himself, and commands coolies under pain of death to bear him right quickly to that temple. SCENE III.--Enter coolies, approaching temple through forest at night. Coolies afraid. Drop box and run. Exeunt coolies. Box alone in the dark. Enter veiled figure, all white. Figure moans unpleasantly; utters horrid cries. Box remains impassive. Figure removes veil, showing Its face--a skull with phosphoric eyes. [Audience unanimously utter the sound 'Aaaaaa!'] Figure displays Its hands--monstrous and apish, with claws. [Audience utter a second 'Aaaaaa!'] Figure approaches the box, touches the box, opens the box! Up leaps noble samurai. A wrestle; drums sound the roll of battle. Noble samurai practises successfully noble art of ju-jutsu. Casts demon down, tramples upon him triumphantly, cuts off his head. Head suddenly enlarges, grows to the size of a house, tries to bite off head of samurai. Samurai slashes it with his sword. Head rolls backward, spitting fire, and vanishes. Finis. Exeunt omnes. Sec. 6 The vision of the samurai and the goblin reminded Kinjuro of a queer tale, which he began to tell me as soon as the shadow-play was over. Ghastly stories are apt to fall flat after such an exhibition; but Kinjuro's stories are always peculiar enough to justify the telling under almost any circumstances. Wherefore I listened eagerly, in spite of the cold: 'A long time ago, in the days when Fox-women and goblins haunted this land, there came to the capital with her parents a samurai girl, so beautiful that all men who saw her fell enamoured of her. And hundreds of young samurai desired and hoped to marry her, and made their desire known to her parents. For it has ever been the custom in Japan that marriages should be arranged by parents. But there are exceptions to all customs, and the case of this maiden was such an exception. Her parents declared that they intended to allow their daughter to choose her own husband, and that all who wished to win her would be free to woo her. 'Many men of high rank and of great wealth were admitted to the house as suitors; and each one courted her as he best knew how--with gifts, and with fair words, and with poems written in her honour, and with promises of eternal love. And to each one she spoke sweetly and hopefully; but she made strange conditions. For every suitor she obliged to bind himself by his word of honour as a samurai to submit to a test of his love for her, and never to divulge to living person what that test might be. And to this all agreed. 'But even the most confident suitors suddenly ceased their importunities after having been put to the test; and all of them appeared to have been greatly terrified by something. Indeed, not a few even fled away from the city, and could not be persuaded by their friends to return. But no one ever so much as hinted why. Therefore it was whispered by those who knew nothing of the mystery, that the beautiful girl must be either a Fox-woman or a goblin. 'Now, when all the wooers of high rank had abandoned their suit, there came a samurai who had no wealth but his sword. He was a good man and true, and of pleasing presence; and the girl seemed to like him. But she made him take the same pledge which the others had taken; and after he had taken it, she told him to return upon a certain evening. 'When that evening came, he was received at the house by none but the girl herself. With her own hands she set before him the repast of hospitality, and waited upon him, after which she told him that she wished him to go out with her at a late hour. To this he consented gladly, and inquired to what place she desired to go. But she replied nothing to his question, and all at once became very silent, and strange in her manner. And after a while she retired from the apartment, leaving him alone. 'Only long after midnight she returned, robed all in white--like a Soul --and, without uttering a word, signed to him to follow her. Out of the house they hastened while all the city slept. It was what is called an oborozuki-yo--'moon-clouded night.' Always upon such a night, 'tis said, do ghosts wander. She swiftly led the way; and the dogs howled as she flitted by; and she passed beyond the confines of the city to a place of knolls shadowed by enormous trees, where an ancient cemetery was. Into it she glided--a white shadow into blackness. He followed, wondering, his hand upon his sword. Then his eyes became accustomed to the gloom; and he saw. 'By a new-made grave she paused and signed to him to wait. The tools of the grave-maker were still lying there. Seizing one, she began to dig furiously, with strange haste and strength. At last her spade smote a coffin-lid and made it boom: another moment and the fresh white wood of the kwan was bare. She tore off the lid, revealing a corpse within--the corpse of a child. With goblin gestures she wrung an arm from the body, wrenched it in twain, and, squatting down, began to devour the upper half. Then, flinging to her lover the other half, she cried to him, "Eat, if thou lovest mel this is what I eat!" 'Not even for a single instant did he hesitate. He squatted down upon the other side of the grave, and ate the half of the arm, and said, "Kekko degozarimasu! mo sukoshi chodai." [3] For that arm was made of the best kwashi [4] that Saikyo could produce. 'Then the girl sprang to her feet with a burst of laughter, and cried: "You only, of all my brave suitors, did not run away! And I wanted a husband: who could not fear. I will marry you; I can love you: you are a man!"' Sec. 7 'O Kinjuro,' I said, as we took our way home, 'I have heard and I have read many Japanese stories of the returning of the dead. Likewise you yourself have told me it is still believed the dead return, and why. But according both to that which I have read and that which you have told me, the coming back of the dead is never a thing to be desired. They return because of hate, or because of envy, or because they cannot rest for sorrow. But of any who return for that which is not evil--where is it written? Surely the common history of them is like that which we have this night seen: much that is horrible and much that is wicked and nothing of that which is beautiful or true.' Now this I said that I might tempt him. And he made even the answer I desired, by uttering the story which is hereafter set down: 'Long ago, in the days of a daimyo whose name has been forgotten, there lived in this old city a young man and a maid who loved each other very much. Their names are not remembered, but their story remains. From infancy they had been betrothed; and as children they played together, for their parents were neighbours. And as they grew up, they became always fonder of each other. 'Before the youth had become a man, his parents died. But he was able to enter the service of a rich samurai, an officer of high rank, who had been a friend of his people. And his protector soon took him into great favour, seeing him to be courteous, intelligent, and apt at arms. So the young man hoped to find himself shortly in a position that would make it possible for him to marry his betrothed. But war broke out in the north and east; and he was summoned suddenly to follow his master to the field. Before departing, however, he was able to see the girl; and they exchanged pledges in the presence of her parents; and he promised, should he remain alive, to return within a year from that day to marry his betrothed. 'After his going much time passed without news of him, for there was no post in that time as now; and the girl grieved so much for thinking of the chances of war that she became all white and thin and weak. Then at last she heard of him through a messenger sent from the army to bear news to the daimyo and once again a letter was brought to her by another messenger. And thereafter there came no word. Long is a year to one who waits. And the year passed, and he did not return. 'Other seasons passed, and still he did not come; and she thought him dead; and she sickened and lay down, and died, and was buried. Then her old parents, who had no other child, grieved unspeakably, and came to hate their home for the lonesomeness of it. After a time they resolved to sell all they had, and to set out upon a sengaji--the great pilgrimage to the Thousand Temples of the Nichiren-Shu, which requires many years to perform. So they sold their small house with all that it contained, excepting the ancestral tablets, and the holy things which must never be sold, and the ihai of their buried daughter, which were placed, according to the custom of those about to leave their native place, in the family temple. Now the family was of the Nichiren-Shu; and their temple was Myokoji. 'They had been gone only four days when the young man who had been betrothed to their daughter returned to the city. He had attempted, with the permission of his master, to fulfil his promise. But the provinces upon his way were full of war, and the roads and passes were guarded by troops, and he had been long delayed by many difficulties. And when he heard of his misfortune he sickened for grief, and many days remained without knowledge of anything, like one about to die. 'But when he began to recover his strength, all the pain of memory came back again; and he regretted that he had not died. Then he resolved to kill himself upon the grave of his betrothed; and, as soon as he was able to go out unobserved, he took his sword and went to the cemetery where the girl was buried: it is a lonesome place--the cemetery of Myokoji. There he found her tomb, and knelt before it, and prayed and wept, and whispered to her that which he was about to do. And suddenly he heard her voice cry to him: "Anata!" and felt her hand upon his hand; and he turned, and saw her kneeling beside him, smiling, and beautiful as he remembered her, only a little pale. Then his heart leaped so that he could not speak for the wonder and the doubt and the joy of that moment. But she said: "Do not doubt: it is really I. I am not dead. It was all a mistake. I was buried, because my people thought me dead-- buried too soon. And my own parents thought me dead, and went upon a pilgrimage. Yet you see, I am not dead--not a ghost. It is I: do not doubt it! And I have seen your heart, and that was worth all the waiting, and the pain.. . But now let us go away at once to another city, so that people may not know this thing and trouble us; for all still believe me dead." 'And they went away, no one observing them. And they went even to the village of Minobu, which is in the province of Kai. For there is a famous temple of the Nichiren-Shu in that place; and the girl had said: "I know that in the course of their pilgrimage my parents will surely visit Minobu: so that if we dwell there, they will find us, and we shall be all again together." And when they came to Minobu, she said: "Let us open a little shop." And they opened a little food-shop, on the wide way leading to the holy place; and there they sold cakes for children, and toys, and food for pilgrims. For two years they so lived and prospered; and there was a son born to them. 'Now when the child was a year and two months old, the parents of the wife came in the course of their pilgrimage to Minobu; and they stopped at the little shop to buy food. And seeing their daughter's betrothed, they cried out and wept and asked questions. Then he made them enter, and bowed down before them, and astonished them, saying: "Truly as I speak it, your daughter is not dead; and she is my wife; and we have a son. And she is even now within the farther room, lying down with the child. I pray you go in at once and gladden her, for her heart longs for the moment of seeing you again." 'So while he busied himself in making all things ready for their comfort, they entered the inner, room very softly--the mother first. 'They found the child asleep; but the mother they did not find. She seemed to have gone out for a little while only: her pillow was still warm. They waited long for her: then they began to seek her. But never was she seen again. 'And they understood only when they found beneath the coverings which had covered the mother and child, something which they remembered having left years before in the temple of Myokoji--a little mortuary tablet, the ihai of their buried daughter.' I suppose I must have looked thoughtful after this tale; for the old man said: 'Perhaps the Master honourably thinks concerning the story that it is foolish?' 'Nay, Kinjuro, the story is in my heart.' CHAPTER ELEVEN The Japanese Smile Sec. 1 THOSE whose ideas of the world and its wonders have been formed chiefly by novels and romance still indulge a vague belief that the East is more serious than the West. Those who judge things from a higher standpoint argue, on the contrary, that, under present conditions, the West must be more serious than the East; and also that gravity, or even something resembling its converse, may exist only as a fashion. But the fact is that in this, as in all other questions, no rule susceptible of application to either half of humanity can be accurately framed. Scientifically, we can do no more just now than study certain contrasts in a general way, without hoping to explain satisfactorily the highly complex causes which produced them. One such contrast, of particular interest, is that afforded by the English and the Japanese. It is a commonplace to say that the English are a serious people--not superficially serious, but serious all the way down to the bed-rock of the race character. It is almost equally safe to say that the Japanese are not very serious, either above or below the surface, even as compared with races much less serious than our own. And in the same proportion, at least, that they are less serious, they are more happy: they still, perhaps, remain the happiest people in the civilised world. We serious folk of the West cannot call ourselves very happy. Indeed, we do not yet fully know how serious we are; and it would probably frighten us to learn how much more serious we are likely to become under the ever-swelling pressure of industrial life. It is, possibly, by long sojourn among a people less gravely disposed that we can best learn our own temperament. This conviction came to me very strongly when, after having lived for nearly three years in the interior of Japan, I returned to English life for a few days at the open port of Kobe. To hear English once more spoken by Englishmen touched me more than I could have believed possible; but this feeling lasted only for a moment. My object was to make some necessary purchases. Accompanying me was a Japanese friend, to whom all that foreign life was utterly new and wonderful, and who asked me this curious question: 'Why is it that the foreigners never smile? You smile and bow when you speak to them; but they never smile. Why?' The fact was, I had fallen altogether into Japanese habits and ways, and had got out of touch with Western life; and my companion's question first made me aware that I had been acting somewhat curiously. It also seemed to me a fair illustration of the difficulty of mutual comprehension between the two races--each quite naturally, though quite erroneously, estimating the manners and motives of the other by its own. If the Japanese are puzzled by English gravity, the English are, to say the least, equally puzzled by Japanese levity. The Japanese speak of the 'angry faces' of the foreigners. The foreigners speak with strong contempt of the Japanese smile: they suspect it to signify insincerity; indeed, some declare it cannot possibly signify anything else. Only a few of the more observant have recognised it as an enigma worth studying. One of my Yokohama friends--a thoroughly lovable man, who had passed more than half his life in the open ports of the East--said to me, just before my departure for the interior: 'Since you are going to study Japanese life, perhaps you will be able to find out something for me. I can't understand the Japanese smile. Let me tell you one experience out of many. One day, as I was driving down from the Bluff, I saw an empty kuruma coming up on the wrong side of the curve. I could not have pulled up in time if I had tried; but I didn't try, because I didn't think there was any particular danger. I only yelled to the man in Japanese to get to the other side of the road; instead of which he simply backed his kuruma against a wall on the lower side of the curve, with the shafts outwards. At the rate I was going, there wasn't room even to swerve; and the next minute one of the shafts of that kuruma was in my horse's shoulder. The man wasn't hurt at all. When I saw the way my horse was bleeding, I quite lost my temper, and struck the man over the head with the butt of my whip. He looked right into my face and smiled, and then bowed. I can see that smile now. I felt as if I had been knocked down. The smile utterly nonplussed me--killed all my anger instantly. Mind you, it was a polite smile. But what did it mean? Why the devil did the man smile? I can't understand it.' Neither, at that time, could I; but the meaning of much more mysterious smiles has since been revealed to me. A Japanese can smile in the teeth of death, and usually does. But he then smiles for the same reason that he smiles at other times. There is neither defiance nor hypocrisy in the smile; nor is it to be confounded with that smile of sickly resignation which we are apt to associate with weakness of character. It is an elaborate and long-cultivated etiquette. It is also a silent language. But any effort to interpret it according to Western notions of physiognomical expression would be just about as successful as an attempt to interpret Chinese ideographs by their real or fancied resemblance to shapes of familiar things. First impressions, being largely instinctive, are scientifically recognised as partly trustworthy; and the very first impression produced by the Japanese smile is not far from the truth The stranger cannot fail to notice the generally happy and smiling character of the native faces; and this first impression is, in most cases, wonderfully pleasant. The Japanese smile at first charms. It is only at a later day, when one has observed the same smile under extraordinary circumstances--in moments of pain, shame, disappointment--that one becomes suspicious of it. Its apparent inopportuneness may even, on certain occasions, cause violent anger. Indeed, many of the difficulties between foreign residents and their native servants have been due to the smile. Any man who believes in the British tradition that a good servant must be solemn is not likely to endure with patience the smile of his 'boy.' At present, however, this particular phase of Western eccentricity is becoming more fully recognised by the Japanese; they are beginning to learn that the average English-speaking foreigner hates smiling, and is apt to consider it insulting; wherefore Japanese employees at the open ports have generally ceased to smile, and have assumed an air of sullenness. At this moment there comes to me the recollection of a queer story told by a lady of Yokohama about one of her Japanese servants. 'My Japanese nurse came to me the other day, smiling as if something very pleasant had happened, and said that her husband was dead, and that she wanted permission to attend his funeral. I told her she could go. It seems they burned the man's body. Well, in the evening she returned, and showed me a vase containing some ashes of bones (I saw a tooth among them); and she said: "That is my husband." And she actually laughed as she said it! Did you ever hear of such disgusting creatures?' It would have been quite impossible to convince the narrator of this incident that the demeanour of her servant, instead of being heartless, might have been heroic, and capable of a very touching interpretation. Even one not a Philistine might be deceived in such a case by appearances. But quite a number of the foreign residents of the open ports are pure Philistines, and never try to look below the surface of the life around them, except as hostile critics. My Yokohama friend who told me the story about the kurumaya was quite differently disposed: he recognised the error of judging by appearances. Sec. 2 Miscomprehension of the Japanese smile has more than once led to extremely unpleasant results, as happened in the case of T--a Yokohama merchant of former days. T--had employed in some capacity (I think partly as a teacher of Japanese) a nice old samurai, who wore, according to the fashion of the era, a queue and two swords. The English and the Japanese do not understand each other very well now; but at the period in question they understood each other much less. The Japanese servants at first acted in foreign employ precisely as they would have acted in the service of distinguished Japanese; [1] and this innocent mistake provoked a good deal of abuse and cruelty. Finally the discovery was made that to treat Japanese like West Indian negroes might be very dangerous. A certain number of foreigners were killed, with good moral consequences. But I am digressing. T--was rather pleased with his old samurai, though quite unable to understand his Oriental politeness, his prostrations or the meaning of the small gifts which he presented occasionally, with an exquisite courtesy entirely wasted upon T--. One day he came to ask a favour. (I think it was the eve of the Japanese New Year, when everybody needs money, for reasons not here to be dwelt upon.) The favour was that T--would lend him a little money upon one of his swords, the long one. It was a very beautiful weapon, and the merchant saw that it was also very valuable, and lent the money without hesitation. Some weeks later the old man was able to redeem his sword. What caused the beginning of the subsequent unpleasantness nobody now remembers Perhaps T--'s nerves got out of order. At all events, one day he became very angry with the old man, who submitted to the expression of his wrath with bows and smiles. This made him still more angry, and he used some extremely bad language; but the old man still bowed and smiled; wherefore he was ordered to leave the house. But the old man continued to smile, at which T--losing all self-control struck him. And then T--suddenly became afraid, for the long sword instantly leaped from its sheath, and swirled above him; and the old man ceased to seem old. Now, in the grasp of anyone who knows how to use it, the razor-edged blade of a Japanese sword wielded with both hands can take a head off with extreme facility. But, to T--'s astonishment, the old samurai, almost in the same moment, returned the blade to its sheath with the skill of a practised swordsman, turned upon his heel, and withdrew. Then T-- wondered and sat down to think. He began to remember some nice things about the old man--the many kindnesses unasked and unpaid, the curious little gifts, the impeccable honesty. T-- began to feel ashamed. He tried to console himself with the thought: 'Well, it was his own fault; he had no right to laugh at me when he knew I was angry.' Indeed, T-- even resolved to make amends when an opportunity should offer. But no opportunity ever came, because on the same evening the old man performed hara-kiri, after the manner of a samurai. He left a very beautifully written letter explaining his reasons. For a samurai to receive an unjust blow without avenging it was a shame not to be borne, He had received such a blow. Under any other circumstances he might have avenged it. But the circumstances were, in this instance, of a very peculiar kind, His code of honour forbade him to use his sword upon the man to whom he had pledged it once for money, in an hour of need. And being thus unable to use his sword, there remained for him only the alternative of an honourable suicide. In order to render this story less disagreeable, the reader may suppose that T--was really very sorry, and behaved generously to the family of the old man. What he must not suppose is that T--was ever able to imagine why the old man had smiled the smile which led to the outrage and the tragedy. Sec. 3 To comprehend the Japanese smile, one must be able to enter a little into the ancient, natural, and popular life of Japan. From the modernised upper classes nothing is to be learned. The deeper signification of race differences is being daily more and more illustrated in the effects of the higher education. Instead of creating any community of feeling, it appears only to widen the distance between the Occidental and the Oriental. Some foreign observers have declared that it does this by enormously developing certain latent peculiarities --among others an inherent materialism little perceptible among fife common people. This explanation is one I cannot quite agree with; but it is at least undeniable that, the more highly he is cultivated, according to Western methods, the farther is the Japanese psychologically removed from us. Under the new education, his character seems to crystallise into something of singular hardness, and to Western observation, at least, of singular opacity. Emotionally, the Japanese child appears incomparably closer to us than the Japanese mathematician, the peasant than the statesman. Between the most elevated class of thoroughly modernised Japanese and the Western thinker anything akin to intellectual sympathy is non-existent: it is replaced on the native side by a cold and faultless politeness. Those influences which in other lands appear most potent to develop the higher emotions seem here to have the extraordinary effect of suppressing them. We are accustomed abroad to associate emotional sensibility with intellectual expansion: it would be a grievous error to apply this rule in Japan. Even the foreign teacher in an ordinary school can feel, year by year, his pupils drifting farther away from him, as they pass from class to class; in various higher educational institutions, the separation widens yet more rapidly, so that, prior to graduation, students may become to their professor little more than casual acquaintances. The enigma is perhaps, to some extent, a physiological one, requiring scientific explanation; but its solution must first be sought in ancestral habits of life and of imagination. It can be fully discussed only when its natural causes are understood; and these, we may be sure, are not simple. By some observers it is asserted that because the higher education in Japan has not yet had the effect of stimulating the higher emotions to the Occidental pitch, its developing power cannot have been exerted uniformly and wisely, but in special directions only, at the cost of character. Yet this theory involves the unwarrantable assumption that character can be created by education; and it ignores the fact that the best results are obtained by affording opportunity for the exercise of pre-existing inclination rather than by any system of teaching. The causes of the phenomenon must be looked for in the race character; and whatever the higher education may accomplish in the remote future, it can scarcely be expected to transform nature. But does it at present atrophy certain finer tendencies? I think that it unavoidably does, for the simple reason that, under existing conditions, the moral and mental powers are overtasked by its requirements. All that wonderful national spirit of duty, of patience, of self-sacrifice, anciently directed to social, moral, or religious idealism, must, under the discipline of the higher training, be concentrated upon an end which not only demands, but exhausts its fullest exercise. For that end, to be accomplished at all, must be accomplished in the face of difficulties that the Western student rarely encounters, and could scarcely be made even to understand. All those moral qualities which made the old Japanese character admirable are certainly the same which make the modern Japanese student the most indefatigable, the most docile, the most ambitious in the world. But they are also qualities which urge him to efforts in excess of his natural powers, with the frequent result of mental and moral enervation. The nation has entered upon a period of intellectual overstrain. Consciously or unconsciously, in obedience to sudden necessity, Japan has undertaken nothing less than the tremendous task of forcing mental expansion up to the highest existing standard; and this means forcing the development of the nervous system. For the desired intellectual change, to be accomplished within a few generations, must involve a physiological change never to be effected without terrible cost. In other words, Japan has attempted too much; yet under the circumstances she could not have attempted less. Happily, even among the poorest of her poor the educational policy of the Government is seconded with an astonishing zeal; the entire nation has plunged into study with a fervour of which it is utterly impossible to convey any adequate conception in this little essay. Yet I may cite a touching example. Immediately after the frightful earthquake of 1891, the children of the ruined cities of Gifu and Aichi, crouching among the ashes of their homes, cold and hungry and shelterless, surrounded by horror and misery unspeakable, still continued their small studies, using tiles of their own burnt dwellings in lieu of slates, and bits of lime for chalk, even while the earth still trembled beneath them. [2] What future miracles may justly be expected from the amazing power of purpose such a fact reveals! But it is true that as yet the results of the higher training have not been altogether happy. Among the Japanese of the old regime one encounters a courtesy, an unselfishness, a grace of pure goodness, impossible to overpraise. Among the modernised of the new generation these have almost disappeared. One meets a class of young men who ridicule the old times and the old ways without having been able to elevate themselves above the vulgarism of imitation and the commonplaces of shallow scepticism. What has become of the noble and charming qualities they must have inherited from their fathers? Is it not possible that the best of those qualities have been transmuted into mere effort,--an effort so excessive as to have exhausted character, leaving it without weight or balance? It is to the still fluid, mobile, natural existence of the common people that one must look for the meaning of some apparent differences in the race feeling and emotional expression of the West and the Far East. With those gentle, kindly, sweet-hearted folk, who smile at life, love, and death alike, it is possible to enjoy community of feeling in simple, natural things; and by familiarity and sympathy we can learn why they smile. The Japanese child is born with this happy tendency, which is fostered through all the period of home education. But it is cultivated with the same exquisiteness that is shown in the cultivation of the natural tendencies of a garden plant. The smile is taught like the bow; like the prostration; like that little sibilant sucking-in of the breath which follows, as a token of pleasure, the salutation to a superior; like all the elaborate and beautiful etiquette of the old courtesy. Laughter is not encouraged, for obvious reasons. But the smile is to be used upon all pleasant occasions, when speaking to a superior or to an equal, and even upon occasions which are not pleasant; it is a part of deportment. The most agreeable face is the smiling face; and to present always the most agreeable face possible to parents, relatives, teachers, friends, well-wishers, is a rule of life. And furthermore, it is a rule of life to turn constantly to the outer world a mien of happiness, to convey to others as far as possible a pleasant impression. Even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely. On the other hand, to look serious or unhappy is rude, because this may cause anxiety or pain to those who love us; it is likewise foolish, since it may excite unkindly curiosity on the part of those who love us not. Cultivated from childhood as a duty, the smile soon becomes instinctive. In the mind of the poorest peasant lives the conviction that to exhibit the expression of one's personal sorrow or pain or anger is rarely useful, and always unkind. Hence, although natural grief must have, in Japan as elsewhere, its natural issue, an uncontrollable burst of tears in the presence of superiors or guests is an impoliteness; and the first words of even the most unlettered countrywoman, after the nerves give way in such a circumstance, are invariably: 'Pardon my selfishness in that I have been so rude!' The reasons for the smile, be it also observed, are not only moral; they are to some extent aesthetic they partly represent the same idea which regulated the expression of suffering in Greek art. But they are much more moral than aesthetic, as we shall presently observe. From this primary etiquette of the smile there has been developed a secondary etiquette, the observance of which has frequently impelled foreigners to form the most cruel misjudgements as to Japanese sensibility. It is the native custom that whenever a painful or shocking fact must be told, the announcement should be made, by the sufferer, with a smile. [3] The graver the subject, the more accentuated the smile; and when the matter is very unpleasant to the person speaking of it, the smile often changes to a low, soft laugh. However bitterly the mother who has lost her first-born may have wept at the funeral, it is probable that, if in your service, she will tell of her bereavement with a smile: like the Preacher, she holds that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh. It was long before I myself could understand how it was possible for those whom I believed to have loved a person recently dead to announce to me that death with a laugh. Yet the laugh was politeness carried to the utmost point of self-abnegation. It signified: 'This you might honourably think to be an unhappy event; pray do not suffer Your Superiority to feel concern about so inferior a matter, and pardon the necessity which causes us to outrage politeness by speaking about such an affair at all.'. The key to the mystery of the most unaccountable smiles is Japanese politeness. The servant sentenced to dismissal for a fault prostrates himself, and asks for pardon with a smile. That smile indicates the very reverse of callousness or insolence: 'Be assured that I am satisfied with the great justice of your honourable sentence, and that I am now aware of the gravity of my fault. Yet my sorrow and my necessity have caused me to indulge the unreasonable hope that I may be forgiven for my great rudeness in asking pardon.' The youth or girl beyond the age of childish tears, when punished for some error, receives the punishment with a smile which means: 'No evil feeling arises in my heart; much worse than this my fault has deserved.' And the kurumaya cut by the whip of my Yokohama friend smiled for a similar reason, as my friend must have intuitively felt, since the smile at once disarmed him: 'I was very wrong, and you are right to be angry: I deserve to be struck, and therefore feel no resentment.' But it should be understood that the poorest and humblest Japanese is rarely submissive under injustice. His apparent docility is due chiefly to his moral sense. The foreigner who strikes a native for sport may have reason to find that he has made a serious mistake. The Japanese are not to be trifled with; and brutal attempts to trifle with them have cost several worthless lives. Even after the foregoing explanations, the incident of the Japanese nurse may still seem incomprehensible; but this, I feel quite sure, is because the narrator either suppressed or overlooked certain facts in the case. In the first half of the story, all is perfectly clear. When announcing her husband's death, the young servant smiled, in accordance with the native formality already referred to. What is quite incredible is that, of her own accord, she should have invited the attention of her mistress to the contents of the vase, or funeral urn. If she knew enough of Japanese politeness to smile in announcing her husband's death, she must certainly have known enough to prevent her from perpetrating such an error. She could have shown the vase and its contents only in obedience to some real or fancied command; and when so doing, it is more than possible she may have uttered the low, soft laugh which accompanies either the unavoidable performance of a painful duty, or the enforced utterance of a painful statement. My own opinion is that she was obliged to gratify a wanton curiosity. Her smile or laugh would then have signified: 'Do not suffer your honourable feelings to be shocked upon my unworthy account; it is indeed very rude of me, even at your honourable request, to mention so contemptible a thing as my sorrow.' Sec. 4 But the Japanese smile must not be imagined as a kind of sourire figé, worn perpetually as a soul-mask. Like other matters of deportment, it is regulated by an etiquette which varies in different classes of society. As a rule, the old samurai were not given to smiling upon all occasions; they reserved their amiability for superiors and intimates, and would seem to have maintained toward inferiors an austere reserve. The dignity of the Shinto priesthood has become proverbial; and for centuries the gravity of the Confucian code was mirrored in the decorum of magistrates and officials. From ancient times the nobility affected a still loftier reserve; and the solemnity of rank deepened through all the hierarchies up to that awful state surrounding the Tenshi-Sama, upon whose face no living man might look. But in private life the demeanour of the highest had its amiable relaxation; and even to-day, with some hopelessly modernised exceptions, the noble, the judge, the high priest, the august minister, the military officer, will resume at home, in the intervals of duty, the charming habits of the antique courtesy. The smile which illuminates conversation is in itself but a small detail of that courtesy; but the sentiment which it symbolises certainly comprises the larger part. If you happen to have a cultivated Japanese friend who has remained in all things truly Japanese, whose character has remained untouched by the new egotism and by foreign influences, you will probably be able to study in him the particular social traits of the whole people--traits in his case exquisitely accentuated and polished. You will observe that, as a rule, he never speaks of himself, and that, in reply to searching personal questions, he will answer as vaguely and briefly as possible, with a polite bow of thanks. But, on the other hand, he will ask many questions about yourself: your opinions, your ideas, even trifling details of your daily life, appear to have deep interest for him; and you will probably have occasion to note that he never forgets anything which he has learned concerning you. Yet there are certain rigid limits to his kindly curiosity, and perhaps even to his observation: he will never refer to any disagreeable or painful matter, and he will seem to remain blind to eccentricities or small weaknesses, if you have any. To your face he will never praise you; but he will never laugh at you nor criticise you. Indeed, you will find that he never criticises persons, but only actions in their results. As a private adviser, he will not even directly criticise a plan of which he disapproves, but is apt to suggest a new one in some such guarded language as: 'Perhaps it might be more to your immediate interest to do thus and so.' When obliged to speak of others, he will refer to them in a curious indirect fashion, by citing and combining a number of incidents sufficiently characteristic to form a picture. But in that event the incidents narrated will almost certainly be of a nature to awaken interest, and to create a favourable impression. This indirect way of conveying information is essentially Confucian. 'Even when you have no doubts,' says the Li-Ki, 'do not let what you say appear as your own view.' And it is quite probable that you will notice many other traits in your friend requiring some knowledge of the Chinese classics to understand. But no such knowledge necessary to convince you of his exquisite consideration for others, and his studied suppression of self. Among no other civilised people is the secret of happy living so thoroughly comprehended as among the Japanese; by no other race is the truth so widely understood that our pleasure in life must depend upon the happiness of those about us, and consequently upon the cultivation in ourselves of unselfishness and of patience. For which reason, in Japanese society, sarcasm irony, cruel wit, are not indulged. I might almost say that they have no existence in refined life. A personal failing is not made the subject of ridicule or reproach; an eccentricity is not commented upon; an involuntary mistake excites no laughter. Stiffened somewhat by the Chinese conservatism of the old conditions, it is true that this ethical system was maintained the extreme of giving fixity to ideas, and at the cost of individuality. And yet, if regulated by a broader comprehension social requirements, if expanded by scientific understanding of the freedom essential to intellectual evolution, the very same moral policy is that through which the highest and happiest results may be obtained. But as actually practised it was not favourable to originality; it rather tended to enforce the amiable mediocrity of opinion and imagination which still prevails. Wherefore a foreign dweller in the interior cannot but long sometimes for the sharp, erratic inequalities Western life, with its larger joys and pains and its more comprehensive sympathies. But sometimes only, for the intellectual loss is really more than compensated by the social charm; and there can remain no doubt in the mind of one who even partly understands the Japanese, that they are still the best people in the world to live among. Sec. 5 As I pen these lines, there returns to me the vision of a Kyoto night. While passing through some wonderfully thronged and illuminated street, of which I cannot remember the name, I had turned aside to look at a statue of Jizo, before the entrance of a very small temple. The figure was that of a kozo, an acolyte--a beautiful boy; and its smile was a bit of divine realism. As I stood gazing, a young lad, perhaps ten years old, ran up beside me, joined his little hands before the image, bowed his head and prayed for a moment in silence. He had but just left some comrades, and the joy and glow of play were still upon his face; and his unconscious smile was so strangely like the smile of the child of stone that the boy seemed the twin brother of the god. And then I thought: 'The smile of bronze or stone is not a copy only; but that which the Buddhist sculptor symbolises thereby must be the explanation of the smile of the race.' That was long ago; but the idea which then suggested itself still seems to me true. However foreign to Japanese soil the origin of Buddhist art, yet the smile of the people signifies the same conception as the smile of the Bosatsu--the happiness that is born of self-control and self- suppression. 'If a man conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand and another conquer himself, he who conquers himself is the greatest of conquerors.' 'Not even a god can change into defeat the victory of the man who has vanquished himself.' [4] Such Buddhist texts as these--and they are many--assuredly express, though they cannot be assumed to have created, those moral tendencies which form the highest charm of the Japanese character. And the whole moral idealism of the race seems to me to have been imaged in that marvellous Buddha of Kamakura, whose countenance, 'calm like a deep, still water' [5] expresses, as perhaps no other work of human hands can have expressed, the eternal truth: 'There is no higher happiness than rest.' [6] It is toward that infinite calm that the aspirations of the Orient have been turned; and the ideal of the Supreme Self-Conquest it has made its own. Even now, though agitated at its surface by those new influences which must sooner or later move it even to its uttermost depths, the Japanese mind retains, as compared with the thought of the West, a wonderful placidity. It dwells but little, if at all, upon those ultimate abstract questions about which we most concern ourselves. Neither does it comprehend our interest in them as we desire to be comprehended. 'That you should not be indifferent to religious speculations,' a Japanese scholar once observed to me, 'is quite natural; but it is equally natural that we should never trouble ourselves about them. The philosophy of Buddhism has a profundity far exceeding that of your Western theology, and we have studied it. We have sounded the depths of speculation only to fluid that there are depths unfathomable below those depths; we have voyaged to the farthest limit that thought may sail, only to find that the horizon for ever recedes. And you, you have remained for many thousand years as children playing in a stream but ignorant of the sea. Only now you have reached its shore by another path than ours, and the vastness is for you a new wonder; and you would sail to Nowhere because you have seen the infinite over the sands of life.' Will Japan be able to assimilate Western civilisation, as she did Chinese more than ten centuries ago, and nevertheless preserve her own peculiar modes of thought and feeling? One striking fact is hopeful: that the Japanese admiration for Western material superiority is by no means extended to Western morals. Oriental thinkers do not commit the serious blunder of confounding mechanical with ethical progress, nor have any failed to perceive the moral weaknesses of our boasted civilisation. One Japanese writer has expressed his judgment of things Occidental after a fashion that deserves to be noticed by a larger circle of readers than that for which it was originally written: 'Order or disorder in a nation does not depend upon some-thing that falls from the sky or rises from the earth. It is determined by the disposition of the people. The pivot on which the public disposition turns towards order or disorder is the point where public and private motives separate. If the people be influenced chiefly by public considerations, order is assured; if by private, disorder is inevitable. Public considerations are those that prompt the proper observance of duties; their prevalence signifies peace and prosperity in the case alike of families, communities, and nations. Private considerations are those suggested by selfish motives: when they prevail, disturbance and disorder are unavoidable. As members of a family, our duty is to look after the welfare of that family; as units of a nation, our duty is to work for the good of the nation. To regard our family affairs with all the interest due to our family and our national affairs with all the interest due to our nation--this is to fitly discharge our duty, and to be guided by public considerations. On the other hand, to regard the affairs of the nation as if they were our own family affairs--this is to be influenced by private motives and to stray from the path of duty. ... 'Selfishness is born in every man; to indulge it freely is to become a beast. Therefore it is that sages preach the principles of duty and propriety, justice and morality, providing restraints for private aims and encouragements for public spirit.. . . . What we know of Western civilisation is that it struggled on through long centuries in a confused condition and finally attained a state of some order; but that even this order, not being based upon such principles as those of the natural and immutable distinctions between sovereign and subject, parent and child, with all their corresponding rights and duties, is liable to constant change according to the growth of human ambitions and human aims. Admirably suited to persons whose actions are controlled by selfish ambition, the adoption of this system in Japan is naturally sought by a certain class of politicians. From a superficial point of view, the Occidental form of society is very attractive, inasmuch as, being the outcome of a free development of human desires from ancient times, it represents the very extreme of luxury and extravagance. Briefly speaking, the state of things obtaining in the West is based upon the free play of human selfishness, and can only be reached by giving full sway to that quality. Social disturbances are little heeded in the Occident; yet they are at once the evidences and the factors of the present evil state of affairs. . . . Do Japanese enamoured of Western ways propose to have their nation's history written in similar terms? Do they seriously contemplate turning their country into a new field for experiments in Western civilisation? . . . 'In the Orient, from ancient times, national government has been based on benevolence, and directed to securing the welfare and happiness of the people. No political creed has ever held that intellectual strength should be cultivated for the purpose of exploiting inferiority and ignorance. . . . The inhabitants of this empire live, for the most part, by manual labour. Let them be never so industrious, they hardly earn enough to supply their daily wants. They earn on the average about twenty sen daily. There is no question with them of aspiring to wear fine clothes or to inhabit handsome houses. Neither can they hope to reach positions of fame and honour. What offence have these poor people committed that they, too, should not share the benefits of Western civilisation? . . . By some, indeed, their condition is explained on the hypothesis that their desires do not prompt them to better themselves. There is no truth in such a supposition. They have desires, but nature has limited their capacity to satisfy them; their duty as men limits it, and the amount of labour physically possible to a human being limits it. They achieve as much as their opportunities permit. The best and finest products of their labour they reserve for the wealthy; the worst and roughest they keep for their own use. Yet there is nothing in human society that does not owe its existence to labour. Now, to satisfy the desires of one luxurious man, the toil of a thousand is needed. Surely it is monstrous that those who owe to labour the pleasures suggested by their civilisation should forget what they owe to the labourer, and treat him as if he were not a fellow-being. But civilisation, according to the interpretation of the Occident, serves only to satisfy men of large desires. It is of no benefit to the masses, but is simply a system under which ambitions compete to accomplish their aims. . . . That the Occidental system is gravely disturbing to. the order and peace of a country is seen by men who have eyes, and heard by men who have ears. The future of Japan under such a system fills us with anxiety. A system based on the principle that ethics and religion are made to serve human ambition naturally accords with the wishes of selfish individuals; and such theories as those embodied in the modem formula of liberty and equality annihilate the established relations of society, and outrage decorum and propriety. . . . Absolute equality and absolute liberty being unattainable, the limits prescribed by right and duty are supposed to be set. But as each person seeks to have as much right and to be burdened with as little duty as possible, the results are endless disputes and legal contentions. The principles of liberty and equality may succeed in changing the organisation of nations, in overthrowing the lawful distinctions of social rank, in reducing all men to one nominal level; but they can never accomplish the equal distribution of wealth and property. Consider America. . . . It is plain that if the mutual rights of men and their status are made to depend on degrees of wealth, the majority of the people, being without wealth, must fail to establish their rights; whereas the minority who are wealthy will assert their rights, and, under society's sanction, will exact oppressive duties from the poor, neglecting the dictates of humanity and benevolence. The adoption of these principles of liberty and equality in Japan would vitiate the good and peaceful customs of our country, render the general disposition of the people harsh and unfeeling, and prove finally a source of calamity to the masses. . . 'Though at first sight Occidental civilisation presents an attractive appearance, adapted as it is to the gratification of selfish desires, yet, since its basis is the hypothesis that men' 's wishes constitute natural laws, it must ultimately end in disappointment and demoralisation. . . . Occidental nations have become what they are after passing through conflicts and vicissitudes of the most serious kind; and it is their fate to continue the struggle. Just now their motive elements are in partial equilibrium, and their social condition' is more or less ordered. But if this slight equilibrium happens to be disturbed, they will be thrown once more into confusion and change, until, after a period of renewed struggle and suffering, temporary stability is once more attained. The poor and powerless of the present may become the wealthy and strong of the future, and vice versa. Perpetual disturbance is their doom. Peaceful equality can never be attained until built up among the ruins of annihilated Western' states and the ashes of extinct Western peoples.' Surely, with perceptions like these, Japan may hope to avert some of the social perils which menace her. Yet it appears inevitable that her approaching transformation must be coincident with a moral decline. Forced into the vast industrial competition of nation's whose civilisations were never based on altruism, she must eventually develop those qualities of which the comparative absence made all the wonderful charm of her life. The national character must continue to harden, as it has begun to harden already. But it should never be forgotten that Old Japan was quite as much in advance of the nineteenth century morally as she was behind it materially. She had made morality instinctive, after having made it rational. She had realised, though within restricted limits, several among those social conditions which our ablest thinkers regard as the happiest and the highest. Throughout all the grades of her complex society she had cultivated both the comprehension and the practice of public and private duties after a manner for which it were vain to seek any Western parallel. Even her moral weakness was the result of an excess of that which all civilised religions have united in proclaiming virtue--the self-sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the family, of the community, and of the nation. It was the weakness indicated by Percival Lowell in his Soul of the Far East, a book of which the consummate genius cannot be justly estimated without some personal knowledge of the Far East. [8] The progress made by Japan in social morality, although greater than our own, was chiefly in the direction of mutual dependence. And it will be her coming duty to keep in view the teaching of that mighty thinker whose philosophy she has wisely accepted [9]--the teaching that 'the highest individuation must be joined with the greatest mutual dependence,' and that, however seemingly paradoxical the statement, 'the law of progress is at once toward complete separateness and complete union. Yet to that past which her younger generation now affect to despise Japan will certainly one day look back, even as we ourselves look back to the old Greek civilisation. She will learn to regret the forgotten capacity for simple pleasures, the lost sense of the pure joy of life, the old loving divine intimacy with nature, the marvellous dead art which reflected it. She will remember how much more luminous and beautiful the world then seemed. She will mourn for many things--the old-fashioned patience and self-sacrifice, the ancient courtesy, the deep human poetry of the ancient faith. She will wonder at many things; but she will regret. Perhaps she will wonder most of all at the faces of the ancient gods, because their smile was once the likeness of her own. CHAPTER TWELVE Sayonara! Sec. 1 I am going away--very far away. I have already resigned my post as teacher, and am waiting only for my passport. So many familiar faces have vanished that I feel now less regret at leaving than I should have felt six months ago. And nevertheless, the quaint old city has become so endeared to me by habit and association that the thought of never seeing it again is one I do not venture to dwell upon. I have been trying to persuade myself that some day I may return to this charming old house, in shadowy Kitaborimachi, though all the while painfully aware that in past experience such imaginations invariably preceded perpetual separation. The facts are that all things are impermanent in the Province of the Gods; that the winters are very severe; and that I have received a call from the great Government college in Kyushu far south, where snow rarely falls. Also I have been very sick; and the prospect of a milder climate had much influence in shaping my decision. But these few days of farewells have been full of charming surprises. To have the revelation of gratitude where you had no right to expect more than plain satisfaction with your performance of duty; to find affection where you supposed only good-will to exist: these are assuredly delicious experiences. The teachers of both schools have sent me a farewell gift--a superb pair of vases nearly three feet high, covered with designs representing birds, and flowering-trees overhanging a slope of beach where funny pink crabs are running about--vases made in the old feudal days at Rakuzan--rare souvenirs of Izumo. With the wonderful vases came a scroll bearing in Chinese text the names of the thirty-two donors; and three of these are names of ladies--the three lady-teachers of the Normal School. The students of the Jinjo-Chugakko have also sent me a present--the last contribution of two hundred and fifty-one pupils to my happiest memories of Matsue: a Japanese sword of the time of the daimyo. Silver karashishi with eyes of gold--in Izumo, the Lions of Shinto--swarm over the crimson lacquer of the sheath, and sprawl about the exquisite hilt. And the committee who brought the beautiful thing to my house requested me to accompany them forthwith to the college assembly-room, where the students were all waiting to bid me good-bye, after the old-time custom. So I went there. And the things which we said to each other are hereafter set down. Sec. 2 DEAR TEACHER:--You have been one of the best and most benevolent teachers we ever had. We thank you with all our heart for the knowledge we obtained through your kindest instruction. Every student in our school hoped you would stay with us at least three years. When we learned you had resolved to go to Kyushu, we all felt our hearts sink with sorrow. We entreated our Director to find some way to keep you, but we discovered that could not be done. We have no words to express our feeling at this moment of farewell. We sent you a Japanese sword as a memory of us. It was only a poor ugly thing; we merely thought you would care for it as a mark of our gratitude. We will never forget your kindest instruction; and we all wish that you may ever be healthy and happy. MASANABU OTANI, Representing all the Students of the Middle School of Shimane-Ken. MY DEAR BOYS:--I cannot tell you with what feelings I received your present; that beautiful sword with the silver karashishi ramping upon its sheath, or crawling through the silken cording of its wonderful hilt. At least I cannot tell you all. But there flashed to me, as I looked at your gift, the remembrance of your ancient proverb: 'The Sword is the Soul of the Samurai.' And then it seemed to me that in the very choice of that exquisite souvenir you had symbolised something of your own souls. For we English also have some famous sayings and proverbs about swords. Our poets call a good blade 'trusty' and 'true'; and of our best friend we say, 'He is true as steel'--signifying in the ancient sense the steel of a perfect sword--the steel to whose temper a warrior could trust his honour and his life. And so in your rare gift, which I shall keep and prize while I live, I find an emblem of your true-heartedness and affection. May you always keep fresh within your hearts those impulses of generosity and kindliness and loyalty which I have learned to know so well, and of which your gift will ever remain for me the graceful symbol! And a symbol not only of your affection and loyalty as students to teachers, but of that other beautiful sense of duty you expressed, when so many of you wrote down for me, as your dearest wish, the desire to die for His Imperial Majesty, your Emperor. That wish is holy: it means perhaps even more than you know, or can know, until you shall have become much older and wiser. This is an era of great and rapid change; and it is probable that many of you, as you grow up, will not be able to believe everything that your fathers believed before you--though I sincerely trust you will at least continue always to respect the faith, even as you still respect the memory, of your ancestors. But however much the life of New Japan may change about you, however much your own thoughts may change with the times, never suffer that noble wish you expressed to me to pass away from your souls. Keep it burning there, clear and pure as the flame of the little lamp that glows before your household shrine. Perhaps some of you may have that wish. Many of you must become soldiers. Some will become officers. Some will enter the Naval Academy to prepare for the grand service of protecting the empire by sea; and your Emperor and your country may even require your blood. But the greater number among you are destined to other careers, and may have no such chances of bodily self-sacrifice--except perhaps in the hour of some great national danger, which I trust Japan will never know. And there is another desire, not less noble, which may be your compass in civil life: to live for your country though you cannot die for it. Like the kindest and wisest of fathers, your Government has provided for you these splendid schools, with all opportunities for the best instruction this scientific century can give, at a far less cost than any other civilised country can offer the same advantages. And all this in order that each of you may help to make your country wiser and richer and stronger than it has ever been in the past. And whoever does his best, in any calling or profession, to ennoble and develop that calling or profession, gives his life to his emperor and to his country no less truly than the soldier or the seaman who dies for duty. I am not less sorry to leave you, I think, than you are to see me go. The more I have learned to know the hearts of Japanese students, the more I have learned to love their country. I think, however, that I shall see many of you again, though I never return to Matsue: some I am almost sure I shall meet elsewhere in future summers; some I may even hope to teach once more, in the Government college to which I am going. But whether we meet again or not, be sure that my life has been made happier by knowing you, and that I shall always love you. And, now, with renewed thanks for your beautiful gift, good-bye! Sec. 3 The students of the Normal School gave me a farewell banquet in their hall. I had been with them so little during the year--less even than the stipulated six hours a week--that I could not have supposed they would feel much attachment for their foreign teacher. But I have still much to learn about my Japanese students. The banquet was delightful. The captain of each class in turn read in English a brief farewell address which he had prepared; and more than one of those charming compositions, made beautiful with similes and sentiments drawn from the old Chinese and Japanese poets, will always remain in my memory. Then the students sang their college songs for me, and chanted the Japanese version of 'Auld Lang Syne' at the close of the banquet. And then all, in military procession, escorted me home, and cheered me farewell at my gate, with shouts of 'Manzai!' 'Good-bye!' 'We will march with you to the steamer when you go.' Sec. 4 But I shall not have the pleasure of seeing them again. They are all gone far away--some to another world. Yet it is only four days since I attended that farewell banquet at the Normal School! A cruel visitation has closed its gates and scattered its students through the province. Two nights ago, the Asiatic cholera, supposed to have been brought to Japan by Chinese vessels, broke out in different parts of the city, and, among other places, in the Normal School. Several students and teachers expired within a short while after having been attacked; others are even now lingering between life and death. The rest marched to the little healthy village of Tamatsukuri, famed for its hot springs. But there the cholera again broke out among them, and it was decided to dismiss the survivors at once to their several homes. There was no panic. The military discipline remained unbroken. Students and teachers fell at their posts. The great college building was taken charge of by the medical authorities, and the work of disinfection and sanitation is still going on. Only the convalescents and the fearless samurai president, Saito Kumataro, remain in it. Like the captain who scorns to leave his sinking ship till all souls are safe, the president stays in the centre of danger, nursing the sick boys, overlooking the work of sanitation, transacting all the business usually intrusted to several subordinates, whom he promptly sent away in the first hour of peril. He has had the joy of seeing two of his boys saved. Of another, who was buried last night, I hear this: Only a little while before his death, and in spite of kindliest protest, he found strength, on seeing his president approaching his bedside, to rise on his elbow and give the military salute. And with that brave greeting to a brave man, he passed into the Great Silence. Sec. 5 At last my passport has come. I must go. The Middle School and the adjacent elementary schools have been closed on account of the appearance of cholera, and I protested against any gathering of the pupils to bid me good-bye, fearing for them the risk of exposure to the chilly morning air by the shore of the infected river. But my protest was received only with a merry laugh. Last night the Director sent word to all the captains of classes. Wherefore, an hour after sunrise, some two hundred students, with their teachers, assemble before my gate to escort me to the wharf, near the long white bridge, where the little steamer is waiting. And we go. Other students are already assembled at the wharf. And with them wait a multitude of people known to me: friends or friendly acquaintances, parents and relatives of students, every one to whom I can remember having ever done the slightest favour, and many more from whom I have received favours which I never had the chance to return--persons who worked for me, merchants from whom I purchased little things, a host of kind faces, smiling salutation. The Governor sends his secretary with a courteous message; the President of the Normal School hurries down for a moment to shake hands. The Normal students have been sent to their homes, but not a few of their teachers are present. I most miss friend Nishida. He has been very sick for two long months, bleeding at the lungs but his father brings me the gentlest of farewell letters from him, penned in bed, and some pretty souvenirs. And now, as I look at all these pleasant faces about me, I cannot but ask myself the question: 'Could I have lived in the exercise of the same profession for the same length of time in any other country, and have enjoyed a similar unbroken experience of human goodness?' From each and all of these I have received only kindness and courtesy. Not one has ever, even through inadvertence, addressed to me a single ungenerous word. As a teacher of more than five hundred boys and men, I have never even had my patience tried. I wonder if such an experience is possible only in Japan. But the little steamer shrieks for her passengers. I shake many hands-- most heartily, perhaps, that of the brave, kind President of the Normal School--and climb on board. The Director of the Jinjo-Chugakko a few teachers of both schools, and one of my favourite pupils, follow; they are going to accompany me as far as the next port, whence my way will be over the mountains to Hiroshima. It is a lovely vapoury morning, sharp with the first chill of winter. From the tiny deck I take my last look at the quaint vista of the Ohashigawa, with its long white bridge--at the peaked host of queer dear old houses, crowding close to dip their feet in its glassy flood--at the sails of the junks, gold-coloured by the early sun--at the beautiful fantastic shapes of the ancient hills. Magical indeed the charm of this land, as of a land veritably haunted by gods: so lovely the spectral delicacy of its colours--so lovely the forms of its hills blending with the forms of its clouds--so lovely, above all, those long trailings and bandings of mists which make its altitudes appear to hang in air. A land where sky and earth so strangely intermingle that what is reality may not be distinguished from what is illusion--that all seems a mirage, about to vanish. For me, alas! it is about to vanish for ever. The little steamer shrieks again, puffs, backs into midstream, turns from the long white bridge. And as the grey wharves recede, a long Aaaaaaaaaa rises from the uniformed ranks, and all the caps wave, flashing their Chinese ideographs of brass. I clamber to the roof of the tiny deck cabin, wave my hat, and shout in English: 'Good-bye, good- bye!' And there floats back to me the cry: 'Manzai, manzai!' [Ten thousand years to you! ten thousand years!] But already it comes faintly from far away. The packet glides out of the river-mouth, shoots into the blue lake, turns a pine-shadowed point, and the faces, and the voices, and the wharves, and the long white bridge have become memories. Still for a little while looking back, as we pass into the silence of the great water, I can see, receding on the left, the crest of the ancient castle, over grand shaggy altitudes of pine--and the place of my home, with its delicious garden--and the long blue roofs of the schools. These, too, swiftly pass out of vision. Then only faint blue water, faint blue mists, faint blues and greens and greys of peaks looming through varying distance, and beyond all, towering ghost-white into the east, the glorious spectre of Daisen. And my heart sinks a moment under the rush of those vivid memories which always crowd upon one the instant after parting--memories of all that make attachment to places and to things. Remembered smiles; the morning gathering at the threshold of the old yashiki to wish the departing teacher a happy day; the evening gathering to welcome his return; the dog waiting by the gate at the accustomed hour; the garden with its lotus-flowers and its cooing of doves; the musical boom of the temple bell from the cedar groves; songs of children at play; afternoon shadows upon many-tinted streets; the long lines of lantern-fires upon festal nights; the dancing of the moon upon the lake; the clapping of hands by the river shore in salutation to the Izumo sun; the endless merry pattering of geta over the windy bridge: all these and a hundred other happy memories revive for me with almost painful vividness--while the far peaks, whose names are holy, slowly turn away their blue shoulders, and the little steamer bears me, more and more swiftly, ever farther and farther from the Province of the Gods. NOTES for Chapter One 1 Such as the garden attached to the abbots palace at Tokuwamonji, cited by Mr. Conder, which was made to commemorate the legend of stones which bowed themselves in assent to the doctrine of Buddha. At Togo-ike, in Tottori-ken, I saw a very large garden consisting almost entirely of stones and sand. The impression which the designer had intended to convey was that of approaching the sea over a verge of dunes, and the illusion was beautiful. 2 The Kojiki, translated by Professor B. H. Chamberlain, p. 254. 3 Since this paper was written, Mr. Conder has published a beautiful illustrated volume,-Landscape Gardening in Japan. By Josiah Conder, F.R.I.B.A. Tokyo 1893. A photographic supplement to the work gives views of the most famous gardens in the capital and elsewhere. 4 The observations of Dr. Rein on Japanese gardens are not to be recommended, in respect either to accuracy or to comprehension of the subject. Rein spent only two years in Japan, the larger part of which time he devoted to the study of the lacquer industry, the manufacture of silk and paper and other practical matters. On these subjects his work is justly valued. But his chapters on Japanese manners and customs, art, religion, and literature show extremely little acquaintance with those topics. 5 This attitude of the shachihoko is somewhat de rigueur, whence the common expression shachihoko dai, signifying to stand on ones head. 6 The magnificent perch called tai (Serranus marginalis), which is very common along the Izumo coast, is not only justly prized as the most delicate of Japanese fish, but is also held to be an emblem of good fortune. It is a ceremonial gift at weddings and on congratu-latory occasions. The Japanese call it also the king of fishes. 7 Nandina domestica. 8 The most lucky of all dreams, they say in Izumo, is a dream of Fuji, the Sacred Mountain. Next in order of good omen is dreaming of a falcon (taka). The third best subject for a dream is the eggplant (nasubi). To dream of the sun or of the moon is very lucky; but it is still more so to dream of stars. For a young wife it is most for tunate to dream of swallowing a star: this signifies that she will become the mother of a beautiful child. To dream of a cow is a good omen; to dream of a horse is lucky, but it signifies travelling. To dream of rain or fire is good. Some dreams are held in Japan, as in the West, to go by contraries. Therefore to dream of having ones house burned up, or of funerals, or of being dead, or of talking to the ghost of a dead person, is good. Some dreams which are good for women mean the reverse when dreamed by men; for example, it is good for a woman to dream that her nose bleeds, but for a man this is very bad. To dream of much money is a sign of loss to come. To dream of the koi, or of any freshwater fish, is the most unlucky of all. This is curious, for in other parts of Japan the koi is a symbol of good fortune. 9 Tebushukan: Citrus sarkodactilis. 10 Yuzuru signifies to resign in favour of another; ha signifies a leaf. The botanical name, as given in Hepburns dictionary, is Daphniphillum macropodum. 11 Cerasus pseudo-cerasus (Lindley). 12 About this mountain cherry there is a humorous saying which illustrates the Japanese love of puns. In order fully to appreciate it, the reader should know that Japanese nouns have no distinction of singular and plural. The word ha, as pronounced, may signify either leaves or teeth; and the word hana, either flowers or nose. The yamazakura puts forth its ha (leaves) before his hana (flowers). Wherefore a man whose ha (teeth) project in advance of his hana (nose) is called a yamazakura. Prognathism is not uncommon in Japan, especially among the lower classes. 13 If one should ask you concerning the heart of a true Japanese, point to the wild cherry flower glowing in the sun. 14 There are three noteworthy varieties: one bearing red, one pink and white, and one pure white flowers. 15 The expression yanagi-goshi, a willow-waist, is one of several in common use comparing slender beauty to the willow-tree. 16 Peonia albiflora, The name signifies the delicacy of beauty. The simile of the botan (the tree peony) can be fully appreciated only by one who is acquainted with the Japanese flower. 17 Some say kesbiyuri (poppy) instead of himeyuri. The latter is a graceful species of lily, Lilium callosum. 18 Standing, she is a shakuyaku; seated, she is a botan; and the charm of her figure in walking is the charm of a himeyuri. 19 In the higher classes of Japanese society to-day, the honorific O is not, as a rule, used before the names of girls, and showy appellations are not given to daughters. Even among the poor respectable classes, names resembling those of geisha, etc., are in disfavour. But those above cited are good, honest, everyday names. 20 Mr. Satow has found in Hirata a belief to which this seems to some extent akin--the curious Shinto doctrine according to which a divine being throws off portions of itself by a process of fissure, thus producing what are called waki-mi-tama--parted spirits, with separate functions. The great god of Izumo, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, is said by Hirata to have three such parted spirits: his rough spirit (ara-mi- tama) that punishes, his gentle spirit (nigi-mi-tama) that pardons, and his benedictory or beneficent spirit (saki-mi-tama) that blesses, There is a Shinto story that the rough spirit of this god once met the gentle spirit without recognising it, 21 Perhaps the most impressive of all the Buddhist temples in Kyoto. It is dedicated to Kwannon of the Thousand Hands, and is said to contain 33,333 of her images. 22 Daidaimushi in Izunio. The dictionary word is dedemushi. The snail is supposed to be very fond of wet weather; and one who goes out much in the rain is compared to a snail,--dedemushi no yona. 23 Snail, snail, put out your horns a little it rains and the wind is blowing, so put out your horns, just for a little while. 24 A Buddhist divinity, but within recent times identified by Shinto with the god Kotohira. 25 See Professor Chamberlains version of it in The Japanese Fairy Tale Series, with charming illustrations by a native artist. 26 Butterfly, little butterfly, light upon the na leaf. But if thou dost not like the na leaf, light, I pray thee, upon my hand. 27 Boshi means a hat; tsukeru, to put on. But this etymology is more than doubtful. 28 Some say Chokko-chokko-uisu. Uisu would be pronounced in English very much like weece, the final u being silent. Uiosu would be something like ' we-oce. 29 Pronounced almost as geece. 30 Contraction of kore noru. 31 A kindred legend attaches to the shiwan, a little yellow insect which preys upon cucumbers. The shiwan is said to have been once a physician, who, being detected in an amorous intrigue, had to fly for his life; but as he went his foot caught in a cucumber vine, so that he fell and was overtaken and killed, and his ghost became an insect, the destroyer of cucumber vines. In the zoological mythology and plant mythology of Japan there exist many legends offering a curious resemblance to the old Greek tales of metamorphoses. Some of the most remarkable bits of such folk- lore have originated, however, in comparatively modern time. The legend of the crab called heikegani, found at Nagato, is an example. The souls of the Taira warriors who perished in the great naval battle of Dan-no- ura (now Seto-Nakai), 1185, are supposed to have been transformed into heikegani. The shell of the heikegani is certainly surprising. It is wrinkled into the likeness of a grim face, or rather into exact semblance of one of those black iron visors, or masks, which feudal warriors wore in battle, and which were shaped like frowning visages. 32 Come, firefly, I will give you water to drink. The water of that. place is bitter; the water here is sweet. 33 By honzon is here meant the sacred kakemono, or picture, exposed to public view in the temples only upon the birthday of the Buddha, which is the eighth day of the old fourth month. Honzon also signifies the principal image in a Buddhist temple. 34 A solitary voice! Did the Moon cry? Twas but the hototogisu. 35 When I gaze towards the place where I heard the hototogisu cry, lol there is naught save the wan morning moon. 36 Save only the morning moon, none heard the hearts-blood cry of the hototogisu. 37 A sort of doughnut made of bean flour, or tofu. 38 Kite, kite, let me see you dance, and to-morrow evening, when the crows do not know, I will give you a rat. 39 O tardy crow, hasten forward! Your house is all on fire. Hurry to throw Water upon it. If there be no water, I will give you. If you have too much, give it to your child. If you have no child, then give it back to me. 40 The words papa and mamma exist in Japanese baby language, but their meaning is not at all what might be supposed. Mamma, or, with the usual honorific, O-mamma, means boiled rice. Papa means tobacco. Notes for Chapter Two 1 This was written early in 1892 2 Quoted from Mr. Satow's masterly essay, 'The Revival of Pure Shinto,' published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. By 'gods' are not necessarily meant beneficent Kami. Shinto has no devils; but it has its 'bad gods' as well as good deities. 3 Satow, 'The Revival of Pure Shinto.' 4 Ibid. 5 In the sense of Moral Path,--i.e. an ethical system. 6 Satow, 'The Revival of Pure Shinto.' The whole force of Motowori's words will not be fully understood unless the reader knows that the term 'Shinto' is of comparatively modern origin in Japan,--having been borrowed from the Chinese to distinguish the ancient faith from Buddhism; and that the old name for the primitive religion is Kami-no- michi, 'the Way of the Gods.' 7 Satow, 'The Revival of Pure Shinto.' 8 From Kami, 'the [Powers] Above,' or the Gods, and tana, 'a shelf.' The initial 't' of the latter word changes into 'd' in the compound,-- just as that of tokkuri, 'a jar' or 'bottle,' becomes dokkuri in the cornpound o-mi kidokkuri. 9 The mirror, as an emblem of female divinities, is kept in the secret innermost shrine of various Shinto temples. But the mirror of metal commonly placed before the public gaze in a Shinto shrine is not really of Shinto origin, but was introduced into Japan as a Buddhist symbol of the Shingon sect. As the mirror is the symbol in Shinto of female divinities, the sword is the emblem of male deities. The real symbols of the god or goddess are not, however, exposed to human gaze under any circumstances. 10 Anciently the two great Shinto festivals on which the miya were thus carried in procession were the Yoshigami-no-matsuri, or festival of the God of the New Year, and the anniversary of Jimmu Tenno to the throne. The second of these is still observed. The celebration of the Emperor's birthday is the only other occasion when the miya are paraded. On both days the streets are beautifully decorated with lanterns and shimenawa, the fringed ropes of rice straw which are the emblems of Shinto. Nobody now knows exactly what the words chanted on these days (chosaya! chosaya!) mean. One theory is that they are a corruption of Sagicho, the name of a great samurai military festival, which was celebrated nearly at the same time as the Yashigami-no-matsuri,--both holidays now being obsolete. 11 Thuya obtusa. 12 Such at least is the mourning period under such circumstances in certain samurai families. Others say twenty days is sufficient. The Buddhist code of mourning is extremely varied and complicated, and would require much space to dilate upon. 13 In spite of the supposed rigidity of the Nichiren sect in such matters, most followers of its doctrine in Izumo are equally fervent Shintoists. I have not been able to observe whether the same is true of Izumo Shin-shu families as a rule; but I know that some Shin-shu believers in Matsue worship at Shinto shrines. Adoring only that form of Buddha called Amida, the Shin sect might be termed a Buddhist 'Unitarianism.' It seems never to have been able to secure a strong footing in Izumo on account of its doctrinal hostility to Shinto. Elsewhere throughout Japan it is the most vigorous and prosperous of all Buddhist sects. 14 Mr. Morse, in his Japanese Homes, published on hearsay a very strange error when he stated: 'The Buddhist household shrines rest on the floor--at least so I was informed.' They never rest on the floor under any circumstances. In the better class of houses special architectural arrangements are made for the butsudan; an alcove, recess, or other contrivance, often so arranged as to be concealed from view by a sliding panel or a little door In smaller dwellings it may be put on a shelf, for want of a better place, and in the homes of the poor, on the top of the tansu, or clothes-chest. It is never placed so high as the kamidana, but seldom at a less height than three feet above the floor. In Mr. Morse's own illustration of a Buddhist household shrine (p. 226) it does not rest on the floor at all, but on the upper shelf of a cupboard, which must not be confounded with the butsudan--a very small one. The sketch in question seems to have been made during the Festival of the Dead, for the offerings in the picture are those of the Bommatauri. At that time the household butsudan is always exposed to view, and often moved from its usual place in order to obtain room for the offerings to be set before it. To place any holy object on the floor is considered by the Japanese very disrespectful. As for Shinto objects, to place even a mamori on the floor is deemed a sin. 15 Two ihai are always made for each Buddhist dead. One usually larger than that placed in the family shrine, is kept in the temple of which the deceased was a parishioner, together with a cup in which tea or water is daily poured out as an offering. In almost any large temple, thousands of such ihai may be seen, arranged in rows, tier above tier-- each with its cup before it--for even the souls of the dead are supposed to drink tea. Sometimes, I fear, the offering is forgotten, for I have seen rows of cups containing only dust, the fault, perhaps, of some lazy acolyte. 16 This is a fine example of a samurai kaimyo The kaimyo of kwazoku or samurai are different from those of humbler dead; and a Japanese, by a single glance at an ihai, can tell at once to what class of society the deceased belonged, by the Buddhist words used. 17 'Presenting the honourable tea to the august Buddhas'--for by Buddhist faith it is hoped, if not believed, that the dead become Buddhas and escape the sorrows of further transmigration. Thus the expression 'is dead' is often rendered in Japanese by the phrase 'is become a Buddha.' 18 The idea underlying this offering of food and drink to the dead or to the gods, is not so irrational as unthinking Critics have declared it to be. The dead are not supposed to consume any of the visible substance of the food set before them, for they are thought to be in an ethereal state requiring only the most vapoury kind of nutrition. The idea is that they absorb only the invisible essence of the food. And as fruits and other such offerings lose something of their flavour after having been exposed to the air for several hours, this slight change would have been taken in other days as evidence that the spirits had feasted upon them. Scientific education necessarily dissipates these consoling illusions, and with them a host of tender and beautiful fancies as to the relation between the living and the dead. 19 I find that the number of clappings differs in different provinces somewhat. In Kyushu the clapping is very long, especially before the prayer to the Rising Sun. 20 Another name for Kyoto, the Sacred City of Japanese Buddhism. Notes for Chapter Three 1 Formerly both sexes used the same pillow for the same reason. The long hair of a samurai youth, tied up in an elaborate knot, required much time to arrange. Since it has become the almost universal custom to wear the hair short, the men have adopted a pillow shaped like a small bolster. 2 It is an error to suppose that all Japanese have blue-black hair. There are two distinct racial types. In one the hair is a deep brown instead of a pure black, and is also softer and finer. Rarely, but very rarely, one may see a Japanese chevelure having a natural tendency to ripple. For curious reasons, which cannot be stated here, an Izumo woman is very much ashamed of having wavy hair--more ashamed than she would be of a natural deformity. 3 Even in the time of the writing of the Kojiki the art of arranging t hair must have been somewhat developed. See Professor Chainberlai 's introduction to translation, p. xxxi.; also vol. i. section ix.; vol. vii. section xii.; vol. ix. section xviii., et passim. 4 An art expert can decide the age of an unsigned kakemono or other work of art in which human figures appear, by the style of the coiffure of the female personages. 5 The principal and indispensable hair-pin (kanzashi), usually about seven inches long, is split, and its well-tempered double shaft can be used like a small pair of chopsticks for picking up small things. The head is terminated by a tiny spoon-shaped projection, which has a special purpose in the Japanese toilette. 6 The shinjocho is also called Ichogaeshi by old people, although the original Ichogaeshi was somewhat different. The samurai girls used to wear their hair in the true Ichogaeshi manner the name is derived from the icho-tree (Salisburia andiantifolia), whose leaves have a queer shape, almost like that of a duck's foot. Certain bands of the hair in this coiffure bore a resemblance in form to icho-leaves. 7 The old Japanese mirrors were made of metal, and were extremely beautiful. Kagamiga kumoru to tamashii ga kumoru ('When the Mirror is dim, the Soul is unclean') is another curious proverb relating to mirrors. Perhaps the most beautiful and touching story of a mirror, in any language is that called Matsuyama-no-kagami, which has been translated by Mrs. James. Notes for Chapter Four 1 There is a legend that the Sun-Goddess invented the first hakama by tying together the skirts of her robe. 2 'Let us play the game called kango-kango. Plenteously the water of Jizo-San quickly draw--and pour on the pine-leaves--and turn back again.' Many of the games of Japanese children, like many of their toys, have a Buddhist origin, or at least a Buddhist significance. 3 I take the above translation from a Tokyo educational journal, entitled The Museum. The original document, however, was impressive to a degree that perhaps no translation could give. The Chinese words by which the Emperor refers to himself and his will are far more impressive than our Western 'We' or 'Our;' and the words relating to duties, virtues, wisdom, and other matters are words that evoke in a Japanese mind ideas which only those who know Japanese life perfectly can appreciate, and which, though variant from our own, are neither less beautiful nor less sacred. 4 Kimi ga yo wa chiyo ni yachiyo ni sazare ishi no iwa o to narite oke no musu made. Freely translated: 'May Our Gracious Sovereign reign a thousand years--reign ten thousand thousand years--reign till the little stone grow into a mighty rock, thick-velveted with ancient moss!' 5 Stoves, however, are being introduced. In the higher Government schools, and in the Normal Schools, the students who are boarders obtain a better diet than most poor boys can get at home. Their rooms are also well warmed. 6 Hachi yuki ya Neko no ashi ato Ume no hana. 7 Ni no ji fumi dasu Bokkuri kana. 8 This little poem signifies that whoever in this world thinks much, must have care, and that not to think about things is to pass one's life in untroubled felicity. 9 Having asked in various classes for written answers to the question, 'What is your dearest wish?' I found about twenty per cent, of the replies expressed, with little variation of words, the simple desire to die 'for His Sacred Majesty, Our Beloved Emperor.' But a considerable proportion of the remainder contained the same aspiration less directly stated in the wish to emulate the glory of Nelson, or to make Japan first among nations by heroism and sacrifice. While this splendid spirit lives in the hearts of her youth, Japan should have little to fear for the future. 10 Beautiful generosities of this kind are not uncommon in Japan. 11 The college porter 12 Except in those comparatively rare instances where the family is exclusively Shinto in its faith, or, although belonging to both faiths, prefers to bury its dead according to Shinto rites. In Matsue, as a rule, high officials only have Shinto funeral. 13 Unless the dead be buried according to the Shinto rite. In Matsue the mourning period is usually fifty days. On the fifty-first day after the decease, all members of the family go to Enjoji-nada (the lake-shore at the foot of the hill on which the great temple of Enjoji stands) to perform the ceremony of purification. At Enjoji-nada, on the beach, stands a lofty stone statue of Jizo. Before it the mourners pray; then wash their mouths and hands with the water of the lake. Afterwards they go to a friend's house for breakfast, the purification being always performed at daybreak, if possible. During the mourning period, no member of the family can eat at a friend's house. But if the burial has been according to the Shinto rite, all these ceremonial observances may be dispensed with. 14 But at samurai funerals in the olden time the women were robed in black. Notes for Chapter Five 1 As it has become, among a certain sect of Western Philistines and self-constituted art critics, the fashion to sneer at any writer who becomes enthusiastic about the truth to nature of Japanese art, I may cite here the words of England's most celebrated living naturalist on this very subject. Mr. Wallace's authority will scarcely, I presume, be questioned, even by the Philistines referred to: 'Dr. Mohnike possesses a large collection of coloured sketches of the plants of Japan made by a Japanese lady, which are the most masterly things I have ever seen. Every stem, twig, and leaf is produced by single touches of the brush, the character and perspective of very complicated plants being admirably given, and the articulations of stem and leaves shown in a most scientific manner.' (Malay Archipelago, chap. xx.) Now this was written in 1857, before European methods of drawing had been introduced. The same art of painting leaves, etc., with single strokes of the brush is still common in Japan--even among the poorest class of decorators. 2 There is a Buddhist saying about the kadomatsu: Kadomatsu Meido no tabi no Ichi-ri-zuka. The meaning is that each kadomatsu is a milestone on the journey to the Meido; or, in other words, that each New Year's festival signal only the completion of another stage of the ceaseless journey to death. 3 The difference between the shimenawa and shimekazari is that the latter is a strictly decorative straw rope, to which many curious emblems are attached. 4 It belongs to the sargassum family, and is full of air sacs. Various kinds of edible seaweed form a considerable proportion of Japanese diet. 5 'This is a curiously shaped staff with which the divinity Jizo is commonly represented. It is still carried by Buddhist mendicants, and there are several sizes of it. That carried by the Yaku-otoshj is usually very short. There is a tradition that the shakujo was first invented as a means of giving warning to insects or other little creatures in the path of the Buddhist pilgrim, so that they might not be trodden upon unawares. 6 I may make mention here of another matter, in no way relating to the Setsubun. There lingers in Izumo a wholesome--and I doubt not formerly a most valuable--superstition about the sacredness of writing. Paper upon which anything has been written, or even printed, must not be crumpled up, or trodden upon, or dirtied, or put to any base use. If it be necessary to destroy a document, the paper should be burned. I have been gently reproached in a little hotel at which I stopped for tearing up and crumpling some paper covered with my own writing. NOtes for Chapter Six 1 'A bucket honourably condescend [to give]. 2 The Kappa is not properly a sea goblin, but a river goblin, and haunts the sea only in the neighbourhood of river mouths. About a mile and a half from Matsue, at the little village of Kawachi-mura, on the river called Kawachi, stands a little temple called Kawako-no-miya, or the Miya of the Kappa. (In Izumo, among the common people, the word 'Kappa' is not used, but the term Kawako, or 'The Child of the River.') In this little shrine is preserved a document said to have been signed by a Kappa. The story goes that in ancient times the Kappa dwelling in the Kawachi used to seize and destroy many of the inhabitanta of the village and many domestic animals. One day, however, while trying to seize a horse that had entered the river to drink, the Kappa got its head twisted in some way under the belly-band of the horse, and the terrified animal, rushing out of the water, dragged the Kappa into a field. There the owner of the horse and a number of peasants seized and bound the Kappa. All the villagers gathered to see the monster, which bowed its head to the ground, and audibly begged for mercy. The peasants desired to kill the goblin at once; but the owner of the horse, who happened to be the head-man of the mura, said: 'It is better to make it swear never again to touch any person or animal belonging to Kawachi- mura. A written form of oath was prepared and read to the Kappa. It said that It could not write, but that It would sign the paper by dipping Its hand in ink, and pressing the imprint thereof at the bottom of the document. This having been agreed to and done, the Kappa was set free. From that time forward no inhabitant or animal of Kawachi-mura was ever assaulted by the goblin. 3 The Buddhist symbol. [The small illustration cannot be presented here. The arms are bent in the opposite direction to the Nazi swastika. Preparator's note] 4 'Help! help!' 5 Furuteya, the estab!ishment of a dea!er in second-hand wares--furute. 6 Andon, a paper lantern of peculiar construction, used as a night light. Some forms of the andon are remarkably beautiful. 7 'Ototsan! washi wo shimai ni shitesashita toki mo, chodo kon ya no yona tsuki yo data-ne?'--Izumo dialect. Notes for Chapter Seven 1 The Kyoto word is maiko. 2 Guitars of three strings. 3 It is sometimes customary for guests to exchange cups, after duly rinsing them. It is always a compliment to ask for your friend's cup. 4 Once more to rest beside her, or keep five thousand koku? What care I for koku? Let me be with her!' There lived in ancient times a haramoto called Fuji-eda Geki, a vassal of the Shogun. He had an income of five thousand koku of rice--a great income in those days. But he fell in love with an inmate of the Yoshiwara, named Ayaginu, and wished to marry her. When his master bade the vassal choose between his fortune and his passion, the lovers fled secretly to a farmer's house, and there committed suicide together. And the above song was made about them. It is still sung. 5 'Dear, shouldst thou die, grave shall hold thee never! I thy body's ashes, mixed with wine, wit! drink.' 6 Maneki-Neko 7 Buddhist food, containing no animal substance. Some kinds of shojin- ryori are quite appetising. 8 The terms oshiire and zendana might be partly rendered by 'wardrobe' and 'cupboard.' The fusuma are sliding screens serving as doors. 9 Tennin, a 'Sky-Maiden,' a Buddhist angel. 10 Her shrine is at Nara--not far from the temple of the giant Buddha. Notes for Chapter Eight 1 The names Dozen or Tozen, and Dogo or Toga, signify 'the Before- Islands' and 'the Behind-Islands.' 2 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is only a woman's baby' (a very small package). 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is the daddy, this is the daddy' (a big package). 'Dokoe, dokoel' ''Tis very small, very small!' 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is for Matsue, this is for Matsue!' 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is for Koetsumo of Yonago,' etc. 3 These words seem to have no more meaning than our 'yo-heaveho.' Yan- yui is a cry used by all Izumo and Hoki sailors. 4 This curious meaning is not given in Japanese-English dictionaries, where the idiom is translated merely by the phrase 'as aforesaid.' 5 The floor of a Japanese dwelling might be compared to an immense but very shallow wooden tray, divided into compartments corresponding to the various rooms. These divisions are formed by grooved and polished woodwork, several inches above the level, and made for the accommodation of the fusurna, or sliding screens, separating room from room. The compartments are filled up level with the partitions with tatami, or mats about the thickness of light mattresses, covered with beautifully woven rice-straw. The squared edges of the mats fit exactly together, and as the mats are not made for the house, but the house for the mats, all tatami are exactly the same size. The fully finished floor of each roam is thus like a great soft bed. No shoes, of course, can be worn in a Japanese house. As soon as the mats become in the least soiled they are replaced by new ones. 6 See article on Art in his Things Japanese. 7 It seems to be a black, obsidian. 8 There are several other versions of this legend. In one, it is the mare, and not the foal, which was drowned. 9 There are two ponds not far from each other. The one I visited was called 0-ike, or 'The Male Pond,' and the other, Me-ike, or 'The Female Pond.' 10 Speaking of the supposed power of certain trees to cure toothache, I may mention a curious superstition about the yanagi, or willow-tree. Sufferers from toothache sometimes stick needles into the tree, believing that the pain caused to the tree-spirit will force it to exercise its power to cure. I could not, however, find any record of this practice in Oki. 11 Moxa, a corruption of the native name of the mugwort plant: moe- kusa, or mogusa, 'the burning weed.' Small cones of its fibre are used for cauterising, according to the old Chinese system of medicine--the little cones being placed upon the patient's skin, lighted, and left to smoulder until wholly consumed. The result is a profound scar. The moxa is not only used therapeutically, but also as a punishment for very naughty children. See the interesting note on this subject in Professor Chamberlain's Things Japanese. 12 Nure botoke, 'a wet god.' This term is applied to the statue of a deity left exposed to the open air. 13 According to popular legend, in each eye of the child of a god or a dragon two Buddhas are visible. The statement in some of the Japanese ballads, that the hero sung of had four Buddhas in his eyes, is equivalent to the declaration that each of his eyes had a double-pupil. 14 The idea of the Atman will perhaps occur to many readers. 15 In 1892 a Japanese newspaper, published in Tokyo stated upon the authority of a physician who had visited Shimane, that the people of Oki believe in ghostly dogs instead of ghostly foxes. This is a mistake caused by the literal rendering of a term often used in Shi-mane, especially in Iwami, namely, inu-gami-mochi. It is only a euphemism for kitsune-mochi; the inu-gami is only the hito-kitsune, which is supposed to make itself visible in various animal forms. 16 Which words signify something like this: 'Sleep, baby, sleep! Why are the honourable ears of the Child of the Hare of the honourable mountain so long? 'Tis because when he dwelt within her honoured womb, his mamma ate the leaves of the loquat, the leaves of the bamboo-grass, That is why his honourable ears are so long.' 17 The Japanese police are nearly all of the samurai class, now called shizoku. I think this force may be considered the most perfect police in the world; but whether it will retain those magnificent qualities which at present distinguish it, after the lapse of another generation, is doubtful. It is now the samurai blood that tells. Notes for Chapter Nine 1 Afterwards I found that the old man had expressed to me only one popular form of a belief which would require a large book to fully explain--a belief founded upon Chinese astrology, but possibly modified by Buddhist and by Shinto ideas. This notion of compound Souls cannot be explained at all without a prior knowledge of the astrological relation between the Chinese Zodiacal Signs and the Ten Celestial Stems. Some understanding of these may be obtained from the curious article 'Time,' in Professor Chamberlain's admirable little book, Things Japanese. The relation having been perceived, it is further necessary to know that under the Chinese astrological system each year is under the influence of one or other of the 'Five Elements'--Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water; and according to the day and year of one's birth, one's temperament is celestially decided. A Japanese mnemonic verse tells us the number of souls or natures corresponding to each of the Five Elemental Influences --namely, nine souls for Wood, three for Fire, one for Earth, seven for Metal, five for Water: Kiku karani Himitsu no yama ni Tsuchi hitotsu Nanatsu kane to zo Go suiryo are. Multiplied into ten by being each one divided into 'Elder' and 'Younger,' the Five Elements become the Ten Celestial Stems; and their influences are commingled with those of the Rat, Bull, Tiger, Hare, Dragon, Serpent, Horse, Goat, Ape, Cock, Dog, and Boar (the twelve Zodiacal Signs)--all of which have relations to time, place, life, luck, misfortune, etc. But even these hints give no idea whatever how enormously complicated the subject really is. The book the old gardener referred to--once as widely known in Japan as every fortune-telling book in any European country--was the San-re-so, copies of which may still be picked up. Contrary to Kinjuro's opinion, however, it is held, by those learned in such Chinese matters, just as bad to have too many souls as to have too few. To have nine souls is to be too 'many-minded'--without fixed purpose; to have only one soul is to lack quick intelligence. According to the Chinese astrological ideas, the word 'natures' or 'characters' would perhaps be more accurate than the word 'souls' in this case. There is a world of curious fancies, born out of these beliefs. For one example of hundreds, a person having a Fire-nature must not marry one having a Water-nature. Hence the proverbial saying about two who cannot agree--'They are like Fire and Water.' 2 Usually an Inari temple. Such things are never done at the great Shinto shrines. Notes for Chapter Ten 1 In other parts of Japan I have heard the Yuki-Onna described as a very beautiful phantom who lures young men to lonesome places for the purpose of sucking their blood. 2 In Izumo the Dai-Kan, or Period of Greatest Cold, falls in February. 3 'It is excellent: I pray you give me a little more.' 4 Kwashi: Japanese confectionery Notes for Chapter Eleven 1 The reader will find it well worth his while to consult the chapter entitled 'Domestic Service,' in Miss Bacon's Japanese Girls and Women, for an interesting and just presentation of the practical side of the subject, as relating to servants of both sexes. The poetical side, however, is not treated of--perhaps because intimately connected with religious beliefs which one writing from the Christian standpoint could not be expected to consider sympathetically. Domestic service in ancient Japan was both transfigured and regulated by religion; and the force of the religious sentiment concerning it may be divined from the Buddhist saying, still current: Oya-ko wa is-se, Fufu wa ni-se, Shuju wa san-se. The relation of parent and child endures for the space of one life only; that of husband and wife for the space of two lives; but the relation between msater and servant continues for the period of three existences. 2 The shocks continued, though with lessening frequency and violence, for more than six months after the cataclysm. 3 Of course the converse is the rule in condoling with the sufferer. 4 Dhammapada. 5 Dammikkasutta. 6 Dhammapada. 7 These extracts from a translation in the Japan Daily Mail, November 19, 20, 1890, of Viscount Torio's famous conservative essay do not give a fair idea of the force and logic of the whole. The essay is too long to quote entire; and any extracts from the Mail's admirable translation suffer by their isolation from the singular chains of ethical, religious, and philosophical reasoning which bind the Various parts of the composition together. The essay was furthermore remarkable as the production of a native scholar totally uninfluenced by Western thought. He correctly predicted those social and political disturbances which have occurred in Japan since the opening of the new parliament. Viscount Torio is also well known as a master of Buddhist philosophy. He holds a high rank in the Japanese army. 8 In expressing my earnest admiration of this wonderful book, I must, however, declare that several of its conclusions, and especially the final ones, represent the extreme reverse of my own beliefs on the subject. I do not think the Japanese without individuality; but their individuality is less superficially apparent, and reveals itself much less quickly, than that of Western people. I am also convinced that much of what we call 'personality' and 'force of character' in the West represents only the survival and recognition of primitive aggressive tendencies, more or less disguised by culture. What Mr. Spencer calls the highest individuation surely does not include extraordinary development of powers adapted to merely aggressive ends; and yet it is rather through these than through any others that Western individuality most commonly and readily manifests itself. Now there is, as yet, a remarkable scarcity in Japan, of domineering, brutal, aggressive, or morbid individuality. What does impress one as an apparent weakness in Japanese intellectual circles is the comparative absence of spontaneity, creative thought, original perceptivity of the highest order. Perhaps this seeming deficiency is racial: the peoples of the Far East seem to have been throughout their history receptive rather than creative. At all events I cannot believe Buddhism--originally the faith of an Aryan race--can be proven responsible. The total exclusion of Buddhist influence from public education would not seem to have been stimulating; for the masters of the old Buddhist philosophy still show a far higher capacity for thinking in relations than that of the average graduate of the Imperial University. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that an intellectual revival of Buddhism--a harmonising of its loftier truths with the best and broadest teachings of modern science--would have the most important results for Japan. 9 Herbert Spencer. A native scholar, Mr. Inouye Enryo, has actually founded at Tokyo with this noble object in view, a college of philosophy which seems likely, at the present writing, to become an influential institution. 
6381	----	TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES By Lafcadio Hearn Author Of "Chita" Etc. Illustrated "_La façon d'être du pays est si agréable, la température si bonne, et l'on y vit dans une liberté si honnête, que je n'aye pas vu un seul homme, ny une seule femme, qui en soient revenues, en qui je n'aye remarqué une grande passion d'y retourner._"-LE PÈRE DUTERTRE (1667) À MON CHER AMI LEOPOLD ARNOUX NOTAIRE À SAINT PIERRE, MARTINIQUE _Souvenir de nos promenades,--de nos voyages,--de nos causeries,--des sympathies échangées,--de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et inoubliable,--de tout ce qui parle à l'âme au doux Pay des Revenants._ PREFACE During a trip to the Lesser Antilles in the summer of 1887, the writer of the following pages, landing at Martinique, fell under the influence of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon strangers, and by which it has earned its poetic name,--_Le Pays des Revenants_. Even as many another before him, he left its charmed shores only to know himself haunted by that irresistible regret,--unlike any other,--which is the enchantment of the land upon all who wander away from it. So he returned, intending to remain some months; but the bewitchment prevailed, and he remained two years. Some of the literary results of that sojourn form the bulk of the present volume. Several, or portions of several, papers have been published in HARPER'S MAGAZINE; but the majority of the sketches now appear in print for the first time. The introductory paper, entitled "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics," consists for the most part of notes taken upon a voyage of nearly three thousand miles, accomplished in less than two months. During such hasty journeying it is scarcely possible for a writer to attempt anything more serious than a mere reflection of the personal experiences undergone; and, in spite of sundry justifiable departures from simple note-making, this paper is offered only as an effort to record the visual and emotional impressions of the moment. My thanks are due to Mr. William Lawless, British Consul at St. Pierre, for several beautiful photographs, taken by himself, which have been used in the preparation of the illustrations. L. H. _Philadelphia, 1889._ LIST OF CONTENTS PART ONE--A MIDSUMMER TRIP TO THE TROPICS PART TWO--MARTINIQUE SKETCHES:-- I. LES PORTEUSES II. LA GRANDE ANSE III. UN REVENANT IV. LA GUIABLESSE V. LA VÉRETTE VI. LES BLANCHISSEUSES VII. LA PELÉE VIII. 'TI CANOTIÉ IX. LA FILLE DE COULEUR X. BÊTE-NI-PIÉ XI. MA BONNE XII. "PA COMBINÉ, CHÈ" XIII. YÉ XIV. LYS XV. APPENDIX:--SOME CREOLE MELODIES ILLUSTRATIONS. A Martinique Métisse (Frontispiece) La Place Bertin, St. Pierre, Martinique Itinerant Pastry-seller In the Cimetière du Mouillage, St. Pierre In the Jardin des Plantes, St. Pierre Cascade in the Jardin des Plantes Departure of Steamer for Fort-de-France Statue of Josephine Inner Basin, Bridgetown, Barbadoes Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbadoes Street in Georgetown, Demerara Avenue in Georgetown, Demerara Victoria Regia in the Canal at Georgetown Demerara Coolie Girl St. James Avenue, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad Coolies of Trinidad Coolie Servant Coolie Merchant Church Street, St. George, Grenada Castries, St. Lucia 'Ti Marie Fort-de-France, Martinique Capre in Working Garb A Confirmation Procession Manner of Playing the Ka A Wayside Shrine, or Chapelle Rue Victor Hugo, St. Pierre Quarter of the Fort, St. Pierre Rivière des Blanchisseuses Foot of La Pellé, behind the Quarter of the Fort Village of Morne Rouge Pellé as seen from Grande Anse Arborescent Ferns on a Mountain Road 'Ti Canot The Martinique Turban The Guadeloupe Head-dress Young Mulattress Coolie Woman in Martinique Costume Country Girl-pure Negro Race Coolie Half-breed Capresse The Old Market-place of the Fort, St. Pierre Bread-fruit Tree Basse-terre, St. Kitt's A TRIP TO THE TROPICS. PART ONE--A MIDSUMMER TRIP TO THE TROPICS. I. ... A long, narrow, graceful steel steamer, with two masts and an orange-yellow chimney,--taking on cargo at Pier 49 East River. Through her yawning hatchways a mountainous piling up of barrels is visible below;--there is much rumbling and rattling of steam-winches, creaking of derrick-booms, groaning of pulleys as the freight is being lowered in. A breezeless July morning, and a dead heat,--87° already. The saloon-deck gives one suggestion of past and of coming voyages. Under the white awnings long lounge-chairs sprawl here and there,--each with an occupant, smoking in silence, or dozing with head drooping to one side. A young man, awaking as I pass to my cabin, turns upon me a pair of peculiarly luminous black eyes,--creole eyes. Evidently a West Indian.... The morning is still gray, but the sun is dissolving the haze. Gradually the gray vanishes, and a beautiful, pale, vapory blue--a spiritualized Northern blue--colors water and sky. A cannon-shot suddenly shakes the heavy air: it is our farewell to the American shore;--we move. Back floats the wharf, and becomes vapory with a bluish tinge. Diaphanous mists seem to have caught the sky color; and even the great red storehouses take a faint blue tint as they recede. The horizon now has a greenish glow, Everywhere else the effect is that of looking through very light-blue glasses.... We steam under the colossal span of the mighty bridge; then for a little while Liberty towers above our passing,--seeming first to turn towards us, then to turn away from us, the solemn beauty of her passionless face of bronze. Tints brighten;--the heaven is growing a little bluer, A breeze springs up.... Then the water takes on another hue: pale-green lights play through it, It has begun to sound, Little waves lift up their heads as though to look at us,--patting the flanks of the vessel, and whispering to one another. Far off the surface begins to show quick white flashes here and there, and the steamer begins to swing.... We are nearing Atlantic waters, The sun is high up now, almost overhead: there are a few thin clouds in the tender-colored sky,--flossy, long-drawn-out, white things. The horizon has lost its greenish glow: it is a spectral blue. Masts, spars, rigging,--the white boats and the orange chimney,--the bright deck-lines, and the snowy rail,--cut against the colored light in almost dazzling relief. Though the sun shines hot the wind is cold: its strong irregular blowing fans one into drowsiness. Also the somnolent chant of the engines--_do-do, hey! do-do, hey!_--lulls to sleep. ..Towards evening the glaucous sea-tint vanishes,--the water becomes blue. It is full of great flashes, as of seams opening and reclosing over a white surface. It spits spray in a ceaseless drizzle. Sometimes it reaches up and slaps the side of the steamer with a sound as of a great naked hand, The wind waxes boisterous. Swinging ends of cordage crack like whips. There is an immense humming that drowns speech,--a humming made up of many sounds: whining of pulleys, whistling of riggings, flapping and fluttering of canvas, roar of nettings in the wind. And this sonorous medley, ever growing louder, has rhythm,--a _crescendo_ and _diminuendo_ timed by the steamer's regular swinging: like a great Voice crying out, "Whoh-oh-oh! whoh-oh-oh!" We are nearing the life-centres of winds and currents. One can hardly walk on deck against the ever-increasing breath;--yet now the whole world is blue,--not the least cloud is visible; and the perfect transparency and voidness about us make the immense power of this invisible medium seem something ghostly and awful.... The log, at every revolution, whines exactly like a little puppy;--one can hear it through all the roar fully forty feet away. ...It is nearly sunset. Across the whole circle of the Day we have been steaming south. Now the horizon is gold green. All about the falling sun, this gold-green light takes vast expansion.... Right on the edge of the sea is a tall, gracious ship, sailing sunsetward. Catching the vapory fire, she seems to become a phantom,--a ship of gold mist: all her spars and sails are luminous, and look like things seen in dreams. Crimsoning more and more, the sun drops to the sea. The phantom ship approaches him,--touches the curve of his glowing face, sails right athwart it! Oh, the spectral splendor of that vision! The whole great ship in full sail instantly makes an acute silhouette against the monstrous disk,--rests there in the very middle of the vermilion sun. His face crimsons high above her top-masts,--broadens far beyond helm and bowsprit. Against this weird magnificence, her whole shape changes color: hull, masts, and sails turn black--a greenish black. Sun and ship vanish together in another minute. Violet the night comes; and the rigging of the foremast cuts a cross upon the face of the moon. II. Morning: the second day. The sea is an extraordinary blue,--looks to me something like violet ink. Close by the ship, where the foam-clouds are, it is beautifully mottled,--looks like blue marble with exquisite veinings and nebulosities.... Tepid wind, and cottony white clouds,--cirri climbing up over the edge of the sea all around. The sky is still pale blue, and the horizon is full of a whitish haze. ... A nice old French gentleman from Guadeloupe presumes to say this is not blue water--he declares it greenish (_verdâtre_). Because I cannot discern the green, he tells me I do not yet know what blue water is. _Attendez un peu!_... ... The sky-tone deepens as the sun ascends,--deepens deliciously. The warm wind proves soporific. I drop asleep with the blue light in my face,--the strong bright blue of the noonday sky. As I doze it seems to burn like a cold fire right through my eyelids. Waking up with a start, I fancy that everything is turning blue,--myself included. "Do you not call this the real tropical blue?" I cry to my French fellow-traveller. _"Mon Dieu! non_," he exclaims, as in astonishment at the question;--"this is not blue!"...What can be _his_ idea of blue, I wonder! Clots of sargasso float by,--light-yellow sea-weed. We are nearing the Sargasso-sea,--entering the path of the trade-winds. There is a long ground-swell, the steamer rocks and rolls, and the tumbling water always seems to me growing bluer; but my friend from Guadeloupe says that this color "which I call blue" is only darkness--only the shadow of prodigious depth. Nothing now but blue sky and what I persist in calling blue sea. The clouds have melted away in the bright glow. There is no sign of life in the azure gulf above, nor in the abyss beneath--there are no wings or fins to be seen. Towards evening, under the slanting gold light, the color of the sea deepens into ultramarine; then the sun sinks down behind a bank of copper-colored cloud. III. Morning of the third day. Same mild, warm wind. Bright blue sky, with some very thin clouds in the horizon,--like puffs of steam. The glow of the sea-light through the open ports of my cabin makes them seem filled with thick blue glass.... It is becoming too warm for New York clothing.... Certainly the sea has become much bluer. It gives one the idea of liquefied sky: the foam might be formed of cirrus clouds compressed,--so extravagantly white it looks to-day, like snow in the sun. Nevertheless, the old gentleman from Guadeloupe still maintains this is not the true blue of the tropics ... The sky does not deepen its hue to-day: it brightens it--the blue glows as if it were taking fire throughout. Perhaps the sea may deepen its hue;--I do not believe it can take more luminous color without being set aflame.... I ask the ship's doctor whether it is really true that the West Indian waters are any bluer than these. He looks a moment at the sea, and replies, "_Oh_ yes!" There is such a tone of surprise in his "oh" as might indicate that I had asked a very foolish question; and his look seems to express doubt whether I am quite in earnest.... I think, nevertheless, that this water is extravagantly, nonsensically blue! ... I read for an hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up suddenly; look at the sea,--and cry out! This sea is impossibly blue! The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a lunatic.... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down, turn sky-blue,--a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if one were looking into an immeasurable dyeing vat, or as though the whole ocean had been thickened with indigo. To say this is a mere reflection of the sky is nonsense!--the sky is too pale by a hundred shades for that! This must be the natural color of the water,--a blazing azure,--magnificent, impossible to describe. The French passenger from Guadeloupe observes that the sea is "beginning to become blue." IV. And the fourth day. One awakens unspeakably lazy;--this must be the West Indian languor. Same sky, with a few more bright clouds than yesterday;--always the warm wind blowing. There is a long swell. Under this trade-breeze, warm like a human breath, the ocean seems to pulse,--to rise and fall as with a vast inspiration and expiration. Alternately its blue circle lifts and falls before us and behind us--we rise very high; we sink very low,--but always with a slow long motion. Nevertheless, the water looks smooth, perfectly smooth; the billowings which lift us cannot be seen;--it is because the summits of these swells are mile-broad,--too broad to be discerned from the level of our deck. ... Ten A.M.--Under the sun the sea is a flaming, dazzling lazulite. My French friend from Guadeloupe kindly confesses this is _almost_ the color of tropical water.... Weeds floating by, a little below the surface, are azured. But the Guadeloupe gentleman says he has seen water still more blue. I am sorry,--I cannot believe him. Mid-day.--The splendor of the sky is weird! No clouds above--only blue fire! Up from the warm deep color of the sea-circle the edge of the heaven glows as if bathed in greenish flame. The swaying circle of the resplendent sea seems to flash its jewel-color to the zenith. Clothing feels now almost too heavy to endure; and the warm wind brings a languor with it as of temptation.... One feels an irresistible desire to drowse on deck--the rushing speech of waves, the long rocking of the ship, the lukewarm caress of the wind, urge to slumber--but the light is too vast to permit of sleep. Its blue power compels wakefulness. And the brain is wearied at last by this duplicated azure splendor of sky and sea. How gratefully comes the evening to us,--with its violet glooms and promises of coolness! All this sensuous blending of warmth and force in winds and waters more and more suggests an idea of the spiritualism of elements,--a sense of world-life. In all these soft sleepy swayings, these caresses of wind and sobbing of waters, Nature seems to confess some passional mood. Passengers converse of pleasant tempting things,--tropical fruits, tropical beverages, tropical mountain-breezes, tropical women It is a time for dreams--those day-dreams that come gently as a mist, with ghostly realization of hopes, desires, ambitions.... Men sailing to the mines of Guiana dream of gold. The wind seems to grow continually warmer; the spray feels warm like blood. Awnings have to be clewed up, and wind-sails taken in;--still, there are no white-caps,--only the enormous swells, too broad to see, as the ocean falls and rises like a dreamer's breast.... The sunset comes with a great burning yellow glow, fading up through faint greens to lose itself in violet light;--there is no gloaming. The days have already become shorter.... Through the open ports, as we lie down to sleep, comes a great whispering,--the whispering of the seas: sounds as of articulate speech under the breath,--as, of women telling secrets.... V. Fifth day out. Trade-winds from the south-east; a huge tumbling of mountain-purple waves;--the steamer careens under a full spread of canvas. There is a sense of spring in the wind to-day,--something that makes one think of the bourgeoning of Northern woods, when naked trees first cover themselves with a mist of tender green,--something that recalls the first bird-songs, the first climbings of sap to sun, and gives a sense of vital plenitude. ... Evening fills the west with aureate woolly clouds,--the wool of the Fleece of Gold. Then Hesperus beams like another moon, and the stars burn very brightly. Still the ship bends under the even pressure of the warm wind in her sails; and her wake becomes a trail of fire. Large sparks dash up through it continuously, like an effervescence of flame;--and queer broad clouds of pale fire swirl by. Far out, where the water is black as pitch, there are no lights: it seems as if the steamer were only grinding out sparks with her keel, striking fire with her propeller. VI. Sixth day out. Wind tepid and still stronger, but sky very clear. An indigo sea, with beautiful white-caps. The ocean color is deepening: it is very rich now, but I think less wonderful than before;--it is an opulent pansy hue. Close by the ship it looks black-blue,--the color that bewitches in certain Celtic eyes. There is a feverishness in the air;--the heat is growing heavy; the least exertion provokes perspiration; below-decks the air is like the air of an oven. Above-deck, however, the effect of all this light and heat is not altogether disagreeable;-one feels that vast elemental powers are near at hand, and that the blood is already aware of their approach. All day the pure sky, the deepening of sea-color, the lukewarm wind. Then comes a superb sunset! There is a painting in the west wrought of cloud-colors,--a dream of high carmine cliffs and rocks outlying in a green sea, which lashes their bases with a foam of gold.... Even after dark the touch of the wind has the warmth of flesh. There is no moon; the sea-circle is black as Acheron; and our phosphor wake reappears quivering across it,--seeming to reach back to the very horizon. It is brighter to-night,--looks like another _Via Lactea_,--with points breaking through it like stars in a nebula. From our prow ripples rimmed with fire keep fleeing away to right and left into the night,--brightening as they run, then vanishing suddenly as if they had passed over a precipice. Crests of swells seem to burst into showers of sparks, and great patches of spume catch flame, smoulder through, and disappear.... The Southern Cross is visible,--sloping backward and sidewise, as if propped against the vault of the sky: it is not readily discovered by the unfamiliarized eye; it is only after it has been well pointed out to you that you discern its position. Then you find it is only the _suggestion_ of a cross--four stars set almost quadrangularly, some brighter than others. For two days there has been little conversation on board. It may be due in part to the somnolent influence of the warm wind,--in part to the ceaseless booming of waters and roar of rigging, which drown men's voices; but I fancy it is much more due to the impressions of space and depth and vastness,--the impressions of sea and sky, which compel something akin to awe. VII. Morning over the Caribbean Sea,--a calm, extremely dark-blue sea. There are lands in sight,--high lands, with sharp, peaked, unfamiliar outlines. We passed other lands in the darkness: they no doubt resembled the shapes towering up around us now; for these are evidently volcanic creations,--jagged, coned, truncated, eccentric. Far off they first looked a very pale gray; now, as the light increases, they change hue a little,--showing misty greens and smoky blues. They rise very sharply from the sea to great heights,--the highest point always with a cloud upon it;--they thrust out singular long spurs, push up mountain shapes that have an odd scooped-out look. Some, extremely far away, seem, as they catch the sun, to be made of gold vapor; others have a madderish tone: these are colors of cloud. The closer we approach them, the more do tints of green make themselves visible. Purplish or bluish masses of coast slowly develop green surfaces; folds and wrinkles of land turn brightly verdant. Still, the color gleams as through a thin fog. ... The first tropical visitor has just boarded our ship: a wonderful fly, shaped like a common fly, but at least five times larger. His body is a beautiful shining black; his wings seem ribbed and jointed with silver, his head is jewel-green, with exquisitely cut emeralds for eyes. Islands pass and disappear behind us. The sun has now risen well; the sky is a rich blue, and the tardy moon still hangs in it. Lilac tones show through the water. In the south there are a few straggling small white clouds,--like a long flight of birds. A great gray mountain shape looms up before us. We are steaming on Santa Cruz. The island has a true volcanic outline, sharp and high: the cliffs sheer down almost perpendicularly. The shape is still vapory, varying in coloring from purplish to bright gray; but wherever peaks and spurs fully catch the sun they edge themselves with a beautiful green glow, while interlying ravines seem filled with foggy blue. As we approach, sun lighted surfaces come out still more luminously green. Glens and sheltered valleys still hold blues and grays; but points fairly illuminated by the solar glow show just such a fiery green as burns in the plumage of certain humming-birds. And just as the lustrous colors of these birds shift according to changes of light, so the island shifts colors here and there,--from emerald to blue, and blue to gray.... But now we are near: it shows us a lovely heaping of high bright hills in front,--with a further coast-line very low and long and verdant, fringed with a white beach, and tufted with spidery palm-crests. Immediately opposite, other palms are poised; their trunks look like pillars of unpolished silver, their leaves shimmer like bronze. ... The water of the harbor is transparent and pale green. One can see many fish, and some small sharks. White butterflies are fluttering about us in the blue air. Naked black boys are bathing on the beach;--they swim well, but will not venture out far because of the sharks. A boat puts off to bring colored girls on board. They are tall, and not uncomely, although very dark;--they coax us, with all sorts of endearing words, to purchase bay rum, fruits, Florida water.... We go ashore in boats. The water of the harbor has a slightly fetid odor. VIII. Viewed from the bay, under the green shadow of the hills overlooking it, Frederiksted has the appearance of a beautiful Spanish town, with its Romanesque piazzas, churches, many arched buildings peeping through breaks in a line of mahogany, bread-fruit, mango, tamarind, and palm trees,--an irregular mass of at least fifty different tints, from a fiery emerald to a sombre bluish-green. But on entering the streets the illusion of beauty passes: you find yourself in a crumbling, decaying town, with buildings only two stories high. The lower part, of arched Spanish design, is usually of lava rock or of brick, painted a light, warm yellow; the upper stories are most commonly left unpainted, and are rudely constructed of light timber. There are many heavy arcades and courts opening on the streets with large archways. Lava blocks have been used in paving as well as in building; and more than one of the narrow streets, as it slopes up the hill through the great light, is seen to cut its way through craggy masses of volcanic stone. But all the buildings look dilapidated; the stucco and paint is falling or peeling everywhere; there are fissures in the walls, crumbling façades, tumbling roofs. The first stories, built with solidity worthy of an earthquake region, seem extravagantly heavy by contrast with the frail wooden superstructures. One reason may be that the city was burned and sacked during a negro revolt in 1878;--the Spanish basements resisted the fire well, and it was found necessary to rebuild only the second stories of the buildings; but the work was done cheaply and flimsily, not massively and enduringly, as by the first colonial builders. There is great wealth of verdure. Cabbage and cocoa palms overlook all the streets, bending above almost every structure, whether hut or public building;--everywhere you see the splitted green of banana leaves. In the court-yards you may occasionally catch sight of some splendid palm with silver-gray stem so barred as to look jointed, like the body of an annelid. In the market-place--a broad paved square, crossed by two rows of tamarind-trees, and bounded on one side by a Spanish piazza--you can study a spectacle of savage picturesqueness. There are no benches, no stalls, no booths; the dealers stand, sit, or squat upon the ground under the sun, or upon the steps of the neighboring arcade. Their wares are piled up at their feet, for the most part. Some few have little tables, but as a rule the eatables are simply laid on the dusty ground or heaped upon the steps of the piazza--reddish-yellow mangoes, that look like great apples squeezed out of shape, bunches of bananas, pyramids of bright-green cocoanuts, immense golden-green oranges, and various other fruits and vegetables totally unfamiliar to Northern eyes.... It is no use to ask questions--the black dealers speak no dialect comprehensible outside of the Antilles: it is a negro-English that sounds like some African tongue,--a rolling current of vowels and consonants, pouring so rapidly that the inexperienced ear cannot detach one intelligible word, A friendly white coming up enabled me to learn one phrase: "Massa, youwancocknerfoobuy?" (Master, do you want to buy a cocoanut?) The market is quite crowded,--full of bright color under the tremendous noon light. Buyers and dealers are generally black;--very few yellow or brown people are visible in the gathering. The greater number present are women; they are very simply, almost savagely, garbed--only a skirt or petticoat, over which is worn a sort of calico short dress, which scarcely descends two inches below the hips, and is confined about the waist with a belt or a string. The skirt bells out like the skirt of a dancer, leaving the feet and bare legs well exposed; and the head is covered with a white handkerchief, twisted so as to look like a turban. Multitudes of these barelegged black women are walking past us,--carrying bundles or baskets upon their heads, and smoking very long cigars. They are generally short and thick-set, and walk with surprising erectness, and with long, firm steps, carrying the bosom well forward. Their limbs are strong and finely rounded. Whether walking or standing, their poise is admirable,--might be called graceful, were it not for the absence of real grace of form in such compact, powerful little figures. All wear brightly colored cottonade stuffs, and the general effect of the costume in a large gathering is very agreeable, the dominant hues being pink, white, and blue. Half the women are smoking. All chatter loudly, speaking their English jargon with a pitch of voice totally unlike the English timbre: it sometimes sounds as if they were trying to pronounce English rapidly according to French pronunciation and pitch of voice. These green oranges have a delicious scent and amazing juiciness. Peeling one of them is sufficient to perfume the skin of the hands for the rest of the day, however often one may use soap and water.... We smoke Porto Rico cigars, and drink West Indian lemonades, strongly flavored with rum. The tobacco has a rich, sweet taste; the rum is velvety, sugary, with a pleasant, soothing effect: both have a rich aroma. There is a wholesome originality about the flavor of these products, a uniqueness which certifies to their naif purity: something as opulent and frank as the juices and odors of tropical fruits and flowers. The streets leading from the plaza glare violently in the strong sunlight;--the ground, almost dead-white, dazzles the eyes.... There are few comely faces visible,--in the streets all are black who pass. But through open shop-doors one occasionally catches glimpses of a pretty quadroon face,--with immense black eyes,--a face yellow like a ripe banana. ... It is now after mid-day. Looking up to the hills, or along sloping streets towards the shore, wonderful variations of foliage-color meet the eye: gold-greens, sap-greens, bluish and metallic greens of many tints, reddish-greens, yellowish-greens. The cane-fields are broad sheets of beautiful gold-green; and nearly as bright are the masses of _pomme-cannelle_ frondescence, the groves of lemon and orange; while tamarind and mahoganies are heavily sombre. Everywhere palm-crests soar above the wood-lines, and tremble with a metallic shimmering in the blue light. Up through a ponderous thickness of tamarind rises the spire of the church; a skeleton of open stone-work, without glasses or lattices or shutters of any sort for its naked apertures: it is all open to the winds of heaven; it seems to be gasping with all its granite mouths for breath--panting in this azure heat. In the bay the water looks greener than ever: it is so clear that the light passes under every boat and ship to the very bottom; the vessels only cast very thin green shadows,--so transparent that fish can be distinctly seen passing through from sunlight to sunlight. The sunset offers a splendid spectacle of pure color; there is only an immense yellow glow in the west,--a lemon-colored blaze; but when it melts into the blue there is an exquisite green light.... We leave to-morrow. ... Morning: the green hills are looming in a bluish vapor: the long faint-yellow slope of beach to the left of the town, under the mangoes and tamarinds, is already thronged with bathers,--all men or boys, and all naked: black, brown, yellow, and white. The white bathers are Danish soldiers from the barracks; the Northern brightness of their skins forms an almost startling contrast with the deep colors of the nature about them, and with the dark complexions of the natives. Some very slender, graceful brown lads are bathing with them,--lightly built as deer: these are probably creoles. Some of the black bathers are clumsy-looking, and have astonishingly long legs.... Then little boys come down, leading horses;--they strip, leap naked on the animals' backs, and ride into the sea,--yelling, screaming, splashing, in the morning light. Some are a fine brown color, like old bronze. Nothing could-be more statuesque than the unconscious attitudes of these bronze bodies in leaping, wrestling, running, pitching shells. Their simple grace is in admirable harmony with that of Nature's green creations about them,--rhymes faultlessly with the perfect self-balance of the palms that poise along the shore.... Boom! and a thunder-rolling of echoes. We move slowly out of the harbor, then swiftly towards the southeast.... The island seems to turn slowly half round; then to retreat from us. Across our way appears a long band of green light, reaching over the sea like a thin protraction of color from the extended spur of verdure in which the western end of the island terminates. That is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying high upon it, in very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked vessel on her beam-ends,--the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been broken in; the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are splintered off short; her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; all her upper parts have taken a yellowish-white color,--the color of sun-bleached bone. Behind us the mountains still float back. Their shining green has changed to a less vivid hue; they are taking bluish tones here and there; but their outlines are still sharp, and along their high soft slopes there are white specklings, which are villages and towns. These white specks diminish swiftly,--dwindle to the dimensions of salt-grains,--finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;--it turns at last gray as smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage. Another yellow sunset, made weird by extraordinary black, dense, fantastic shapes of cloud. Night darkens, and again the Southern Cross glimmers before our prow, and the two Milky Ways reveal themselves,--that of the Cosmos and that ghostlier one which stretches over the black deep behind us. This alternately broadens and narrows at regular intervals, concomitantly with the rhythmical swing of the steamer, Before us the bows spout: fire; behind us there is a flaming and roaring as of Phlegethon; and the voices of wind and sea become so loud that we cannot talk to one another,--cannot make our words heard even by shouting. IX. Early morning: the eighth day. Moored in another blue harbor,--a great semicircular basin, bounded by a high billowing of hills all green from the fringe of yellow beach up to their loftiest clouded summit. The land has that up-tossed look which tells a volcanic origin. There are curiously scalloped heights, which, though emerald from base to crest, still retain all the physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must be lava under that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of bright green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray-stretches a long chain of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these elevations are interunited by their curving hollows of land or by filaments--very low valleys. And as they grade away in varying color through distance, these hill-chains take a curious segmented, jointed appearance, like insect forms, enormous ant-bodies.... This is St. Kitt's. We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the town of Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people. It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted. There are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many bread-fruit trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes, and unfamiliar things the negroes call by incomprehensible names,--"sap-saps," "dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less reflection of light than in Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness; no Spanish buildings, no canary-colored arcades. All the narrow streets are gray or neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen tone. Most of the dwellings are timber, resting on brick props, or elevated upon blocks of lava rock. It seems almost as if some breath from the enormous and always clouded mountain overlooking the town had begrimed everything, darkening even the colors of vegetation. The population is not picturesque. The costumes are commonplace; the tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and sombre blues and grays are commoner than pinks, yellows, and violets. Occasionally you observe a fine half-breed type--some tall brown girl walking by with a swaying grace like that of a sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not frequent. Most of those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many stores are kept by yellow men with intensely black hair and eyes,--men who do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer the visitor is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and its palms, its monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees, and its beautiful little mountains. From some of these trees a peculiar tillandsia streams down, much like our Spanish moss,--but it is black! ... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the island look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones, all very green, and connected by strips of valley-land so low that the edge of the sea-circle on the other side of the island can be seen through the gaps. We steam past truncated hills, past heights that have the look of the stumps of peaks cut half down,--ancient fire-mouths choked by tropical verdure. Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other volcanic forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like clouds. Those are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the subterranean fires. It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great mountain flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest, with clouds packed high upon it, still seems to smoke;--the second highest displays the most symmetrical crater-form I have yet seen. All are still grayish-blue or gray. Gradually through the blues break long high gleams of green. As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky; the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red, and brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are distinguishable;--cane-plantations unfold gold-green surfaces. We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to become a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it continues green;--but it is a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor. The sea today looks almost black: the south-west wind has filled the day with luminous mist; and the phantom of Nevis melts in the vast glow, dissolves utterly.... Once more we are out of sight of land,--in the centre of a blue-black circle of sea. The water-line cuts blackly against the immense light of the horizon,--a huge white glory that flames up very high before it fades and melts into the eternal blue. X. Then a high white shape like a cloud appears before us,--on the purplish-dark edge of the sea. The cloud-shape enlarges, heightens without changing contour. It is not a cloud, but an island! Its outlines begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings of color. Shadowy valleys appear, spectral hollows, phantom slopes of pallid blue or green. The apparition is so like a mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself one is looking at real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have shaped itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many miles beyond it; and it vanishes into mist again. ... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it until it materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness to the islands we have already passed--one dominant height, with massing of bright crater shapes about it, and ranges of green hills linked together by low valleys. About its highest summit also hovers a flock of clouds. At the foot of the vast hill nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth. The single salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of echoes. Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that fringes the wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their base;--it has a curtain of palms before it. Approaching, you discern only one or two façades above the sea-wall, and the long wharf projecting through an opening ing in the masonry, over which young palms stand thick as canes on a sugar plantation. But on reaching the street that descends towards the heavily bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy little burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,--steep, irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise of tiny courts everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or displaying above their stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes of cacti. All is old-fashioned and quiet and queer and small. Even the palms are diminutive,--slim and delicate; there is a something in their poise and slenderness like the charm of young girls who have not yet ceased to be children, though soon to become women.... There is a glorious sunset,--a fervid orange splendor, shading starward into delicate roses and greens. Then black boatmen come astern and quarrel furiously for the privilege of carrying one passenger ashore; and as they scream and gesticulate, half naked, their silhouettes against the sunset seem forms of great black apes. ... Under steam and sail we are making south again, with a warm wind blowing south-east,--a wind very moist, very powerful, and soporific. Facing it, one feels almost cool; but the moment one is sheltered from it profuse perspiration bursts out. The ship rocks over immense swells; night falls very black; and there are surprising displays of phosphorescence. XI. ... Morning. A gold sunrise over an indigo sea. The wind is a great warm caress; the sky a spotless blue. We are steaming on Dominica,--the loftiest of the lesser Antilles. While the silhouette is yet all violet in distance nothing more solemnly beautiful can well be imagined: a vast cathedral shape, whose spires are mountain peaks, towering in the horizon, sheer up from the sea. We stay at Roseau only long enough to land the mails, and wonder at the loveliness of the island. A beautifully wrinkled mass of green and blue and gray;--a strangely abrupt peaking and heaping of the land. Behind the green heights loom the blues; behind these the grays--all pinnacled against the sky-glow-thrusting up through gaps or behind promontories. Indescribably exquisite the foldings and hollowings of the emerald coast. In glen and vale the color of cane-fields shines like a pooling of fluid bronze, as if the luminous essence of the hill tints had been dripping down and clarifying there. Far to our left, a bright green spur pierces into the now turquoise sea; and beyond it, a beautiful mountain form, blue and curved like a hip, slopes seaward, showing lighted wrinkles here and there, of green. And from the foreground, against the blue of the softly outlined shape, cocoa-palms are curving,--all sharp and shining in the sun. ... Another hour; and Martinique looms before us. At first it appears all gray, a vapory gray; then it becomes bluish-gray; then all green. It is another of the beautiful volcanic family: it owns the same hill shapes with which we have already become acquainted; its uppermost height is hooded with the familiar cloud; we see the same gold-yellow plains, the same wonderful varieties of verdancy, the same long green spurs reaching out into the sea,--doubtless formed by old lava torrents. But all this is now repeated for us more imposingly, more grandiosely;--it is wrought upon a larger scale than anything we have yet seen. The semicircular sweep of the harbor, dominated by the eternally veiled summit of the Montagne Pelee (misnamed, since it is green to the very clouds), from which the land slopes down on either hand to the sea by gigantic undulations, is one of the fairest sights that human eye can gaze upon. Thus viewed, the whole island shape is a mass of green, with purplish streaks and shadowings here and there: glooms of forest-hollows, or moving umbrages of cloud. The city of St. Pierre, on the edge of the land, looks as if it had slided down the hill behind it, so strangely do the streets come tumbling to the port in cascades of masonry,--with a red billowing of tiled roofs over all, and enormous palms poking up through it,--higher even than the creamy white twin towers of its cathedral. We anchor in limpid blue water; the cannon-shot is answered by a prolonged thunder-clapping of mountain echo. Then from the shore a curious flotilla bears down upon us. There is one boat, two or three canoes; but the bulk of the craft are simply wooden frames,--flat-bottomed structures, made from shipping-cases or lard-boxes, with triangular ends. In these sit naked boys,--boys between ten and fourteen years of age,--varying in color from a fine clear yellow to a deep reddish-brown or chocolate tint. They row with two little square, flat pieces of wood for paddles, clutched in each hand; and these lid-shaped things are dipped into the water on either side with absolute precision, in perfect time,--all the pairs of little naked arms seeming moved by a single impulse. There is much unconscious grace in this paddling, as well as skill. Then all about the ship these ridiculous little boats begin to describe circles,--crossing and intercrossing so closely as almost to bring them into collision, yet never touching. The boys have simply come out to dive for coins they expect passengers to fling to them. All are chattering creole, laughing and screaming shrilly; every eye, quick and bright as a bird's, watches the faces of the passengers on deck. "'Tention-là!" shriek a dozen soprani. Some passenger's fingers have entered his vest-pocket, and the boys are on the alert. Through the air, twirling and glittering, tumbles an English shilling, and drops into the deep water beyond the little fleet. Instantly all the lads leap, scramble, topple head-foremost out of their little tubs, and dive in pursuit. In the blue water their lithe figures look perfectly red,--all but the soles of their upturned feet, which show nearly white. Almost immediately they all rise again: one holds up at arm's-length above the water the recovered coin, and then puts it into his mouth for safe-keeping; Coin after coin is thrown in, and as speedily brought up; a shower of small silver follows, and not a piece is lost. These lads move through the water without apparent effort, with the suppleness of fishes. Most are decidedly fine-looking boys, with admirably rounded limbs, delicately formed extremities. The best diver and swiftest swimmer, however, is a red lad;--his face is rather commonplace, but his slim body has the grace of an antique bronze. ... We are ashore in St. Pierre, the quaintest, queerest, and the prettiest withal, among West Indian cities: all stone-built and stone-flagged, with very narrow streets, wooden or zinc awnings, and peaked roofs of red tile, pierced by gabled dormers. Most of the buildings are painted in a clear yellow tone, which contrasts delightfully with the burning blue ribbon of tropical sky above; and no street is absolutely level; nearly all of them climb hills, descend into hollows, curve, twist, describe sudden angles. There is everywhere a loud murmur of running water,--pouring through the deep gutters contrived between the paved thoroughfare and the absurd little sidewalks, varying in width from one to three feet. The architecture is quite old: it is seventeenth century, probably; and it reminds one a great deal of that characterizing the antiquated French quarter of New Orleans. All the tints, the forms, the vistas, would seem to have been especially selected or designed for aquarelle studies,--just to please the whim of some extravagant artist. The windows are frameless openings without glass; some have iron bars; all have heavy wooden shutters with movable slats, through which light and air can enter as through Venetian blinds. These are usually painted green or bright bluish-gray. So steep are the streets descending to the harbor,--by flights of old mossy stone steps,--that looking down them to the azure water you have the sensation of gazing from a cliff. From certain openings in the main street--the Rue Victor Hugo--you can get something like a bird's-eye view of the harbor with its shipping. The roofs of the street below are under your feet, and other streets are rising behind you to meet the mountain roads. They climb at a very steep angle, occasionally breaking into stairs of lava rock, all grass-tufted and moss-lined. [Illustration: LA PLACE BERTIN (THE SUGAR LANDING), ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE.] The town has an aspect of great solidity: it is a creation of crag-looks almost as if it had been hewn out of one mountain fragment, instead of having been constructed stone by stone. Although commonly consisting of two stories and an attic only, the dwellings have walls three feet in thickness;--on one street, facing the sea, they are even heavier, and slope outward like ramparts, so that the perpendicular recesses of windows and doors have the appearance of being opened between buttresses. It may have been partly as a precaution against earthquakes, and partly for the sake of coolness, that the early colonial architects built thus;--giving the city a physiognomy so well worthy of its name,--the name of the Saint of the Rock. And everywhere rushes mountain water,--cool and crystal clear, washing the streets;--from time to time you come to some public fountain flinging a silvery column to the sun, or showering bright spray over a group of black bronze tritons or bronze swans. The Tritons on the Place Bertin you will not readily forget;--their curving torsos might have been modelled from the forms of those ebon men who toil there tirelessly all day in the great heat, rolling hogsheads of sugar or casks of rum. And often you will note, in the course of a walk, little drinking-fountains contrived at the angle of a building, or in the thick walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares: glittering threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone. Some mountain torrent, skilfully directed and divided, is thus perpetually refreshing the city,--supplying its fountains and cooling its courts.... This is called the Gouyave water: it is not the same stream which sweeps and purifies the streets. Picturesqueness and color: these are the particular and the unrivalled charms of St. Pierre. As you pursue the Grande Rue, or Rue Victor Hugo,--which traverses the town through all its length, undulating over hill-slopes and into hollows and over a bridge,--you become more and more enchanted by the contrast of the yellow-glowing walls to right and left with the jagged strip of gentian-blue sky overhead. Charming also it is to watch the cross-streets climbing up to the fiery green of the mountains behind the town. On the lower side of the main thoroughfare other streets open in wonderful bursts of blue-warm blue of horizon and sea. The steps by which these ways descend towards the bay are black with age, and slightly mossed close to the wall on either side: they have an alarming steepness,--one might easily stumble from the upper into the lower street. Looking towards the water through these openings from the Grande Rue, you will notice that the sea-line cuts across the blue space just at the level of the upper story of the house on the lower street-corner. Sometimes, a hundred feet below, you see a ship resting in the azure aperture,--seemingly suspended there in sky-color, floating in blue light. And everywhere and always, through sunshine or shadow, comes to you the scent of the city,--the characteristic odor of St. Pierre;--a compound odor suggesting the intermingling of sugar and garlic in those strange tropical dishes which creoles love.... XII. ... A population fantastic, astonishing,--a population of the Arabian Nights. It is many-colored; but the general dominant tint is yellow, like that of the town itself--yellow in the interblending of all the hues characterizing _mulâtresse, capresse, griffe, quarteronne, métisse, chabine,_--a general effect of rich brownish yellow. You are among a people of half-breeds,--the finest mixed race of the West Indies. Straight as palms, and supple and tall, these colored women and men impress one powerfully by their dignified carriage and easy elegance of movement. They walk without swinging of the shoulders;--the perfectly set torso seems to remain rigid; yet the step is a long full stride, and the whole weight is springily poised on the very tip of the bare foot. All, or nearly all, are without shoes: the treading of many naked feet over the heated pavement makes a continuous whispering sound. ... Perhaps the most novel impression of all is that produced by the singularity and brilliancy of certain of the women's costumes. These were developed, at least a hundred years ago, by some curious sumptuary law regulating the dress of slaves and colored people of free condition,--a law which allowed considerable liberty as to material and tint, prescribing chiefly form. But some of these fashions suggest the Orient: they offer beautiful audacities of color contrast; and the full-dress coiffure, above all, is so strikingly Eastern that one might be tempted to believe it was first introduced into the colony by some Mohammedan slave. It is merely an immense Madras handkerchief, which is folded about the head with admirable art, like a turban;--one bright end pushed through at the top in front, being left sticking up like a plume. Then this turban, always full of bright canary-color, is fastened with golden brooches,--one in front and one at either side. As for the remainder of the dress, it is simple enough: an embroidered, low-cut chemise with sleeves; a skirt or _jupe_, very long behind, but caught up and fastened in front below the breasts so as to bring the hem everywhere to a level with the end of the long chemise; and finally a _foulard_, or silken kerchief, thrown over the shoulders. These _jupes_ and _foulards_, however, are exquisite in pattern and color: bright crimson, bright yellow, bright blue, bright green,--lilac, violet, rose,--sometimes mingled in plaidings or checkerings or stripings: black with orange, sky-blue with purple. And whatever be the colors of the costume, which vary astonishingly, the coiffure must be yellow-brilliant, flashing yellow--the turban is certain to have yellow stripes or yellow squares. To this display add the effect of costly and curious jewellery: immense earrings, each pendant being formed of five gold cylinders joined together (cylinders sometimes two inches long, and an inch at least in circumference);--a necklace of double, triple, quadruple, or quintuple rows of large hollow gold beads (sometimes smooth, but generally ally graven)--the wonderful _collier-choux_. Now, this glowing jewellery is not a mere imitation of pure metal: the ear-rings are worth one hundred and seventy-five francs a pair; the necklace of a Martinique quadroon may cost five hundred or even one thousand francs.... It may be the gift of her lover, her _doudoux_, but such articles are usually purchased either on time by small payments, or bead by bead singly until the requisite number is made up. But few are thus richly attired: the greater number of the women carrying burdens on their heads,--peddling vegetables, cakes, fruit, ready-cooked food, from door to door,--are very simply dressed in a single plain robe of vivid colors (_douillette_) reaching from neck to feet, and made with a train, but generally girded well up so as to sit close to the figure and leave the lower limbs partly bare and perfectly free. These women can walk all day long up and down hill in the hot sun, without shoes, carrying loads of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds on their heads; and if their little stock sometimes fails to come up to the accustomed weight stones are added to make it heavy enough. Doubtless the habit of carrying everything in this way from childhood has much to do with the remarkable vigor and erectness of the population.... I have seen a grand-piano carried on the heads of four men. With the women the load is very seldom steadied with the hand after having been once placed in position. The head remains almost most motionless; but the black, quick, piercing eyes flash into every window and door-way to watch for a customer's signal. And the creole street-cries, uttered in a sonorous, far-reaching high key, interblend and produce random harmonies very pleasant to hear. ..._"Çe moune-là, ça qui lè bel mango?"_ Her basket of mangoes certainly weighs as much as herself.... _"Ça qui lè bel avocat?,"_ The alligator-pear--cuts and tastes like beautiful green cheese... _"Ça qui lè escargot?"_ Call her, if you like snails.... _"Ca qui lè titiri?"_ Minuscule fish, of which a thousand would scarcely fill a tea-cup;--one of the most delicate of Martinique dishes.... _"Ça qui lè canna?--Ça qui lè charbon?--Ça qui lè di pain aubè?_" (Who wants ducks, charcoal, or pretty little loaves shaped like cucumbers.)... _"Ça qui lè pain-mi?"_ A sweet maize cake in the form of a tiny sugar-loaf, wrapped in a piece of banana leaf.... _"Ça qui lè fromassé" (pharmacie) "lapotécai créole?"_ She deals in creole roots and herbs, and all the leaves that make _tisanes_ or poultices or medicines: _matriquin, feuill-corossol, balai-doux, manioc-chapelle, Marie-Perrine, graine-enba-feuill, bois d'lhomme, zhèbe-gras, bonnet-carré, zhèbe-codeinne, zhèbe-à-femme, zhèbe-à-châtte, canne-dleau, poque, fleu-papillon, lateigne,_ and a score of others you never saw or heard of before.... _"Ça qui lè dicaments?"_ (overalls for laboring-men).... _"Çé moune-là, si ou pa lè acheté canari-à dans lanmain moin, moin ké crazé y."_ The vender of red clay cooking-pots;--she has only one left, if you do not buy it she will break it! _"Hé! zenfants-la!--en deho'!"_ Run out to meet her, little children, if you like the sweet rice-cakes.... _"Hé! gens pa' enho', gens pa' enbas, gens di galtas, moin ni bel gououôs poisson!"_ Ho! people up-stairs, people down-stairs, and all ye good folks who dwell in the attics,--know that she has very big and very beautiful fish to sell!... _"Hé! ça qui lé mangé yonne?"_--those are "akras,"--flat yellow-brown cakes, made of pounded codfish, or beans, or both, seasoned with pepper and fried in butter.... And then comes the pastry-seller, black as ebony, but dressed all in white, and white-aproned and white-capped like a French cook, and chanting half in French, half in creole, with a voice like a clarinet: _"C'est louvouier de la pâtisserie qui passe, Qui té ka veillé pou' gagner son existence, Toujours content, Toujours joyeux. Oh, qu'ils sont bons!--Oh, qu'ils sont doux!"_ It is the pastryman passing by, who has been up all night to gain his livelihood,--always content,--always happy.... Oh, how good they are (the pies)!--Oh, how sweet they are! ... The quaint stores bordering both sides of the street bear no names and no signs over their huge arched doors;--you must look well inside to know what business is being done. Even then you will scarcely be able to satisfy yourself as to the nature of the commerce;--for they are selling gridirons and frying-pans in the dry goods stores, holy images and rosaries in the notion stores, sweet-cakes and confectionery in the crockery stores, coffee and stationery in the millinery stores, cigars and tobacco in the china stores, cravats and laces and ribbons in the jewellery stores, sugar and guava jelly in the tobacco stores! But of all the objects exposed for sale the most attractive, because the most exotic, is a doll,--the Martinique _poupée_. There are two kinds,--the _poupée-capresse_, of which the body is covered with smooth reddish-brown leather, to imitate the tint of the capresse race; and the _poupée-négresse_, covered with black leather. When dressed, these dolls range in price from eleven to thirty-five francs,--some, dressed to order, may cost even more; and a good _poupée-négresse_ is a delightful curiosity. Both varieties of dolls are attired in the costume of the people; but the _négresse_ is usually dressed the more simply. Each doll has a broidered chemise, a tastefully arranged _jupe_ of bright hues; a silk _foulard_, a _collier-choux_, ear-rings of five cylinders (_zanneaux-à-clous_), and a charming little yellow-banded Madras turban. Such a doll is a perfect costume-model,--a perfect miniature of Martinique fashions, to the smallest details of material and color: it is almost too artistic for a toy. [Illustration: ITINERANT PASTRY-SELLER. "Tourjours content, Toujours joyeux."] These old costume-colors of Martinique-always relieved by brilliant yellow stripings or checkerings, except in the special violet dresses worn on certain religious occasions--have an indescribable luminosity,--a wonderful power of bringing out the fine warm tints of this tropical flesh. Such are the hues of those rich costumes Nature gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,--her honey-lovers--her insects: these are wasp-colors. I do not know whether the fact ever occurred to the childish fancy of this strange race; but there is a creole expression which first suggested it to me;--in the patois, _pouend guêpe_, "to catch a wasp," signifies making love to a pretty colored girl.... And the more one observes these costumes, the more one feels that only Nature could have taught such rare comprehension of powers and harmonies among colors,--such knowledge of chromatic witchcrafts and chromatic laws. ... This evening, as I write, La Pelée is more heavily coiffed than is her wont. Of purple and lilac cloud the coiffure is,--a magnificent Madras, yellow-banded by the sinking sun. La Pelée is in _costume de fête_, like a _capresse_ attired for a baptism or a ball; and in her phantom turban one great star glimmers for a brooch. XIII. Following the Rue Victor Hugo in the direction of the Fort,--crossing the Rivière Roxelane, or Rivière des Blanchisseuses, whose rocky bed is white with unsoaped linen far as the eye can reach,--you descend through some tortuous narrow streets into the principal marketplace. [1] A square--well paved and well shaded--with a fountain in the midst. Here the dealers are seated in rows;--one half of the market is devoted to fruits and vegetables; the other to the sale of fresh fish and meats. On first entering you are confused by the press and deafened by the storm of creole chatter;--then you begin to discern some order in this chaos, and to observe curious things. In the middle of the paved square, about the market fountain, are lying boats filled with fish, which have been carried up from the water upon men's shoulders,--or, if very heavy, conveyed on rollers.... Such fish!--blue, rosy, green, lilac, scarlet, gold: no spectral tints these, but luminous and strong like fire. Here also you see heaps of long thin fish looking like piled bars of silver,--absolutely dazzling,--of almost equal thickness from head to tail;--near by are heaps of flat pink creatures;--beyond these, again, a mass of azure backs and golden bellies. Among the stalls you can study the monsters,--twelve or fifteen feet long,--the shark, the _vierge_, the sword fish, the _tonne_,--or the eccentricities. Some are very thin round disks, with long, brilliant, wormy feelers in lieu of fins, flickering in all directions like a moving pendent silver fringe;--others bristle with spines;--others, serpent-bodied, are so speckled as to resemble shapes of red polished granite. These are _moringues_. The _balaou, couliou, macriau, lazard, tcha-tcha, bonnique_, and _zorphi_ severally represent almost all possible tints of blue and violet. The _souri_ is rose-color and yellow; the _cirurgien_ is black, with yellow and red stripes; the _patate_, black and yellow; the _gros-zié_ is vermilion; the _couronné_, red and black. Their names are not less unfamiliar than their shapes and tints;-the _aiguille-de-mer_, or sea-needle, long and thin as a pencil;-the _Bon-Dié-manié-moin_ ("the Good-God handled me"), which has something like finger-marks upon it;--the _lambi_, a huge sea-snail;--the _pisquette_, the _laline_ (the Moon);--the _crapaud-de-mer_, or sea-toad, with a dangerous dorsal fin;--the _vermeil_, the _jacquot_, the _chaponne_, and fifty others.... As the sun gets higher, banana or balisier leaves are laid over the fish. Even more puzzling, perhaps, are the astonishing varieties of green, yellow, and parti-colored vegetables,--and fruits of all hues and forms,--out of which display you retain only a confused general memory of sweet smells and luscious colors. But there are some oddities which impress the recollection in a particular way. One is a great cylindrical ivory-colored thing,--shaped like an elephant's tusk, except that it is not curved: this is the head of the cabbage-palm, or palmiste,--the brain of one of the noblest trees in the tropics, which must be totally destroyed to obtain it. Raw or cooked, it is eaten in a great variety of ways,--in salads, stews, fritters, or _akras_. Soon after this compact cylinder of young germinating leaves has been removed, large worms begin to appear in the hollow of the dead tree,--the _vers-palmiste_. You may see these for sale in the market, crawling about in bowls or cans: they are said, when fried alive, to taste like almonds, and are esteemed as a great luxury. ... Then you begin to look about you at the faces of the black, brown, and yellow people who are watching at you curiously from beneath their Madras turbans, or from under the shade of mushroom-shaped hats as large as umbrellas. And as you observe the bare backs, bare shoulders, bare legs and arms and feet, you will find that the colors of flesh are even more varied and surprising than the colors of fruit. Nevertheless, it is only with fruit-colors that many of these skin-tints can be correctly be compared; the only terms of comparison used by the colored people themselves being terms of this kind,--such as _peau-chapotille_, "sapota-skin." The _sapota_ or _sapotille_ is a juicy brown fruit with a rind satiny like a human cuticle, and just the color, when flushed and ripe, of certain half-breed skins. But among the brighter half-breeds, the colors, I think, are much more fruit-like;--there are banana-tints, lemon-tones, orange-hues, with sometimes such a mingling of ruddiness as in the pink ripening of a mango. Agreeable to the eye the darker skins certainly are, and often very remarkable--all clear tones of bronze being represented; but the brighter tints are absolutely beautiful. Standing perfectly naked at door-ways, or playing naked in the sun, astonishing children may sometimes be seen,--banana-colored or gulf orange babies, There is one rare race-type, totally unseen like the rest: the skin has a perfect gold-tone, an exquisite metallic yellow the eyes are long, and have long silky lashes;--the hair is a mass of thick, rich, glossy the curls that show blue lights in the sun. What mingling of races produced this beautiful type?--there is some strange blood in the blending,--not of coolie, nor of African, nor of Chinese, although there are Chinese types here of indubitable beauty. [2] ... All this population is vigorous, graceful, healthy: all you see passing by are well made--there are no sickly faces, no scrawny limbs. If by some rare chance you encounter a person who has lost an arm or a leg, you can be almost certain you are looking at a victim of the fer-de-lance,--the serpent whose venom putrefies living tissue.... Without fear of exaggerating facts, I can venture to say that the muscular development of the working-men here is something which must be seen in order to be believed;--to study fine displays of it, one should watch the blacks and half-breeds working naked to the waist,--on the landings, in the gas-houses and slaughter-houses or on the nearest plantations. They are not generally large men, perhaps not extraordinarily powerful; but they have the aspect of sculptural or even of anatomical models; they seem absolutely devoid of adipose tissue; their muscles stand out with a saliency that astonishes the eye. At a tanning-yard, while I was watching a dozen blacks at work, a young mulatto with the mischievous face of a faun walked by, wearing nothing but a clout (_lantcho_) about his loins; and never, not even in bronze, did I see so beautiful a play of muscles. A demonstrator of anatomy could have used him for a class-model;--a sculptor wishing to shape a fine Mercury would have been satisfied to take a cast of such a body without thinking of making one modification from neck to heel. "Frugal diet is the cause of this physical condition," a young French professor assures me; "all these men," he says, "live upon salt codfish and fruit." But frugal living alone could never produce such symmetry and saliency of muscles: race-crossing, climate, perpetual exercise, healthy labor--many conditions must have combined to cause it. Also it is certain that this tropical sun has a tendency to dissolve spare flesh, to melt away all superfluous tissue, leaving the muscular fibre dense and solid as mahogany. At the _mouillage_, below a green _morne_, is the bathing-place. A rocky beach rounding away under heights of tropical wood;--palms curving out above the sand, or bending half-way across it. Ships at anchor in blue water, against golden-yellow horizon. A vast blue glow. Water clear as diamond, and lukewarm. It is about one hour after sunrise; and the high parts of Montaigne Pelée are still misty blue. Under the palms and among the lava rocks, and also in little cabins farther up the slope, bathers are dressing or undressing: the water is also dotted with heads of swimmers. Women and girls enter it well robed from feet to shoulders;--men go in very sparsely clad;--there are lads wearing nothing. Young boys--yellow and brown little fellows--run in naked, and swim out to pointed rocks that jut up black above the bright water. They climb up one at a time to dive down. Poised for the leap upon the black lava crag, and against the blue light of the sky, each lithe figure, gilded by the morning sun, has a statuesqueness and a luminosity impossible to paint in words. These bodies seem to radiate color; and the azure light intensifies the hue: it is idyllic, incredible;--Coomans used paler colors in his Pompeiian studies, and his figures were never so symmetrical. This flesh does not look like flesh, but like fruit-pulp.... XIV. ... Everywhere crosses, little shrines, way-side chapels, statues of saints. You will see crucifixes and statuettes even in the forks or hollows of trees shadowing the high-roads. As you ascend these towards the interior you will see, every mile or half-mile, some chapel, or a cross erected upon a pedestal of masonry, or some little niche contrived in a wall, closed by a wire grating, through which the image of a Christ or a Madonna is visible. Lamps are kept burning all night before these figures. But the village of Morne Rouge--some two thousand feet above the sea, and about an hour's drive from St. Pierre--is chiefly remarkable for such displays: it is a place of pilgrimage as well as a health resort. Above the village, upon the steep slope of a higher morne, one may note a singular succession of little edifices ascending to the summit,--fourteen little tabernacles, each containing a _relievo_ representing some incident of Christ's Passion. This is called _Le Calvaire_: it requires more than a feeble piety to perform the religious exercise of climbing the height, and saying a prayer before each little shrine on the way. From the porch of the crowning structure the village of Morne Rouge appears so far below that it makes one almost dizzy to look at it; but even for the profane one ascent is well worth making, for the sake of the beautiful view. On all the neighboring heights around are votive chapels or great crucifixes. St. Pierre is less peopled with images than Morne Rouge; but it has several colossal ones, which may be seen from any part of the harbor. On the heights above the middle quarter, or _Centre_, a gigantic Christ overlooks the bay; and from the Morne d'Orange, which bounds the city on the south, a great white Virgin-Notre Dame de la Garde, patron of mariners--watches above the ships at anchor in the mouillage. ... Thrice daily, from the towers of the white cathedral, a superb chime of bells rolls its _carillon_ through the town. On great holidays the bells are wonderfully rung;--the ringers are African, and something of African feeling is observable in their impressive but in cantatory manner of ringing. The _bourdon_ must have cost a fortune. When it is made to speak, the effect is startling: all the city vibrates to a weird sound difficult to describe,--an abysmal, quivering moan, producing unfamiliar harmonies as the voices of the smaller bells are seized and interblended by it....One will not easily forget the ringing of a _bel-midi_. ... Behind the cathedral, above the peaked city roofs, and at the foot of the wood-clad Morne d'Orange, is the _Cimetière du Mouillage_.... It is full of beauty,--this strange tropical cemetery. Most of the low tombs are covered with small square black and white tiles, set exactly after the fashion of the squares on a chess-board; at the foot of each grave stands a black cross, bearing on its centre a little white plaque, on which the name is graven in delicate and tasteful lettering. So pretty these little tombs are, that you might almost believe yourself in a toy cemetery. Here and there, again, are miniature marble chapels built over the dead,--containing white Madonnas and Christs and little angels,--while flowering creepers climb and twine about the pillars. Death seems so luminous here that one thinks of it unconciously as a soft rising from this soft green earth,--like a vapor invisible,--to melt into the prodigious day. Everything is bright and neat and beautiful; the air is sleepy with jasmine scent and odor of white lilies; and the palm--emblem of immortality--lifts its head a hundred feet into the blue light. There are rows of these majestic and symbolic trees;--two enormous ones guard the entrance;--the others rise from among the tombs,--white-stemmed, out-spreading their huge parasols of verdure higher than the cathedral towers. [Illustration: IN THE CIMETÈRE DU MOUILLAGE, ST. PIERRE.] Behind all this, the dumb green life of the morne seems striving to descend, to invade the rest of the dead. It thrusts green hands over the wall,--pushes strong roots underneath;--it attacks every joint of the stone-work, patiently, imperceptibly, yet almost irresistibly. ... Some day there may be a great change in the little city of St. Pierre;--there may be less money and less zeal and less remembrance of the lost. Then from the morne, over the bulwark, the green host will move down unopposed;--creepers will prepare the way, dislocating the pretty tombs, pulling away the checkered tiling;--then will corne the giants, rooting deeper,--feeling for the dust of hearts, groping among the bones;--and all that love has hidden away shall be restored to Nature,--absorbed into the rich juices of her verdure,--revitalized in her bursts of color,--resurrected in her upliftings of emerald and gold to the great sun.... XV. Seen from the bay, the little red-white-and-yellow city forms but one multicolored streak against the burning green of the lofty island. There is no naked soil, no bare rock: the chains of the mountains, rising by successive ridges towards the interior, are still covered with forests;--tropical woods ascend the peaks to the height of four and five thousand feet. To describe the beauty of these woods--even of those covering the mornes in the immediate vicinity of St. Pierre--seems to me almost impossible;--there are forms and colors which appear to demand the creation of new words to express. Especially is this true in regard to hue;--the green of a tropical forest is something which one familiar only with the tones of Northern vegetation can form no just conception of: it is a color that conveys the idea of green fire. You have only to follow the high-road leading out of St. Pierre by way of the Savane du Fort to find yourself, after twenty minutes' walk, in front of the Morne Parnasse, and before the verge of a high wood,--remnant of the enormous growth once covering all the island. What a tropical forest is, as seen from without, you will then begin to feel, with a sort of awe, while you watch that beautiful upclimbing of green shapes to the height of perhaps a thousand feet overhead. It presents one seemingly solid surface of vivid color,--rugose like a cliff. You do not readily distinguish whole trees in the mass;--you only perceive suggestions, dreams of trees, Doresqueries. Shapes that seem to be staggering under weight of creepers rise a hundred feet above you;--others, equally huge, are towering above these; and still higher, a legion of monstrosities are nodding, bending, tossing up green arms, pushing out great knees, projecting curves as of backs and shoulders, intertwining mockeries of limbs. No distinct head appears except where some palm pushes up its crest in the general fight for sun. All else looks as if under a veil,--hidden and half smothered by heavy drooping things. Blazing green vines cover every branch and stem;--they form draperies and tapestries and curtains and motionless cascades--pouring down over all projections like a thick silent flood: an amazing inundation of parasitic life.... It is a weird awful beauty that you gaze upon; and yet the spectacle is imperfect. These woods have been decimated; the finest trees have been cut down: you see only a ruin of what was. To see the true primeval forest, you must ride well into the interior. The absolutism of green does not, however, always prevail in these woods. During a brief season, corresponding to some of our winter months, the forests suddenly break into a very conflagration of color, caused by blossoming of the lianas--crimson, canary-yellow, blue and white. There are other flowerings, indeed; but that of the lianas alone has chromatic force enough to change the aspect of a landscape. XVI. ... If it is possible for a West Indian forest to be described at all, it could not be described more powerfully than it has been by Dr. E. Rufz, a creole of Martinique, one of whose works I venture to translate the following remarkable pages: ... "The sea, the sea alone, because it is the most colossal of earthly spectacles,--only the sea can afford us any terms of comparison for the attempt to describe a _grand-bois_;--but even then one must imagine the sea on a day of a storm, suddenly immobilized in the expression of its mightiest fury. For the summits of these vast woods repeat all the inequalities of the land they cover; and these inequalities are mountains from 4200 to 4800 feet in height, and valleys of corresponding profundity. All this is hidden, blended together, smoothed over by verdure, in soft and enormous undulations,--in immense billowings of foliage. Only, instead of a blue line at the horizon, you have a green line; instead of flashings of blue, you have flashings of green,--and in all the tints, in all the combinations of which green is capable: deep green, light green, yellow-green, black-green. "When your eyes grow weary--if it indeed be possible for them to weary--of contemplating the exterior of these tremendous woods, try to penetrate a little into their interior. What an inextricable chaos it is! The sands of a sea are not more closely pressed together than the trees are here: some straight, some curved, some upright, some toppling,--fallen, or leaning against one another, or heaped high upon each other. Climbing lianas, which cross from one tree to the other, like ropes passing from mast to mast, help to fill up all the gaps in this treillage; and parasites--not timid parasites like ivy or like moss, but parasites which are trees self-grafted upon trees--dominate the primitive trunks, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage, and fall back to the ground, forming factitious weeping-willows. You do not find here, as in the great forests of the North, the eternal monotony of birch and fir: this is the kingdom of infinite variety;--species the most diverse elbow each other, interlace, strangle and devour each other: all ranks and orders are confounded, as in a human mob. The soft and tender _balisier_ opens its parasol of leaves beside the _gommier_, which is the cedar of the colonies you see the _acomat_, the _courbaril_, the mahogany, the _tedre-à-caillou_, the iron-wood... but as well enumerate by name all the soldiers of an army! Our oak, the balata, forces the palm to lengthen itself prodigiously in order to get a few thin beams of sunlight; for it is as difficult here for the poor trees to obtain one glance from this King of the world, as for us, subjects of a monarchy, to obtain one look from our monarch. As for the soil, it is needless to think of looking at it: it lies as far below us probably as the bottom of the sea;--it disappeared, ever so long ago, under the heaping of debris,--under a sort of manure that has been accumulating there since the creation: you sink into it as into slime; you walk upon putrefied trunks, in a dust that has no name! Here indeed it is that one can get some comprehension of what vegetable antiquity signifies;--a lurid light (_lurida lux_), greenish, as wan at noon as the light of the moon at midnight, confuses forms and lends them a vague and fantastic aspect; a mephitic humidity exhales from all parts; an odor of death prevails; and a calm which is not silence (for the ear fancies it can hear the great movement of composition and of decomposition perpetually going on) tends to inspire you with that old mysterious horror which the ancients felt in the primitive forests of Germany and of Gaul: "'Arboribus suus horror inest.'" * * "Enquête sur le Serpent de la Martinique (Vipère Fer-de- Lance, Bothrops Lancéolé, etc.)" Par le Docteur E. Rufz. 2 ed. 1859. Paris: Germer-Ballière. pp. 55-57 (note). XVII. But the sense of awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly greater than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the North could ever have created. The brilliancy of colors that seem almost preternatural; the vastness of the ocean of frondage, and the violet blackness of rare gaps, revealing its in conceived profundity; and the million mysterious sounds which make up its perpetual murmur,--compel the idea of a creative force that almost terrifies. Man feels here like an insect,--fears like an insect on the alert for merciless enemies; and the fear is not unfounded. To enter these green abysses without a guide were folly: even with the best of guides there is peril. Nature is dangerous here: the powers that build are also the powers that putrefy; here life and death are perpetually interchanging office in the never-ceasing transformation of forces,--melting down and reshaping living substance simultaneously within the same vast crucible. There are trees distilling venom, there are plants that have fangs, there are perfumes that affect the brain, there are cold green creepers whose touch blisters flesh like fire; while in all the recesses and the shadows is a swarming of unfamiliar life, beautiful or hideous,--insect, reptile, bird,--inter-warring, devouring, preying.... But the great peril of the forest--the danger which deters even the naturalist;--is the presence of the terrible _fer-de-lance (trigonocephalus lanceolatus,--bothrops lanceolatus,--craspodecephalus_),--deadliest of the Occidental thanatophidia, and probably one of the deadliest serpents of the known world. ... There are no less than eight varieties of it,--the most common being the dark gray, speckled with black--precisely the color that enables the creature to hide itself among the protruding roots of the trees, by simply coiling about them, and concealing its triangular head. Sometimes the snake is a clear bright yellow: then it is difficult to distinguish it from the bunch of bananas among which it conceals itself. Or the creature may be a dark yellow,--or a yellowish brown,--or the color of wine-lees, speckled pink and black,--or dead black with a yellow belly,--or black with a pink belly: all hues of tropical forest-mould, of old bark, of decomposing trees.... The iris of the eye is orange,--with red flashes: it glows at night like burning charcoal. And the fer-de-lance reigns absolute king over the mountains and the ravines; he is lord of the forest and solitudes by day, and by night he extends his dominion over the public roads, the familiar paths, the parks, pleasure resorts. People must remain at home after dark, unless they dwell in the city itself: if you happen to be out visiting after sunset, only a mile from town, your friends will caution you anxiously not to follow the boulevard as you go back, and to keep as closely as possible to the very centre of the path. Even in the brightest noon you cannot venture to enter the woods without an experienced escort; you cannot trust your eyes to detect danger: at any moment a seeming branch, a knot of lianas, a pink or gray root, a clump of pendent yellow It, may suddenly take life, writhe, stretch, spring, strike.... Then you will need aid indeed, and most quickly; for within the span of a few heart-beats the wounded flesh chills, tumefies, softens. Soon it changes or, and begins to spot violaceously; while an icy coldness creeps through all the blood. If the _panseur_ or the physician arrives in time, and no vein has been pierced, there is hope; but it more often happens that the blow is received directly on a vein of the foot or ankle,--in which case nothing can save the victim. Even when life is saved the danger is not over. Necrosis of the tissues is likely to set in: the flesh corrupts, falls from the bone sometimes in tatters; and the colors of its putrefaction simuulate the hues of vegetable decay,--the ghastly grays and pinks and yellows of trunks rotting down into the dark soil which gave them birth. The human victim moulders as the trees moulder,--crumbles and dissolves as crumbles the substance of the dead palms and balatas: the Death-of-the-Woods is upon him. To-day a fer-de-lance is seldom found exceeding six feet length; but the dimensions of the reptile, at least, would seem to have been decreased considerably by man's warring upon it since the time of Père Labat, who mentions having seen a fer-de-lance nine feet long and five inches in diameter. He also speaks of a _couresse_--a beautiful and harmless serpent said to kill the fer-de-lance--over ten feet long and thick as a man's leg; but a large couresse is now seldom seen. The negro woodsmen kill both creatures indiscriminately; and as the older reptiles are the least likely to escape observation, the chances for the survival of extraordinary individuals lessen with the yearly decrease of forest-area. ... But it may be doubted whether the number of deadly snakes has been greatly lessened since the early colonial period. Each female produces viviparously from forty to sixty young at a birth. The favorite haunts of the fer-de-lance are to a large extent either inaccessible or unexplored, and its multiplication is prodigious. It is really only the surplus of its swarming that overpours into the cane-fields, and makes the public roads dangerous after dark;--yet more than three hundred snakes have been killed in twelve months on a single plantation. The introduction of the Indian mongoos, or _mangouste_ (ichneumon), proved futile as a means of repressing the evil. The mangouste kills the fer-de-lance when it has a chance but it also kills fowls and sucks their eggs, which condemns it irrevocably with the country negroes, who live to a considerable extent by raising and selling chickens. [Illustration: IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES, ST. PIERRE.] ... Domestic animals are generally able to discern the presence of their deadly enemy long before a human eye, can perceive it. If your horse rears and plunges in the darkness, trembles and sweats, do not try to ride on until you are assured the way is clear. Or your dog may come running back, whining, shivering: you will do well to accept his warning. The animals kept about country residences usually try to fight for their lives; the hen battles for her chickens; the bull endeavors to gore and stamp the enemy; the pig gives more successful combat; but the creature who fears the monster least is the brave cat. Seeing a snake, she at once carries her kittens to a place of safety, then boldly advances to the encounter. She will walk to the very limit of the serpent striking range, and begin to feint,--teasing him, startling him, trying to draw his blow. How the emerald and the topazine eyes glow then!--they are flames! A moment more and the triangular head, hissing from the coil, flashes swift as if moved by wings. But swifter still the stroke of the armed paw that dashes the horror aside, flinging it mangled in the dust. Nevertheless, pussy does not yet dare to spring;--the enemy, still active, has almost instantly reformed his coil;--but she is again in front of him, watching,--vertical pupil against vertical pupil. Again the lashing stroke; again the beautiful countering;--again the living death is hurled aside; and now the scaled skin is deeply torn,--one eye socket has ceased to flame. Once more the stroke of the serpent once more the light, quick, cutting blow. But the trionocephalus is blind, is stupefied;--before he can attempt to coil pussy has leaped upon him,--nailing the horrible flat head fast to the ground with her two sinewy Now let him lash, writhe, twine, strive to strangle her!--in vain! he will never lift his head: an instant more and he lies still:--the keen white teeth of the cat have severed the vertebra just behind the triangular skull!... XVIII. The Jardin des Plantes is not absolutely secure from visits of the serpent; for the trigonocephalus goes everywhere,--mounting to the very summits of the cocoa-palms, swimming rivers, ascending walls, hiding in thatched roofs, breeding in bagasse heaps. But, despite what has been printed to the contrary, this reptile fears man and hates light: it rarely shows itself voluntarily during the day. Therefore, if you desire, to obtain some conception of the magnificence of Martinique vegetation, without incurring the risk of entering the high woods, you can do so by visiting the Jardin des Plantes,--only taking care to use your eyes well while climbing over fallen trees, or picking your way through dead branches. The garden is less than a mile from the city, on the slopes of the Morne Parnasse; and the primitive forest itself has been utilized in the formation of it,--so that the greater part of the garden is a primitive growth. Nature has accomplished here infinitely more than art of man (though such art has done much to lend the place its charm),--and until within a very recent time the result might have been deemed, without exaggeration, one of the wonders of the world. A moment after passing the gate you are in twilight,--though the sun may be blinding on the white road without. All about you is a green gloaming, up through which you see immense trunks rising. Follow the first path that slopes up on your left as you proceed, if you wish to obtain the best general view of the place in the shortest possible time. As you proceed, the garden on your right deepens more and more into a sort of ravine;--on your left rises a sort of foliage-shrouded cliff; and all this in a beautiful crepuscular dimness, made by the foliage of great trees meeting overhead. Palms rooted a hundred feet below you hold their heads a hundred feet above you; yet they can barely reach the light.... Farther on the ravine widens to frame in two tiny lakes, dotted with artificial islands, which are miniatures of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica: these are covered with tropical plants, many of which are total strangers even here: they are natives of India, Senegambia, Algeria, and the most eastern East. Arbores. cent ferps of unfammiliar elegance curve up from path-verge lake-brink; and the great _arbre-du-voyageur_ outspreads its colossal fan. Giant lianas droop down over the way in loops and festoons; tapering green cords, which are creepers descending to take root, hang everywhere; and parasites with stems thick as cables coil about the trees like boas. Trunks shooting up out of sight, into the green wilderness above, display no bark; you cannot guess what sort of trees they are; they are so thickly wrapped in creepers as to seem pillars of leaves. Between you and the sky, where everything is fighting for sun, there is an almost unbroken vault of leaves, a cloudy green confusion in which nothing particular is distinguishable. You come to breaks now and then in the green steep to your left,--openings created for cascades pouring down from one mossed basin of brown stone to another,--or gaps occupied by flights of stone steps, green with mosses, and chocolate-colored by age. These steps lead to loftier paths; and all the stone-work,-the grottos, bridges, basins, terraces, steps,--are darkened by time and velveted with mossy things.... It is of another century, this garden: special ordinances were passed concerning it during the French Revolution (_An. II._);--it is very quaint; it suggests an art spirit as old as Versailles, or older; but it is indescribably beautiful even now. ... At last you near the end, to hear the roar of falling water;--there is a break in the vault of green above the bed of a river below you; and at a sudden turn you in sight of the cascade. Before you is the Morne itself; and against the burst of descending light you discern a precipice-verge. Over it, down one green furrow in its brow, tumbles the rolling foam of a cataract, like falling smoke, to be caught below in a succession of moss-covered basins. The first clear leap of the water is nearly seventy feet.... Did Josephine ever rest upon that shadowed bench near by?... She knew all these paths by heart: surely they must have haunted her dreams in the after-time! Returning by another path, you may have a view of other cascades-though none so imposing. But they are beautiful; and you will not soon forget the effect of one,--flanked at its summit by white-stemmed palms which lift their leaves so high into the light that the loftiness of them gives the sensation of vertigo.... Dizzy also the magnificence of the great colonnade of palmistes and angelins, two hundred feet high, through which: you pass if you follow the river-path from the cascade--the famed _Allée des duels_.... The vast height, the pillared solemnity of the ancient trees in the green dimness, the solitude, the strangeness of shapes but half seen,--suggesting fancies of silent aspiration, or triumph, or despair,--all combine to produce a singular impression of awe.... You are alone; you hear no human voice,--no sounds but the rushing of the river over its volcanic rocks, and the creeping of millions of lizards and tree-frogs and little toads. You see no human face; but you see all around you the labor of man being gnawed and devoured by nature,--broken bridges, sliding steps, fallen arches, strangled fountains with empty basins;--and everywhere arises the pungent odor of decay. This omnipresent odor affects one unpleasantly;--it never ceases to remind you that where Nature is most puissant to charm, there also is she mightiest to destroy. [Illustration: CASCADE IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES.] The beautiful garden is now little more than a wreck of what it once was; since the fall of the Empire it has been shamefully abused and neglected. Some _agronome_ sent out to take charge of it by the Republic, began its destruction by cutting down acres of enormous and magnificent trees,--including a superb alley of plants,--for the purpose of experimenting with roses. But the rose-trees would not be cultivated there; and the serpents avenged the demolition by making the experimental garden unsafe to enter;--they always swarm into underbrush and shrubbery after forest-trees have been clearedd away.... Subsequently the garden was greatly damaged by storms and torrential rains; the mountain river overflowed, carrying bridges away and demolishing stone-work. No attempt was made to repair these destructions; but neglect alone would not have ruined the lovliness of the place;--barbarism was necessary! Under the present negro-radical regime orders have been given for the wanton destruction of trees older than the colony itself;--and marvels that could not be replaced in a hundred generations were cut down and converted into charcoal for the use of public institutions. XIX. How gray seem the words of poets in the presence is Nature!... The enormous silent poem of color and light--(you who know only the North do not know color, do not know light!)--of sea and sky, of the woods and the peaks, so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze it--mocking the language of admiration, defying all power of expression. That is before you which never can be painted or chanted, because there is no cunning of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your most hopeless ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. And the sight of this supreme terrestrial expression of creative magic numbs thought. In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,--the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,--but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. Man here seems to bear scarcely more relation to the green life about him than the insect; and the results of human effort seem impotent by comparison son with the operation of those vast blind forces which clothe the peaks and crown the dead craters with impenetrable forest. The air itself seems inimical to thought,--soporific, and yet pregnant with activities of dissolution so powerful that the mightiest tree begins to melt like wax from the moment it has ceased to live. For man merely to exist is an effort; and doubtless in the perpetual struggle of the blood to preserve itself from fermentation, there is such an expenditure of vital energy as leaves little surplus for mental exertion. ... Scarcely less than poet or philosopher, the artist, I fancy, would feel his helplessness. In the city he may find wonderful picturesqueness to invite his pencil, but when he stands face to face alone with Nature he will discover that he has no colors! The luminosities of tropic foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some great height, through which the colors come to his eye softened and subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing atmosphere. ... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of color. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I see the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light. XX. In these tropic latitudes Night does not seem "to fall,"--to descend over the many-peaked land: it appears to rise up, like an exhalation, from the ground. The coast-lines darken first;--then the slopes and the lower hills and valleys become shadowed;--then, very swiftly, the gloom mounts to the heights, whose very loftiest peak may remain glowing like a volcano at its tip for several minutes after the rest of the island is veiled in blackness and all the stars are out.... [Illustration: DEPARTURE OF STEAMER FOR FORT-DE-FRANCE.] ... Tropical nights have a splendor that seems strange to northern eyes. The sky does not look so high--so far way as in the North; but the stars are larger, and the luminosity greater. With the rising of the moon all the violet of the sky flushes;--there is almost such a rose-color as heralds northern dawn. Then the moon appears over the mornes, very large, very bright--brighter certainly than many a befogged sun one sees in northern Novembers; and it seems to have a weird magnetism--this tropical moon. Night-birds, insects, frogs,--everything that can sing,--all sing very low on the nights of great moons. Tropical wood-life begins with dark: in the immense white light of a full moon this nocturnal life seems afraid to cry out as usual. Also, this moon has a singular effect on the nerves. It is very difficult to sleep on such bright nights: you feel such a vague uneasiness as the coming of a great storm gives.... XXI. You reach Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, steamer from St. Pierre, in about an hour and a... There is an overland route--_La Trace_, but it twenty-five-mile ride, and a weary one in such a climate, notwithstanding the indescribable beauty of the landscapes which the lofty road commands. Rebuilt in wood after the almost total destruction by an earthquake of its once picturesque streets of stone, Fort-de-France (formerly Fort-Royal) has little of outward interest by comparison with St. Pierre. It lies in a low, moist plain, and has few remarkable buildings: you can walk allover the little town in about half an hour. But the Savane,--the great green public square, with its grand tamarinds and _sabliers_,--would be worth the visit alone, even were it not made romantic by the marble memory of Josephine. I went to look at the white dream of her there, a creation of master-sculptors.... It seemed to me absolutely lovely. Sea winds have bitten it; tropical rains have streaked it: some microscopic growth has darkened the exquisite hollow of the throat. And yet such is the human charm of the figure that you almost fancy you are gazing at a living presence.... Perhaps the profile is less artistically real,--statuesque to the point of betraying the chisel; but when you look straight up into the sweet creole face, you can believe she lives: all the wonderful West Indian charm of the woman is there. She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumor has it that she spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet space of summer sea; through the vast splendor of azure light, she is looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive smile,--unutterably touching.... [Illustration: STATUE OF JOSEPHINE.] XXII. One leaves Martinique with regret, even after so brief a stay: the old colonial life itself, not less than the revelation of tropic nature, having in this island a quality of uniqueness, a special charm, unlike anything previously seen.... We steam directly for Barbadoes;--the vessel will touch at the intervening islands only on her homeward route. ... Against a hot wind south,--under a sky always deepening in beauty. Towards evening dark clouds begin to rise before us; and by nightfall they spread into one pitch-blackness over all the sky. Then comes a wind in immense sweeps, lifting the water,--but a wind that is still strangely warm. The ship rolls heavily in the dark for an hour or more;--then torrents of tepid rain make the sea smooth again; the clouds pass, and the viole transparency of tropical night reappears,--ablaze with stars. At early morning a long low land appears on the horizon,--totally unlike the others we have seen; it has no visable volcanic forms. That is Barbadoes,--a level burning coral coast,--a streak of green, white-edged, on the verge of the sea. But hours pass before the green line begins to show outlines of foliage. ... As we approach the harbor an overhanging black cloud suddenly bursts down in illuminated rain,--through which the shapes of moored ships seem magnified as through a golden fog. It ceases as suddenly as it begun; the cloud vanishes utterly; and the azure is revealed unflecked, dazzling, wondrous.... It is a sight worth the whole journey,--the splendor of this noon sky at Barbadoes;--the horizon glow is almost blinding, the sea-line sharp as a razor-edge; and motionless upon the sapphire water nearly a hundred ships lie,--masts, spars, booms, cordage, cutting against the amazing magnificence of blue.... Mean while the island coast has clearly brought out all its beauties: first you note the long white winding thread-line of beach-coral and bright sand;--then the deep green fringe of vegetation through which roofs and spires project here and there, and quivering feathery heads of palms with white trunks. The general tone of this verdure is sombre green, though it is full of lustre: there is a glimmer in it as of metal. Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of misty pale, green are visible,--far slopes of low hill and plain the highest curving line, the ridge of the island, bears a row of cocoa-palms, They are so far that their stems diminish almost to invisibility: only the crests are clearly distinguishable,--like spiders hanging between land and sky. But there are no forests: the land is a naked unshadowed green far as the eye can reach beyond the coast-line. There is no waste space in Barbadoes: it is perhaps one of the most densely-peopled places on the globe--(one thousand and thirty-five inhabitants to the square mile)--.and it sends black laborers by thousands to the other British colonies every year,--the surplus of its population. ... The city of Bridgetown disappoints the stranger who expects to find any exotic features of architecture or custom,--disappoints more, perhaps, than any other tropical port in this respect. Its principal streets give you the impression of walking through an English town,--not an old-time town, but a new one, plain almost to commonplaceness, in spite of Nelson's monument. Even the palms are powerless to lend the place a really tropical look;--the streets are narrow without being picturesque, white as lime roads and full of glare;--the manners, the costumes, the style of living, the system of business are thoroughly English;--the population lacks visible originality; and its extraordinary activity, so oddly at variance with the quiet indolence of other West Indian peoples, seems almost unnatural. Pressure of numbers has largely contributed to this characteristic; but Barbadoes would be in any event, by reason of position alone, a busy colony. As the most windward of the West Indies it has naturally become not only the chief port, but also the chief emporium of the Antilles. It has railroads, telephones, street-cars, fire and life insurance companies, good hotels, libraries and reading-rooms, and excellent public schools. Its annual export trade figures for nearly $6,000,000. [Illustration: INNER BASIN, BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES.] The fact which seems most curious to the stranger, on his first acquaintance with the city, is that most of this business activity is represented by black men--black merchants, shopkeepers, clerks. Indeed, the Barbadian population, as a mass, strikes one as the darkest in the West Indies. Black regiments march through the street to the sound of English music,--uniformed as Zouaves; black police, in white helmets and white duck uniforms, maintain order; black postmen distribute the mails; black cabmen wait for customers at a shilling an hour. It is by no means an attractive population, physically,--rather the reverse, and frankly brutal as well--different as possible from the colored race of Martinique; but it has immense energy, and speaks excellent English. One is almost startled on hearing Barbadian negroes speaking English with a strong Old Country accent Without seeing the speaker, you could scarcely believe such English uttered by black lips; and the commonest negro laborer about the port pronounces as well as a Londoner. The purity of Barbadian English is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that, unlike most of the other islands, Barbadoes has always remained in the possession of Great Britain. Even as far back as 1676 Barbadoes was in a very different condition of prosperity from that of the other colonies, and offered a totally different social aspect--having a white population of 50,000. At that time the island could muster 20,000 infantry and 3000 horse; there were 80,000 slaves; there were 1500 houses in Bridgetown and an immense number of shops; and not less than two hundred ships were required to export the annual sugar crop alone. But Barbadoes differs also from most of the Antilles geologically; and there can be no question that the nature of its soil has considerably influenced the physical character of its inhabitants. Although Barbadoes is now known to be also of volcanic origin,--a fact which its low undulating surface could enable no unscientific observer to suppose,--it is superficially a calcareous formation; and the remarkable effect of limestone soil upon the bodily development of a people is not less marked in this latitude than elsewhere. In most of the Antilles the white race degenerates and dwarfs under the influence of climate and environment; but the Barbadian creole--tall, muscular, large of bone--preserves and perpetuates in the tropics the strength and sturdiness of his English forefathers. XXIII. ... Night: steaming for British Guiana;--we shall touch at no port before reaching Demerara.... A strong warm gale, that compels the taking in of every awning and wind-sail. Driving tepid rain; and an intense darkness, broken only by the phosphorescence of the sea, which to-night displays extraordinary radiance. [Illustration: TRAFALGAR SQUARE, BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES.] The steamer's wake is a great broad, seething river of fire,--white like strong moonshine: the glow is bright enough to read by. At its centre the trail is brightest;--towards either edge it pales off cloudily,--curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are the long slow fires that keep burning at a distance, out in the dark. Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and pass;--serpentine flames wriggle by;--there are long billowing crests of fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light up all at the same time, glow for a while, disappear, reappear, and swirl away in a prolonged smouldering. There are warm gales and heavy rain each night,--it is the hurricane season;--and it seems these become more violent the farther south we sail. But we are nearing those equinoctial regions where the calm of nature is never disturbed by storms. ... Morning: still steaming south, through a vast blue day. The azure of the heaven always seems to be growing deeper. There is a bluish-white glow in the horizon,--almost too bright to look at. An indigo sea.... There are no clouds; and the splendor endures until sunset. Then another night, very luminous and calm. The Southern constellations burn whitely.... We are nearing the great shallows of the South American coast. XXIV. ... It is the morning of the third day since we left Barbadoes, and for the first time since entering tropic waters all things seem changed. The atmosphere is heavy with strange mists; and the light of an orange-colored sun, immensely magnified by vapors, illuminates a greenish-yellow sea,--foul and opaque, as if stagnant.... I remember just such a sunrise over the Louisiana gulf-coast. We are in the shallows, moving very slowly. The line-caster keeps calling, at regular intervals: "Quarter less five, sir!" "And a half four, sir!"... There is little variation in his soundings--a quarter of a fathom or half a fathom difference. The warm air has a sickly heaviness, like the air of a swamp; the water shows olive and ochreous tones alternately;--the foam is yellow in our wake. These might be the colors of a fresh-water inundation.... A fellow-traveller tells me, as we lean over the rail, that this same viscous, glaucous sea washes the great penal colony of Cayenne--which he visited. When a convict dies there, the corpse, sewn up in a sack, is borne to the water, and a great bell tolled. Then the still surface is suddenly broken by fins innumerable--black fins of sharks rushing to the hideous funeral: they know the Bell!... There is land in sight--very low land,--a thin dark line suggesting marshiness; and the nauseous color of the water always deepens. As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical appearance. The sombre green line brightens color, I sharpens into a splendid fringe of fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling with palm crests. Then a mossy sea-wall comes into sight--dull gray stone--work, green-lined at all its joints. There is a fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a queer echo, and the cannon-shot once reverberated--only once: there are no mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and more ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. Vessels becalmed everywhere speck the glass-level of the sea, like insects sticking upon a mirror. It begins, all of a sudden, to rain torrentially; and through the white storm of falling drops nothing is discernible. XXV. At Georgetown, steamers entering the river can lie close to the wharf;--we can enter the Government warehouses without getting wet. In fifteen minutes the shower ceases; and we leave the warehouses to find ourselves in a broad, palm-bordered street illuminated by the most prodigious day that yet shone upon our voyage. The rain has cleared the air and dissolved the mists; and the light is wondrous. [Illustration: STREET IN GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA.] My own memory of Demerara will always be a memory of enormous light. The radiance has an indescribable dazzling force that conveys the idea of electric fire;--the horizon blinds like a motionless sheet of lightning; and you dare not look at the zenith.... The brightest summer-day in the North is a gloaming to this. Men walk only under umbrellas, or with their eyes down--and the pavements, already dry, flare almost unbearably. ... Georgetown has an exotic aspect peculiar to itself,--different from that of any West Indian city we have seen; and this is chiefly due to the presence of palm-trees. For the edifices, the plan, the general idea of the town, are modern; the white streets, laid out very broad to the sweep of the sea-breeze, and drained by canals running through their centres, with bridges at cross-streets, display the value of nineteenth-century knowledge regarding house-building with a view to coolness as well as to beauty. The architecture might be described as a tropicalized Swiss style--Swiss eaves are developed into veranda roofs, and Swiss porches prolonged and lengthened into beautiful piazzas and balconies. The men who devised these large cool halls, these admirably ventilated rooms, these latticed windows opening to the ceiling, may have lived in India; but the physiognomy of the town also reveals a fine sense of beauty in the designers: all that is strange and beautiful in the vegetation of the tropics has had a place contrived for it, a home prepared for it. Each dwelling has its garden; each garden blazes with singular and lovely color; but everywhere and always tower the palms. There are colonnades of palms, clumps of palms, groves of palms-sago and cabbage and cocoa and fan palms. You can see that the palm is cherished here, is loved for its beauty, like a woman. Everywhere you find palms, in all stages of development, from the first sheaf of tender green plumes rising above the soil to the wonderful colossus that holds its head a hundred feet above the roofs; palms border the garden walks in colonnades; they are grouped in exquisite poise about the basins of fountains; they stand like magnificent pillars at either side of gates; they look into the highest windows of public buildings and hotels. ... For miles and miles and miles we drive along avenues of palms--avenues leading to opulent cane-fields, traversing queer coolie villages. Rising on either side of the road to the same level, the palms present the vista of a long unbroken double colonnade of dead-silver trunks, shining tall pillars with deep green plume-tufted summits, almost touching, almost forming something like the dream of an interminable Moresque arcade. Sometimes for a full mile the trees are only about thirty or forty feet high; then, turning into an older alley, we drive for half a league between giants nearly a hundred feet in altitude. The double perspective lines of their crests, meeting before us and behind us in a bronze-green darkness, betray only at long intervals any variation of color, where some dead leaf droops like an immense yellow feather. XXVI. In the marvellous light, which brings out all the rings of their bark, these palms sometimes produce a singular impression of subtle, fleshy, sentient life,--seem to move with a slowly stealthy motion as you ride or drive past them. The longer you watch them, the stronger this idea becomes,--the more they seem alive,--the more their long silver-gray articulated bodies seem to poise, undulate, stretch.... Certainly the palms of a Demerara country-road evoke no such real emotion as that produced by the stupendous palms of the Jardin des Plantes in Martinique. That beautiful, solemn, silent life up-reaching through tropical forest to the sun for warmth, for color, for power,--filled me, I remember, with a sensation of awe different from anything which I had ever experienced.... But even here in Guiana, standing alone under the sky, the palm still seems a creature rather than a tree,--gives you the idea of personality;--you could almost believe each lithe shape animated by a thinking force,--believe that all are watching you with such passionless calm as legend lends to beings super-natural.... And I wonder if some kindred fancy might not have inspired the name given by the French colonists to the male palmiste,--_angelin_.... [Illustration: AVENUE IN GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA.] Very wonderful is the botanical garden here. It is new; and there are no groves, no heavy timber, no shade; but the finely laid-out grounds,--alternations of lawn and flower-bed,--offer everywhere surprising sights. You observe curious orange-colored shrubs; plants speckled with four different colors; plants that look like wigs of green hair; plants with enormous broad leaves that seem made of colored crystal; plants that do not look like natural growths, but like idealizations of plants,--those beautiful fantasticalities imagined by sculptors. All these we see in glimpses from a carriage-window,--yellow, indigo, black, and crimson plants.... We draw rein only to observe in the ponds the green navies of the Victoria Regia,--the monster among water-lilies. It covers all the ponds and many of the canals. Close to shore the leaves are not extraordinarily large; but they increase in breadth as they float farther out, as if gaining bulk proportionately to the depth of water. A few yards off, they are large as soup-plates; farther out, they are broad as dinner-trays; in the centre of the pond or canal they have surface large as tea-tables. And all have an up-turned edge, a perpendicular rim. Here and there you see the imperial flower,--towering above the leaves.... Perhaps, if your hired driver be a good guide, he will show you the snake-nut,--the fruit of an extraordinary tree native to the Guiana forests. This swart nut--shaped almost like a clam-shell, and halving in the same way along its sharp edges--encloses something almost incredible. There is a pale envelope about the kernel; remove it, and you find between your fingers a little viper, triangular-headed, coiled thrice upon itself, perfect in every detail of form from head to tail. Was this marvellous mockery evolved for a protective end? It is no eccentricity: in every nut the serpent-kernel lies coiled the same. ... Yet in spite of a hundred such novel impressions, what a delight it is to turn again cityward through the avenues of palms, and to feel once more the sensation of being watched, without love or hate, by all those lithe, tall, silent, gracious shapes! XXVII. Hindoos; coolies; men, women, and children-standing, walking, or sitting in the sun, under the shadowing of the palms. Men squatting, with hands clasped over their black knees, are watching us from under their white turbans-very steadily, with a slight scowl. All these Indian faces have the same set, stern expression, the same knitting of the brows; and the keen gaze is not altogether pleasant. It borders upon hostility; it is the look of measurement--measurement physical and moral. In the mighty swarming of India these have learned the full meaning and force of life's law as we Occidentals rarely learn it. Under the dark fixed frown eye glitters like a serpent's. [Illustration: VICTORIA REGIA IN THE CANAL AT GEORGETOWN] Nearly all wear the same Indian dress; the thickly folded turban, usually white, white drawers reaching but half-way down the thigh, leaving the knees and the legs bare, and white jacket. A few don long blue robes, and wear a colored head-dress: these are babagees-priests. Most of the men look tall; they are slender and small-boned, but the limbs are well turned. They are grave--talk in low tones, and seldom smile. Those you see heavy black beards are probably Mussulmans: I am told they have their mosques here, and that the muezzein's call to prayer is chanted three times daily on many plantations. Others shave, but the Mohammedans allow all the beard to grow.... Very comely some of the women are in their close-clinging soft brief robes and tantalizing veils--a costume leaving shoulders, arms, and ankles bare. The dark arm is always tapered and rounded; the silver-circled ankle always elegantly knit to the light straight foot. Many slim girls, whether standing or walking or in repose, offer remarkable studies of grace; their attitude when erect always suggests lightness and suppleness, like the poise of a dancer. ... A coolie mother passes, carrying at her hip a very pretty naked baby. It has exquisite delicacy of limb: its tiny ankles are circled by thin bright silver rings; it looks like a little bronze statuette, a statuette of Kama, the Indian Eros. The mother's arms are covered from elbow to wrist with silver bracelets,--some flat and decorated; others coarse, round, smooth, with ends hammered into the form of viper-heads. She has large flowers of gold in her ears, a small gold flower in her very delicate little nose. This nose ornament does not seem absurd; on these dark skins the effect is almost as pleasing as it is bizarre. This jewellery is pure metal;--it is thus the coolies carry their savings,--melting down silver or gold coin, and recasting it into bracelets, ear-rings, and nose ornaments. [Illustration: DEMERARA COOLIE GIRL.] ... Evening is brief: all this time the days have been growing shorter: it will be black at 6 P.M. One does not regret it;--the glory of such a tropical day as this is almost too much to endure for twelve hours. The sun is already low, and yellow with a tinge of orange: as he falls between the palms his stare colors the world with a strange hue--such a phantasmal light as might be given by a nearly burnt-out sun. The air is full of unfamiliar odors. We pass a flame-colored bush; and an extraordinary perfume--strange, rich, sweet--envelops us like a caress: the soul of a red jasmine.... ... What a tropical sunset is this-within two days' steam-journey of the equator! Almost to the zenith the sky flames up from the sea,--one tremendous orange incandescence, rapidly deepening to vermilion as the sun dips. The indescribable intensity of this mighty burning makes one totally unprepared for the spectacle of its sudden passing: a seeming drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light.... Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, keen, as of a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents, aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a continuous dripping sound; the drops fall heavily, like bodies of clumsy insects. But it is not dew, nor insects; it is a thick, transparent jelly--a fleshy liquor that falls in immense drops.... The night grows chill with dews, with vegetable breath; and we sleep with windows nearly closed. XXVIII. ... Another sunset like the conflagration of a world, as we steam away from Guiana;--another unclouded night; and morning brings back to us that bright blue in the sea-water which we missed for the first time on our approach to the main-land. There is a long swell all day, and tepid winds. But towards evening the water once more shifts its hue--takes olive tint--the mighty flood of the Orinoco is near. Over the rim of the sea rise shapes faint pink, faint gray-misty shapes that grow and lengthen as we advance. We are nearing Trinidad. It first takes definite form as a prolonged, undulating, pale gray mountain chain,--the outline of a sierra. Approaching nearer, we discern other hill summits rounding up and shouldering away behind the chain itself. Then the nearest heights begin to turn faint green--very slowly. Right before the outermost spur of cliff, fantastic shapes of rock are rising sheer from the water: partly green, partly reddish-gray where the surface remains unclothed by creepers and shrubs. Between them the sea leaps and whitens. ... And we begin to steam along a magnificent tropical coast,--before a billowing of hills wrapped in forest from sea to summit,--astonishing forest, dense, sombre, impervious to sun--every gap a blackness as of ink. Giant palms here and there overtop the denser foliage; and queer monster trees rise above the forest-level against the blue,--spreading out huge flat crests from which masses of lianas stream down. This forest-front has the apparent solidity of a wall, and forty-five miles of it undulate uninterruptedly by us-rising by terraces, or projecting like turret-lines, or shooting up into semblance of cathedral forms or suggestions of castellated architecture.... But the secrets of these woods have not been unexplored;--one of the noblest writers of our time has so beautifully and fully written of them as to leave little for anyone else to say. He who knows Charles Kingsley's "At Last" probably knows the woods of Trinidad far better than many who pass them daily. Even as observed from the steamer's deck, the mountains and forests of Trinidad have an aspect very different from those of the other Antilles. The heights are less lofty,--less jagged and abrupt,--with rounded summits; the peaks of Martinique or Dominica rise fully two thousand feet higher. The land itself is a totally different formation,--anciently being a portion of the continent; and its flora and fauna are of South America. ... There comes a great cool whiff of wind,--another and another;--then a mighty breath begins to blow steadily upon us,--the breath of the Orinoco.... It grows dark before we pass through the Ape's Mouth, to anchor in one of the calmest harbors in the world,--never disturbed by hurricanes. Over unruffled water the lights of Port-of-Spain shoot long still yellow beams. The night grows chill;--the air is made frigid by the breath of the enormous river and the vapors of the great woods. XXIX. ... Sunrise: a morning of supernal beauty,--the sky of a fairy tale,--the sea of a love-poem. Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a perfect luminous dove-color,--the horizon being filled to a great height with greenish-golden haze,--a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an impossiblity. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has but just risen above them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy level of the flood, winds of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold begin to shoot and quiver and broaden; these are the currents of the morning, catching varying color with the deepening of the day and the lifting of the tide. Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the grays; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and the downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow; the hills take soft, rich, sensuous colors. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous tone--a seemingly diaphanous aureate color, the very ghost of gold. But at last all of them sharpen bluely, show bright folds and ribbings of green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue. All these tints and colors have a spectral charm, a preternatural loveliness; everything seems subdued, softened, semi-vaporized,--the only very sharply defined silhouettes being those of the little becalmed ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading colored wings to catch the morning breeze. The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the landscape out of vapory blue; the hills all become green-faced, reveal the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails--white, red, yellow,--ripples the water, and turns it green. Little fish begin to leap; they spring and fall in glittering showers like opalescent blown spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled roofs reveal themselves: the city is unveiled-a city full of color, somewhat quaint, somewhat Spanish-looking--a little like St. Pierre, a little like New Orleans in the old quarter; everywhere fine tall palms. XXX. Ashore, through a black swarming and a great hum of creole chatter.... Warm yellow narrow streets under a burning blue day;--a confused impression of long vistas, of low pretty houses and cottages, more or less quaint, bathed in sun and yellow-wash,--and avenues of shade-trees,--and low garden-walls overtopped by waving banana leaves and fronds of palms.... A general sensation of drowsy warmth and vast light and exotic vegetation,--coupled with some vague disappointment a the absence of that picturesque humanity that delighted us in the streets of St. Pierre, Martinique. The bright costumes of the French colonies are not visible here: there is nothing like them in any of the English islands. Nevertheless, this wonderful Trinidad is as unique ethnologically as it is otherwise remarkable among all the other Antilles. It has three distinct creole populations,--English, Spanish, and French,--besides its German and Madeiran settlers. There is also a special black or half-breed element, corresponding to each creole race, and speaking the language of each; there are fifty thousand Hindoo coolies, and a numerous body of Chinese. Still, this extraordinary diversity of race elements does not make itself at once apparent to the stranger. Your first impressions, as you pass through the black crowd upon the wharf, is that of being among a population as nearly African as that of Barbadoes; and indeed the black element dominates to such an extent that upon the streets white faces look strange by contrast. When a white face does appear, it is usually under the shadow of an Indian helmet, and heavily bearded, and austere: the physiognomy of one used to command. Against the fantastic ethnic background of all this colonial life, this strong, bearded English visage takes something of heroic relief;--one feels, in a totally novel way, the dignity of a white skin. [Illustration: ST. JAMES AVENUE, PORT-OF-SPAIN, TRINIDAD.] ... I hire a carriage to take me to the nearest coolie village;--a delightful drive.... Sometimes the smooth white road curves round the slope of a forest-covered mountain;--sometimes overlooks a valley shining with twenty different shades of surface green;--sometimes traverses marvellous natural arcades formed by the interweaving and intercrossing of bamboos fifty feet high. Rising in vast clumps, and spreading out sheafwise from the soil towards the sky, the curves of their beautiful jointed stems meet at such perfect angles above the way, and on either side of it, as to imitate almost exactly the elaborate Gothic arch-work of old abbey cloisters. Above the road, shadowing the slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure. They are green--burning, flashing green--covered with parasitic green creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form, fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter along the way-side; palms shoot up to vast altitudes, like pillars of white metal; and there is a perpetual shifting of foliage color, from yellow-green to orange, from reddish-green to purple, from emerald-green to black-green. But the background color, the dominant tone, is like the plumage of a green parrot. ... We drive into the coolie village, along a narrower way, lined with plantain-trees, bananas, flamboyants, and unfamiliar shrubs with large broad leaves. Here and there are cocoa-palms. Beyond the little ditches on either side, occupying openings in the natural hedge, are the dwellings--wooden cabins, widely separated from each other. The narrow lanes that enter the road are also lined with habitations, half hidden by banana-trees. There is a prodigious glare, an intense heat. Around, above the trees and the roofs, rise the far hill shapes, some brightly verdant, some cloudy blue, some gray. The road and the lanes are almost deserted; there is little shade; only at intervals some slender brown girl or naked baby appears at a door-way. The carriage halts before a shed built against a wall--a simple roof of palm thatch supported upon jointed posts of bamboo. It is a little coolie temple. A few weary Indian laborers slumber in its shadow; pretty naked children, with silver rings round their ankles, are playing there with a white dog. Painted over the wall surface, in red, yellow, brown, blue, and green designs upon a white ground, are extraordinary figures of gods and goddesses. They have several pairs of arms, brandishing mysterious things,--they seem to dance, gesticulate, threaten; but they are all very naïf;--remind one of the first efforts of a child with the first box of paints. While I am looking at these things, one coolie after another wakes up (these men sleep lightly) and begins to observe me almost as curiously, and I fear much less kindly, than I have been observing the gods. "Where is your babagee?" I inquire. No one seems to comprehend my question; the gravity of each dark face remains unrelaxed. Yet I would have liked to make an offering unto Siva. ... Outside the Indian goldsmith's cabin, palm shadows are crawling slowly to and fro in the white glare, like shapes of tarantulas. Inside, the heat is augmented by the tiny charcoal furnace which glows beside a ridiculous little anvil set into a wooden block buried level with the soil. Through a rear door come odors of unknown known flowers and the cool brilliant green of banana leaves.... A minute of waiting in the hot silence;--then, noiselessly as a phantom, the nude-limbed smith enters by a rear door,--squats down, without a word, on his little mat beside his little anvil,--and turns towards me, inquiringly, a face half veiled by a black beard,--a turbaned Indian face, sharp, severe, and slightly unpleasant in expression. "_Vlé béras!_" explains my creole driver, pointing to his client. The smith opens his lips to utter in the tone of a call the single syllable "_Ra_!" then folds his arms. [Illustration: COOLIES OF TRINIDAD.] Almost immediately a young Hindoo woman enters, squats down on the earthen floor at the end of the bench which forms the only furniture of the shop, and turns upon me a pair of the finest black eyes I have ever seen,--like the eyes of a fawn. She is very simply clad, in a coolie robe leaving arms and ankles bare, and clinging about the figure in gracious folds; her color is a clear bright brown-new bronze; her face a fine oval, and charmingly aquiline. I perceive a little silver ring, in the form of a twisted snake, upon the slender second toe of each bare foot; upon each arm she has at least ten heavy silver rings; there are also large silver rings about her ankles; a gold flower is fixed by a little hook in one nostril, and two immense silver circles, shaped like new moons, shimmer in her ears. The smith mutters something to her in his Indian tongue. She rises, and seating herself on the bench beside me, in an attitude of perfect grace, holds out one beautiful brown arm to me that I may choose a ring. The arm is much more worthy of attention than the rings: it has the tint, the smoothness, the symmetry, of a fine statuary's work in metal;--the upper arm, tattooed with a bluish circle of arabesques, is otherwise unadorned; all the bracelets are on the fore-arm. Very clumsy and coarse they prove to be on closer examination: it was the fine dark skin which by color contrast made them look so pretty. I choose the outer one, a round ring with terminations shaped like viper heads;--the smith inserts a pair of tongs between these ends, presses outward slowly and strongly, and the ring is off. It has a faint musky odor, not unpleasant, the perfume of the tropical flesh it clung to. I would have taken it thus; but the smith snatches it from me, heats it red in his little charcoal furnace, hammers it into a nearly perfect circle again, slakes it, and burnishes it. Then I ask for children's _béras_, or bracelets; and the young mother brings in her own baby girl,--a little darling just able to walk. She has extraordinary eyes;--the mother's eyes magnified (the father's are small and fierce). I bargain for the single pair of thin rings on her little wrists;--while the smith is taking them off, the child keeps her wonderful gaze fixed on my face. Then I observe that the peculiarity of the eye is the size of the iris rather than the size of the ball. These eyes are not soft like the mother's, after all; they are ungentle, beautiful as they are; they have the dark and splendid flame of the eyes of a great bird--a bird of prey. ... She will grow up, this little maid, into a slender, graceful woman, very beautiful, no doubt; perhaps a little dangerous. She will marry, of course: probably she is betrothed even now, according to Indian custom,--pledged to some brown boy, the son of a friend. It will not be so many years before the day of their noisy wedding: girls shoot up under this sun with as swift a growth as those broad-leaved beautiful shapes which fill the open door-way with quivering emerald. And she will know the witchcraft of those eyes, will feel the temptation to use them,--perhaps to smile one of those smiles which have power over life and death. [Illustration: COOLIE SERVANT.] And then the old coolie story! One day, in the yellowing cane-fields, among the swarm of veiled and turbaned workers, a word is overheard, a side glance intercepted;--there is the swirling flash of a cutlass blade; a shrieking gathering of women about a headless corpse in the sun; and passing cityward, between armed and helmeted men, the vision of an Indian prisoner, blood-crimsoned, walking very steadily, very erect, with the solemnity of a judge, the dry bright gaze of an idol.... XXXI. ... We steam very slowly into the harbor of St. George, Grenada, in dead silence. No cannon-signal allowed here.... Some one suggests that the violence of the echoes in this harbor renders the firing of cannon dangerous; somebody else says the town is in so ruinous a condition that the report of a gun would shake it down. ... There are heavy damp smells in the warm air as of mould, or of wet clay freshly upturned. This harbor is a deep clear basin, surrounded and shadowed by immense volcanic hills, all green. The opening by which we entered is cut off from sight by a promontory, and hill shapes beyond the promontory;--we seem to be in the innermost ring of a double crater. There is a continuous shimmering and plashing of leaping fish in the shadow of the loftiest height, which reaches half across the water. As it climbs up the base of the huge hill at a precipitous angle, the city can be seen from the steamer's deck almost as in a bird's-eye view. A senescent city; mostly antiquated Spanish architecture,--ponderous archways and earthquake-proof walls. The yellow buildings fronting us beyond the wharf seem half decayed; they are strangely streaked with green, look as if they had been long under water. We row ashore, land in a crowd of lazy-looking, silent blacks. ... What a quaint, dawdling, sleepy place it is! All these narrow streets are falling into ruin; everywhere the same green stains upon the walls, as of slime left by a flood; everywhere disjointed brickwork, crumbling roofs, pungent odors of mould. Yet this Spanish architecture was built to endure; those yellow, blue, or green walls were constructed with the solidity of fortress-work; the very stairs are stone; the balustrades and the railings were made of good wrought iron. In a Northern clime such edifices would resist the wear and tear of five hundred years. But here the powers of disintegration are extraordinary, and the very air would seem to have the devouring force of an acid. All surfaces and angles are yielding to the attacks of time, weather, and microscopic organisms; paint peels, stucco falls, tiles tumble, stones slip out of place, and in every chink tiny green things nestle, propagating themselves through the jointures and dislocating the masonry. There is an appalling mouldiness, an exaggerated mossiness--the mystery and the melancholy of a city deserted. Old warehouses without signs, huge and void, are opened regularly every day for so many hours; yet the business of the aged merchants within seems to be a problem;--you might fancy those gray men were always waiting for ships that sailed away a generation ago, and will never return. You see no customers entering the stores, but only a black mendicant from time to time. And high above all this, overlooking streets too steep for any vehicle, slope the red walls of the mouldering fort, patched with the viridescence of ruin. [Illustration: COOLIE MERCHANT.] By a road leading up beyond the city, you reach the cemetery. The staggering iron gates by which you enter it are almost rusted from their hinges, and the low wall enclosing it is nearly all verdant. Within, you see a wilderness of strange weeds, vines, creepers, fantastic shrubs run mad, with a few palms mounting above the green confusion;--only here and there a gleam of slabs with inscriptions half erased. Such as you can read are epitaphs of seamen, dating back to the years 1800, 1802, 1812. Over these lizards are running; undulations in the weeds warn you to beware of snakes; toads leap away as you proceed; and you observe everywhere crickets perched--grass-colored creatures with two ruby specks for eyes. They make a sound shrill as the scream of machinery beveling marble. At the farther end of the cemetery is a heavy ruin that would seem to have once been part of a church: it is so covered with creeping weeds now that you only distinguish the masonry on close approach, and high trees are growing within it. There is something in tropical ruin peculiarly and terribly impressive: this luxuriant, evergreen, ever-splendid Nature consumes the results of human endeavor so swiftly, buries memories so profoundly, distorts the labors of generations so grotesquely, that one feels here, as nowhere else, how ephemeral man is, how intense and how tireless the effort necessary to preserve his frail creations even a little while from the vast unconscious forces antagonistic to all stability, to all factitious equilibrium. ... A gloomy road winds high around one cliff overlooking the hollow of the bay, Following it, you pass under extraordinarily dark shadows of foliage, and over a blackish soil strewn with pretty bright green fruit that has fallen from above. Do not touch them even with the tip of your finger! Those are manchineel apples; with their milky juice the old Caribs were wont to poison the barbs of their parrot-feathered arrows. Over the mould, swarming among the venomous fruit, innumerable crabs make a sound almost like the murmuring of water. Some are very large, with prodigious stalked eyes, and claws white as ivory, and a red cuirass; others, very small and very swift in their movements, are raspberry-colored; others, again, are apple-green, with queer mottlings of black and white. There is an unpleasant odor of decay in the air--vegetable decay. Emerging from the shadow of the manchineel-trees, you may follow the road up, up, up, under beetling cliffs of plutonian rock that seem about to topple down upon the path-way. The rock is naked and black near the road; higher, it is veiled by a heavy green drapery of lianas, curling creepers, unfamiliar vines. All around you are sounds of crawling, dull echoes of dropping; the thick growths far up waver in the breathless air as if something were moving sinuously through them. And always the odor of humid decomposition. Farther on, the road looks wilder, sloping between black rocks, through strange vaultings of foliage and night-black shadows. Its lonesomeness oppresses; one returns without regret, by rusting gate-ways and tottering walls, back to the old West Indian city rotting in the sun. ... Yet Grenada, despite the dilapidation of her capital and the seeming desolation of its environs, is not the least prosperous of the Antilles. Other islands have been less fortunate: the era of depression has almost passed for Grenada; through the rapid development of her secondary cultures--coffee and cocoa--she hopes with good reason to repair some of the vast losses involved by the decay of the sugar industry. Still, in this silence of mouldering streets, this melancholy of abandoned dwellings, this invasion of vegetation, there is a suggestion of what any West Indian port might become when the resources of the island had been exhausted, and its commerce ruined. After all persons of means and energy enough to seek other fields of industry and enterprise had taken their departure, and the plantations had been abandoned, and the warehouses closed up forever, and the voiceless wharves left to rot down into the green water, Nature would soon so veil the place as to obliterate every outward visible sign of the past. In scarcely more than a generation from the time that the last merchant steamer had taken her departure some traveller might look for the once populous and busy mart in vain: vegetation would have devoured it. ... In the mixed English and creole speech of the black population one can discern evidence of a linguistic transition. The original French _patois_ is being rapidly forgotten or transformed irrecognizably. Now, in almost every island the negro idiom is different. So often have some of the Antilles changed owners, moreover, that in them the negro has never been able to form a true _patois_. He had scarcely acquired some idea of the language of his first masters, when other rulers and another tongue were thrust upon him,--and this may have occurred three or four times! The result is a totally incoherent agglomeration of speech-forms--a baragouin fantastic and unintelligible beyond the power of anyone to imagine who has not heard it.... XXXII. ... A beautiful fantastic shape floats to us through the morning light; first cloudy gold like the horizon, then pearly gray, then varying blue, with growing green lights;--Saint Lucia. Most strangely formed of all this volcanic family;--everywhere mountainings sharp as broken crystals. Far off the Pitons--twin peaks of the high coast-show softer contours, like two black breasts pointing against the sky.... ... As we enter the harbor of Castries, the lines of the land seem no less exquisitely odd, in spite of their rich verdure, than when viewed afar off;--they have a particular pitch of angle.... Other of these islands show more or less family resemblance;--you might readily mistake one silhouette for another as seen at a distance, even after several West Indian journeys. But Saint Lucia at once impresses you by its eccentricity. [Illustration: CHURCH STREET, ST. GEORGE, GRENADA.] Castries, drowsing under palm leaves at the edge of its curving harbor,--perhaps an ancient crater,--seems more of a village than a town: streets of low cottages and little tropic gardens. It has a handsome half-breed population: the old French colonial manners have been less changed here by English influence than in Saint Kitt's and elsewhere;--the creole _patois_ is still spoken, though the costumes have changed.... A more beautiful situation could scarcely be imagined,--even in this tropic world. In the massing of green heights about the little town are gaps showing groves of palm beyond; but the peak summits catch the clouds. Behind us the harbor mouth seems spanned by steel-blue bars: these are lines of currents. Away, on either hand, volcanic hills are billowing to vapory distance; and in their nearer hollows are beautiful deepenings of color: ponded shades of diaphanous blue or purplish tone.... I first remarked this extraordinary coloring of shadows in Martinique, where it exists to a degree that tempts one to believe the island has a special atmosphere of its own.... A friend tells me the phenomenon is probably due to inorganic substances floating in the air--each substance in diffusion having its own index of refraction. Substances so held in suspension by vapors would vary according to the nature of soil in different islands, and might thus produce special local effects of atmospheric tinting. ... We remain but half an hour at Castries; then steam along the coast to take in freight at another port. Always the same delicious color-effects as we proceed, with new and surprising visions of hills. The near slopes descending to the sea are a radiant green, with streaks and specklings of darker verdure;--the farther-rising hills faint blue, with green saliencies catching the sun;--and beyond these are upheavals of luminous gray--pearl-gray--sharpened in the silver glow of the horizon.... The general impression of the whole landscape is one of motion suddenly petrified,--of an earthquake surging and tossing suddenly arrested and fixed: a raging of cones and peaks and monstrous truncated shapes.... We approach the Pitons. Seen afar off, they first appeared twin mammiform peaks,--naked and dark against the sky; but now they begin to brighten a little and show color,--also to change form. They take a lilaceous hue, broken by gray and green lights; and as we draw yet nearer they prove dissimilar both in shape and tint.... Now they separate before us, throwing long pyramidal shadows across the steamer's path. Then, as they open to our coming, between them a sea bay is revealed--a very lovely curving bay, bounded by hollow cliffs of fiery green. At either side of the gap the Pitons rise like monster pylones. And a charming little settlement, a beautiful sugar-plantation, is nestling there between them, on the very edge of the bay. Out of a bright sea of verdure, speckled with oases of darker foliage, these Pitons from the land side tower in sombre vegetation. Very high up, on the nearer one, amid the wooded slopes, you can see houses perched; and there are bright breaks in the color there--tiny mountain pastures that look like patches of green silk velvet. ... We pass the Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to cast anchor before the village of Choi-seul. It lies on a ledge above the beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat high up on soft yellowish sand. A delicious saline scent of sea-weed. It is disappointing, the village: it is merely one cross of brief streets, lined with blackening wooden dwellings there are no buildings worth looking at, except the queer old French church, steep-roofed and bristling with points that look like extinguishers. Over broad reaches of lava rock a shallow river flows by the village to the sea, gurgling under shadows of tamarind foliage. It passes beside the market-place--a market-place without stalls, benches, sheds, or pavements: meats, fruits, and vegetables are simply fastened to the trees. Women are washing and naked children bathing in the stream; they are bronze-skinned, a fine dark color with a faint tint of red in it.... There is little else to look at: steep wooded hills cut off the view towards the interior. But over the verge of the sea there is something strange growing visible, looming up like a beautiful yellow cloud. It is an island, so lofty, so luminous, so phantom-like, that it seems a vision of the Island of the Seven Cities. It is only the form of St. Vincent, bathed in vapory gold by the sun. ... Evening at La Soufrière: still another semicircular bay in a hollow of green hills. Glens hold bluish shadows ows. The color of the heights is very tender; but there are long streaks and patches of dark green, marking watercourses and very abrupt surfaces. From the western side immense shadows are pitched brokenly across the valley and over half the roofs of the palmy town. There is a little river flowing down to the bay on the left; and west of it a walled cemetery is visible, out of which one monumental palm rises to a sublime height: its crest still bathes in the sun, above the invading shadow. Night approaches; the shade of the hills inundates all the landscape, rises even over the palm-crest. Then, black-towering into the golden glow of sunset, the land loses all its color, all its charm; forms of frondage, variations of tint, become invisible. Saint Lucia is only a monstrous silhouette; all its billowing hills, its volcanic bays, its amphitheatrical valleys, turn black as ebony. And you behold before you a geological dream, a vision of the primeval sea: the apparition of the land as first brought forth, all peak-tossed and fissured and naked and grim, in the tremendous birth of an archipelago. XXXIII. Homeward bound. Again the enormous poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in order inverse; again is the island--Litany of the Saints repeated for us, but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to receive us;--each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow, then vapory gray, then ghostly blue, but always sharply radiant at last, symmetrically exquisite, as if chiselled out of amethyst and emerald and sapphire. We review the same wondrous wrinkling of volcanic hills, the cities that sit in extinct craters, the woods that tower to heaven, the peaks perpetually wearing that luminous cloud which seems the breathing of each island-life,--its vital manifestation.... [Illustration: CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA.] ... Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar impressions received begin to group and blend, to form homogeneous results,--general ideas or convictions. Strongest among these is the belief that the white race is disappearing from these islands, acquired and held at so vast a cost of blood and treasure. Reasons almost beyond enumeration have been advanced--economical, climatic, ethnical, political--all of which contain truth, yet no single one of which can wholly explain the fact. Already the white West Indian populations are diminishing at a rate that almost staggers credibility. In the island paradise of Martinique in 1848 there were 12,000 whites; now, against more than 160,000 blacks and half-breeds, there are perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less. Many of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin; St. Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous, the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full decadence. And while the white element is disappearing, the dark races are multiplying as never before;--the increase of the negro and half-breed populations has been everywhere one of the startling results of emancipation. The general belief among the creole whites of the Lesser Antilles would seem to confirm the old prediction that the slave races of the past must become the masters of the future. Here and there the struggle may be greatly prolonged, but everywhere the ultimate result must be the same, unless the present conditions of commerce and production become marvellously changed. The exterminated Indian peoples of the Antilles have already been replaced by populations equally fitted to cope with the forces of the nature about them,--that splendid and terrible Nature of the tropics which consumes the energies of the races of the North, which devours all that has been accomplished by their heroism or their crimes,--effacing their cities, rejecting their civilization. To those peoples physiologically in harmony with this Nature belong all the chances of victory in the contest--already begun--for racial supremacy. But with the disappearance of the white populations the ethnical problem would be still unsettled. Between the black and mixed peoples prevail hatreds more enduring and more intense than any race prejudices between whites and freedmen in the past;--a new struggle for supremacy could not fail to begin, with the perpetual augmentation of numbers, the ever-increasing competition for existence. And the true black element, more numerically powerful, more fertile, more cunning, better adapted to pyrogenic climate and tropical environment, would surely win. All these mixed races, all these beautiful fruit-colored populations, seem doomed to extinction: the future tendency must be to universal blackness, if existing conditions continue--perhaps to universal savagery. Everywhere the sins of the past have borne the same fruit, have furnished the colonies with social enigmas that mock the wisdom of legislators, a dragon-crop of problems that no modern political science has yet proved competent to deal with. Can it even be hoped that future sociologists will be able to answer them, after Nature--who never forgives--shall have exacted the utmost possible retribution for all the crimes and follies of three hundred years? PART TWO--MARTINIQUE SKETCHES. CHAPTER I. -- LES PORTEUSES. I. When you find yourself for the first time, upon some unshadowed day, in the delightful West Indian city of St. Pierre,--supposing that you own the sense of poetry, the recollections of a student,--there is apt to steal upon your fancy an impression of having seen it all before, ever so long ago,--you cannot tell where. The sensation of some happy dream you cannot wholly recall might be compared to this feeling. In the simplicity and solidity of the quaint architecture,--in the eccentricity of bright narrow streets, all aglow with warm coloring,--in the tints of roof and wall, antiquated by streakings and patchings of mould greens and grays,--in the startling absence of window-sashes, glass, gas lamps, and chimneys,--in the blossom-tenderness of the blue heaven, the splendor of tropic light, and the warmth of the tropic wind,--you find less the impression of a scene of to-day than the sensation of something that was and is not. Slowly this feeling strengthens with your pleasure in the colorific radiance of costume,--the semi-nudity of passing figures,--the puissant shapeliness of torsos ruddily swart like statue metal,--the rounded outline of limbs yellow as tropic fruit,--the grace of attitudes,--the unconscious harmony of groupings,--the gathering and folding and falling of light robes that oscillate with swaying of free hips,--the sculptural symmetry of unshod feet. You look up and down the lemon-tinted streets,--down to the dazzling azure brightness of meeting sky and sea; up to the perpetual verdure of mountain woods--wondering at the mellowness of tones, the sharpness of lines in the light, the diaphaneity of colored shadows; always asking memory: "When?... where did I see all this... long ago?".... Then, perhaps, your gaze is suddenly riveted by the vast and solemn beauty of the verdant violet-shaded mass of the dead Volcano,--high-towering above the town, visible from all its ways, and umbraged, maybe, with thinnest curlings of cloud,--like spectres of its ancient smoking to heaven. And all at once the secret of your dream is revealed, with the rising of many a luminous memory,--dreams of the Idyllists, flowers of old Sicilian song, fancies limned upon Pompeiian walls. For a moment the illusion is delicious: you comprehend as never before the charm of a vanished world,--the antique life, the story of terra-cottas and graven stones and gracious things exhumed: even the sun is not of to-day, but of twenty centuries gone;--thus, and under such a light, walked the women of the elder world. You know the fancy absurd;--that the power of the orb has visibly abated nothing in all the eras of man,--that millions are the ages of his almighty glory; but for one instant of reverie he seemeth larger,--even that sun impossible who coloreth the words, coloreth the works of artist-lovers of the past, with the gold light of dreams. Too soon the hallucination is broken by modern sounds, dissipated by modern sights,--rough trolling of sailors descending to their boats,--the heavy boom of a packet's signal-gun,--the passing of an American buggy. Instantly you become aware that the melodious tongue spoken by the passing throng is neither Hellenic nor Roman: only the beautiful childish speech of French slaves. II. But what slaves were the fathers of this free generation? Your anthropologists, your ethnologists, seem at fault here: the African traits have become transformed; the African characteristics have been so modified within little more than two hundred years--by inter-blending of blood, by habit, by soil and sun and all those natural powers which shape the mould of races,--that you may look in vain for verification of ethnological assertions.... No: the heel does _not_ protrude;--the foot is _not_ flat, but finely arched;--the extremities are not large;--all the limbs taper, all the muscles are developed; and prognathism has become so rare that months of research may not yield a single striking case of it.... No: this is a special race, peculiar to the island as are the shapes of its peaks,--a mountain race; and mountain races are comely.... Compare it with the population of black Barbadoes, where the apish grossness of African coast types has been perpetuated unchanged;--and the contrast may well astonish!... III. The erect carriage and steady swift walk of the women who bear burdens is especially likely to impress the artistic observer: it is the sight of such passers-by which gives, above all, the antique tone and color to his first sensations;--and the larger part of the female population of mixed race are practised carriers. Nearly all the transportation of light merchandise, as well as of meats, fruits, vegetables, and food stuffs,--to and from the interior,--is effected upon human heads. At some of the ports the regular local packets are loaded and unloaded by women and girls,--able to carry any trunk or box to its destination. At Fort-de-France the great steamers of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, are entirely coaled by women, who carry the coal on their heads, singing as they come and go in processions of hundreds; and the work is done with incredible rapidity. Now, the creole _porteuse_, or female carrier, is certainly one of the most remarkable physical types in the world; and whatever artistic enthusiasm her graceful port, lithe walk, or half-savage beauty may inspire you with, you can form no idea, if a total stranger, what a really wonderful being she is.... Let me tell you something about that highest type of professional female carrier, which is to the _charbonnière_, or coaling-girl, what the thorough-bred racer is to the draught-horse,--the type of porteuse selected for swiftness and endurance to distribute goods in the interior parishes, or to sell on commission at long distances. To the same class naturally belong those country carriers able to act as porteuses of plantation produce, fruits, or vegetables,--between the nearer ports and their own interior parishes.... Those who believe that great physical endurance and physical energy cannot exist in the tropics do not know the creole carrier-girl. IV. At a very early age--perhaps at five years--she learns to carry small articles upon her head,--a bowl of rice,--a dobanne, or red earthen decanter, full of water,--even an orange on a plate; and before long she is able to balance these perfectly without using her hands to steady them. (I have often seen children actually run with cans of water upon their heads, and never spill a drop.) At nine or ten she is able to carry thus a tolerably heavy basket, or a _trait_ (a wooden tray with deep outward sloping sides) containing a weight of from twenty to thirty pounds; and is able to accompany her mother, sister, or cousin on long peddling journeys,--walking barefoot twelve and fifteen miles a day. At sixteen or seventeen she is a tall robust girl,--lithe, vigorous, tough,--all of tendon and hard flesh;--she carries a tray or a basket of the largest size, and a burden of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds weight;--she can now earn about thirty francs (about six dollars) a month, _by walking fifty miles a day_, as an itinerant seller. Among her class there are figures to make you dream of Atalanta;--and all, whether ugly or attractive as to feature, are finely shapen as to body and limb. Brought into existence by extraordinary necessities of environment, the type is a peculiarly local one,--a type of human thorough-bred representing the true secret of grace: economy of force. There are no corpulent porteuses for the long interior routes; all are built lightly and firmly as those racers. There are no old porteuses;--to do the work even at forty signifies a constitution of astounding solidity. After the full force of youth and health is spent, the poor carrier must seek lighter labor;--she can no longer compete with the girls. For in this calling the young body is taxed to its utmost capacity of strength, endurance, and rapid motion. As a general rule, the weight is such that no well-freighted porteuse can, unassisted, either "load" or "unload" (_châgé_ or _déchâgé_, in creole phrase); the effort to do so would burst a blood-vessel, wrench a nerve, rupture a muscle. She cannot even sit down under her burden without risk of breaking her neck: absolute perfection of the balance is necessary for self-preservation. A case came under my own observation of a woman rupturing a muscle in her arm through careless haste in the mere act of aiding another to unload. And no one not a brute will ever refuse to aid a woman to lift or to relieve herself of her burden;--you may see the wealthiest merchant, the proudest planter, gladly do it;--the meanness of refusing, or of making any conditions for the performance of this little kindness has only been imagined in those strange Stories of Devils wherewith the oral and uncollected literature of the creole abounds. [3] V. Preparing for her journey, the young _màchanne_ (marchande) puts on the poorest and briefest chemise in her possession, and the most worn of her light calico robes. These are all she wears. The robe is drawn upward and forward, so as to reach a little below the knee, and is confined thus by a waist-string, or a long kerchief bound tightly round the loins. Instead of a Madras or painted turban-kerchief, she binds a plain _mouchoir_ neatly and closely about her head; and if her hair be long, it is combed back and gathered into a loop behind. Then, with a second mouchoir of coarser quality she makes a pad, or, as she calls it, _tòche_, by winding the kerchief round her fingers as you would coil up a piece of string;--and the soft mass, flattened with a patting of the hand, is placed upon her head, over the coiffure. On this the great loaded trait is poised. [Illustration: 'TI MARIE (On the Route from St. Pierre to Basse-Pointe.)] She wears no shoes! To wear shoes and do her work swiftly and well in such a land of mountains would be impossible. She must climb thousands and descend thousands of feet every day,--march up and down slopes so steep that the horses of the country all break down after a few years of similar journeying. The girl invariably outlasts the horse,--though carrying an equal weight. Shoes, unless extraordinarily well made, would shift place a little with every change from ascent to descent, or the reverse, during the march,--would yield and loosen with the ever-varying strain,--would compress the toes,--produce corns, bunions, raw places by rubbing, and soon cripple the porteuse. Remember, she has to walk perhaps fifty miles between dawn and dark, under a sun to which a single hour's exposure, without the protection of an umbrella, is perilous to any European or American--the terrible sun of the tropics! Sandals are the only conceivable foot-gear suited to such a calling as hers; but she needs no sandals: the soles of her feet are toughened so as to feel no asperities, and present to sharp pebbles a surface at once yielding and resisting, like a cushion of solid caoutchouc. Besides her load, she carries only a canvas purse tied to her girdle on the right side, and on the left a very small bottle of rum, or white _tafia_,--usually the latter, because it is so cheap.... For she may not always find the Gouyave Water to drink,--the cold clear pure stream conveyed to the fountains of St. Pierre from the highest mountains by a beautiful and marvellous plan of hydraulic engineering: she will have to drink betimes the common spring-water of the bamboo-fountains on the remoter high-roads; and this may cause dysentery if swallowed without a spoonful of spirits. Therefore she never travels without a little liquor. VI. ... So!--She is ready: "_Châgé moin, souplè, chè!_" She bends to lift the end of the heavy trait: some one takes the other,--_yon!-dé!--toua!_--it is on her head. Perhaps she winces an instant;--the weight is not perfectly balanced; she settles it with her hands,--gets it in the exact place. Then, all steady,--lithe, light, half naked,--away she moves with a long springy step. So even her walk that the burden never sways; yet so rapid her motion that however good a walker you may fancy yourself to be you will tire out after a sustained effort of fifteen minutes to follow her uphill. Fifteen minutes;--and she can keep up that pace without slackening--save for a minute to eat and drink at mid-day,--for at least twelve hours and fifty-six minutes, the extreme length of a West Indian day. She starts before dawn; tries to reach her resting-place by sunset: after dark, like all her people, she is afraid of meeting _zombis_. Let me give you some idea of her average speed under an average weight of one hundred and twenty-five pounds,--estimates based partly upon my own observations, partly upon the declarations of the trustworthy merchants who employ her, and partly on the assertion of habitants of the burghs or cities named--all of which statements perfectly agree. From St. Pierre to Basse-Pointe, by the national road, the distance is a trifle less than twenty-seven kilometres and three-quarters. She makes the transit easily in three hours and a half; and returns in the afternoon, after an absence of scarcely more than eight hours. From St. Pierre to Morne Rouge--two thousand feet up in the mountains (an ascent so abrupt that no one able to pay carriage-fare dreams of attempting to walk it)--the distance is seven kilometres and three-quarters. She makes it in little more than an hour. But this represents only the beginning of her journey. She passes on to Grande Anse, twenty-one and three-quarter kilometres away. But she does not rest there: she returns at the same pace, and reaches St. Pierre before dark. From St. Pierre to Gros-Morne the distance to be twice traversed by her is more than thirty-two kilometres. A journey of sixty-four kilometres,--daily, perhaps,--forty miles! And there are many màchannes who make yet longer trips,--trips of three or four days' duration;--these rest at villages upon their route. VII. Such travel in such a country would be impossible but for the excellent national roads,--limestone highways, solid, broad, faultlessly graded,--that wind from town to town, from hamlet to hamlet, over mountains, over ravines; ascending by zigzags to heights of twenty-five hundred feet; traversing the primeval forests of the interior; now skirting the dizziest precipices, now descending into the loveliest valleys. There are thirty-one of these magnificent routes, with a total length of 488,052 metres (more than 303 miles), whereof the construction required engineering talent of the highest order,--the building of bridges beyond counting, and devices the most ingenious to provide against dangers of storms, floods, and land-slips. Most have drinking-fountains along their course at almost regular intervals,--generally made by the negroes, who have a simple but excellent plan for turning the water of a spring through bamboo pipes to the road-way. Each road is also furnished with mile-stones, or rather kilometre-stones; and the drainage is perfect enough to assure of the highway becoming dry within fifteen minutes after the heaviest rain, so long as the surface is maintained in tolerably good condition. Well-kept embankments of earth (usually covered with a rich growth of mosses, vines, and ferns), or even solid walls of masonry, line the side that overhangs a dangerous depth. And all these highways pass through landscapes of amazing beauty,--visions of mountains so many-tinted and so singular of outline that they would almost seem to have been created for the express purpose of compelling astonishment. This tropic Nature appears to call into being nothing ordinary: the shapes which she evokes are always either gracious or odd,--and her eccentricities, her extravagances, have a fantastic charm, a grotesqueness as of artistic whim. Even where the landscape-view is cut off by high woods the forms of ancient trees--the infinite interwreathing of vine growths all on fire with violence of blossom-color,--the enormous green outbursts of balisiers, with leaves ten to thirteen feet long,--the columnar solemnity of great palmistes,--the pliant quivering exqisiteness of bamboo,--the furious splendor of roses run mad--more than atone for the loss of the horizon. Sometimes you approach a steep covered with a growth of what, at first glance, looks precisely like fine green fur: it is a first-growth of young bamboo. Or you see a hill-side covered with huge green feathers, all shelving down and overlapping as in the tail of some unutterable bird: these are baby ferns. And where the road leaps some deep ravine with a double or triple bridge of white stone, note well what delicious shapes spring up into sunshine from the black profundity on either hand! Palmiform you might hastily term them,--but no palm was ever so gracile; no palm ever bore so dainty a head of green plumes light as lace! These likewise are ferns (rare survivors, maybe, of that period of monstrous vegetation which preceded the apparition of man), beautiful tree-ferns, whose every young plume, unrolling in a spiral from the bud, at first assumes the shape of a crozier,--a crozier of emerald! Therefore are some of this species called "archbishop-trees," no doubt.... But one might write for a hundred years of the sights to be seen upon such a mountain road. VIII. In every season, in almost every weather, the porteuse makes her journey,--never heeding rain;--her goods being protected by double and triple water-proof coverings well bound down over her trait. Yet these tropical rains, coming suddenly with a cold wind upon her heated and almost naked body, are to be feared. To any European or un-acclimated white such a wetting, while the pores are all open during a profuse perspiration, would probably prove fatal: even for white natives the result is always a serious and protracted illness. But the porteuse seldom suffers in consequences: she seems proof against fevers, rheumatisms, and ordinary colds. When she does break down, however, the malady is a frightful one,--a pneumonia that carries off the victim within forty-eight hours. Happily, among her class, these fatalities are very rare. And scarcely less rare than such sudden deaths are instances of failure to appear on time. In one case, the employer, a St. Pierre shopkeeper, on finding his _marchande_ more than an hour late, felt so certain something very extraordinary must have happened that he sent out messengers in all directions to make inquiries. It was found that the woman had become a mother when only half-way upon her journey home. The child lived and thrived;--she is now a pretty chocolate-colored girl of eight, who follows her mother every day from their mountain ajoupa down to the city, and back again,--bearing a little trait upon her head. Murder for purposes of robbery is not an unknown crime in Martinique; but I am told the porteuses are never molested. And yet some of these girls carry merchandise to the value of hundreds of francs; and all carry money,--the money received for goods sold, often a considerable sum. This immunity may be partly owing to the fact that they travel during the greater part of the year only by day,--and usually in company. A very pretty girl is seldom suffered to journey unprotected: she has either a male escort or several experienced and powerful women with her. In the cacao season-when carriers start from Grande Anse as early as two o'clock in the morning, so as to reach St. Pierre by dawn--they travel in strong companies of twenty or twenty-five, singing on the way. As a general rule the younger girls at all times go two together,--keeping step perfectly as a pair of blooded fillies; only the veterans, or women selected for special work by reason of extraordinary physical capabilities, go alone. To the latter class belong certain girls employed by the great bakeries of Fort-de-France and St. Pierre: these are veritable caryatides. They are probably the heaviest-laden of all, carrying baskets of astounding size far up into the mountains before daylight, so as to furnish country families with fresh bread at an early hour; and for this labor they receive about four dollars (twenty francs) a month and one loaf of bread per diem.... While stopping at a friend's house among the hills, some two miles from Fort-de-France, I saw the local bread-carrier halt before our porch one morning, and a finer type of the race it would be difficult for a sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall,--strength and grace united throughout her whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx,--she looked to me, as she towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa. Seeing me smoking one of those long thin Martinique cigars called _bouts_, she begged one; and, not happening to have another, I gave her the price of a bunch of twenty,--ten sous. She took it without a smile, and went her way. About an hour and a half later she came back and asked for me,--to present me with the finest and largest mango I had ever seen, a monster mango. She said she wanted to see me eat it, and sat down on the ground to look on. While eating it, I learned that she had walked a whole mile out of her way under that sky of fire, just to bring her little gift of gratitude. [Illustration: FORT-DE-FRANCE, MARTINIQUE--(FORMERLY FORT ROYAL.)] IX. Forty to fifty miles a day, always under a weight of more than a hundred pounds,--for when the trait has been emptied she puts in stones for ballast;--carrying her employer's merchandise and money over the mountain ain ranges, beyond the peaks, across the ravines, through the tropical forest, sometimes through by-ways haunted by the fer-de-lance,--and this in summer or winter, the deason of rains or the season of heat, the time of fevers or the time of hurricanes, at a franc a day!... How does she live upon it? There are twenty sous to the franc. The girl leaves St. Pierre with her load at early morning. At the second village, Morne Rouge, she halts to buy one, two, or three biscuits at a sou apiece; and reaching Ajoupa-Bouillon later in the forenoon, she may buy another biscuit or two. Altogether she may be expected to eat five Sous of biscuit or bread before reaching Grande Anse, where she probably has a meal waiting for her. This ought to cost her ten sous,--especially if there be meat in her ragoût: which represents a total expense of fifteen sous for eatables. Then there is the additional cost of the cheap liquor, which she must mix with her drinking-water, as it would be more than dangerous to swallow pure cold water in her heated condition; two or three sous more. This almost makes the franc. But such a hasty and really erroneous estimate does not include expenses of lodging and clothing;--she may sleep on the bare floor sometimes, and twenty francs a year may keep her in clothes; but she must rent the floor and pay for the clothes out of that franc. As a matter of fact she not only does all this upon her twenty sous a day, but can even economize something which will enable her, when her youth and force decline, to start in business for herself. And her economy will not seem so wonderful when I assure you that thousands of men here--huge men muscled like bulls and lions--live upon an average expenditure of five sous a day. One sou of bread, two sous of manioc flour, one sou of dried codfish, one sou of tafia: such is their meal. There are women carriers who earn more than a franc a day,--women with a particular talent for selling, who are paid on commission--from ten to fifteen per cent. These eventually make themselves independent in many instances;--they continue to sell and bargain in person, but hire a young girl to carry the goods. X. ... "_Ou 'lè màchanne!_" rings out a rich alto, resonant as the tone of a gong, from behind the balisiers that shut in our garden. There are two of them--no, three--Maiyotte, Chéchelle, and Rina. Maiyotte and Chéchelle have just arrived from St. Pierre;--Rina come from Gros-Morne with fruits and vegetables. Suppose we call them all in, and see what they have got. Maiyotte and Chéchelle sell on commission; Rina sells for her mother, who has a little garden at Gros-Morne. ... "_Bonjou', Maiyotte;--bonjou', Chéchelle! coument ou kallé, Rina, chè!_"... Throw open the folding-doors to let the great trays pass.... Now all three are unloaded by old Théréza and by young Adou;--all the packs are on the floor, and the water-proof wrappings are being un-corded, while Ah-Manmzell, the adopted child, brings the rum and water for the tall walkers.... "Oh, what a medley, Maiyotte!"... Inkstands and wooden cows; purses and paper dogs and cats; dolls and cosmetics; pins and needles and soap and tooth-brushes; candied fruits and smoking-caps; _pelotes_ of thread, and tapes, and ribbons, and laces, and Madeira wine; cuffs, and collars, and dancing-shoes, and tobacco _sachets_.... But what is in that little flat bundle? Presents for your _guêpe_, if you have one.... _Fesis-Maïa!_--the pretty foulards! Azure and yellow in checkerings; orange and crimson in stripes; rose and scarlet in plaidings; and bronze tints, and beetle-tints of black and green. "Chéchelle, what a _bloucoutoum_ if you should ever let that tray fall--_aïe yaïe yaïe!_" Here is a whole shop of crockeries and porcelains;--plates, dishes, cups,--earthen-ware _canaris_ and _dobannes_, and gift-mugs and cups bearing creole girls' names,--all names that end in _ine_. "Micheline," "Honorine," "Prospérine" [you will never sell that, Chéchelle: there is not a Prospérine this side of St. Pierre], "Azaline," "Leontine," "Zéphyrine," "Albertine," "Chrysaline," "Florine," "Coralline," "Alexandrine."...And knives and forks, and cheap spoons, and tin coffee-pots, and tin rattles for babies, and tin flutes for horrid little boys,--and pencils and note-paper and envelopes!... ... "Oh, Rina, what superb oranges!--fully twelve inches round--! ... "and these, which look something like our mandarins, what do you call them?" "Zorange-macaque!" (monkey-oranges). And here are avocados--beauties!--guavas of three different kinds,--tropical cherries (which have four seeds instead of one),--tropical raspberries, whereof the entire eatable portion comes off in one elastic piece, lined with something like white silk.... Here are fresh nutmegs: the thick green case splits in equal halves at a touch; and see the beautiful heart within,--deep dark glossy red, all wrapped in a bright net-work of flat blood-colored fibre, spun over it like branching veins.... This big heavy red-and-yellow thing is a _pomme-cythère_: the smooth cuticle, bitter as gall, covers a sweet juicy pulp, interwoven with something that seems like cotton thread.... Here is a _pomme-cannelle_: inside its scaly covering is the most delicious yellow custard conceivable, with little black seeds floating in it. This larger _corossol_ has almost as delicate an interior, only the custard is white instead of yellow.... Here are _christophines_,--great pear-shaped things, white and green, according to kind, with a peel prickly and knobby as the skin of a horned toad; but they stew exquisitely. And _mélongènes_, or egg-plants; and palmiste-pith, and _chadèques_, and _pommes-d' Haïti_,--and roots that at first sight look all alike, but they are not: there are _camanioc_, and _couscous_, and _choux-caraïbes_, and _zignames_, and various kinds of _patates_ among them. Old Théréza's magic will transform these shapeless muddy things, before evening, into pyramids of smoking gold,--into odorous porridges that will look like messes of molten amber and liquid pearl;--for Rina makes a good sale. Then Chéchelle manages to dispose of a tin coffee-pot and a big canari.... And Maiyotte makes the best sale of all; for the sight of a funny _biscuit_ doll has made Ah-Manmzell cry and smile so at the same time that I should feel unhappy for the rest of my life if I did not buy it for her. I know I ought to get some change out of that six francs;--and Maiyotte, who is black but comely as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon, seems to be aware of the fact. Oh, Maiyotte, how plaintive that pretty sphinx face of yours, now turned in profile;--as if you knew you looked beautiful thus,--with the great gold circlets of your ears glittering and swaying as you bend! And why are you so long, so long untying that poor little canvas purse?--fumbling and fingering it?--is it because you want me to think of the weight of that trait and the sixty kilometres you must walk, and the heat, and the dust, and all the disappointments? Ah, you are cunning, Maiyotte! No, I do not want the change! XI. ... Travelling together, the porteuses often walk in silence for hours at a time;--this is when they feel weary. Sometimes they sing,--most often when approaching their destination;--and when they chat, it is in a key so high-pitched that their voices can be heard to a great distance in this land of echoes and elevations. But she who travels alone is rarely silent: she talks to herself or to inanimate things;--you may hear her talking to the trees, to the flowers,--talking to the high clouds and the far peaks of changing color,--talking to the setting sun! Over the miles of the morning she sees, perchance, the mighty Piton Gélé, a cone of amethyst in the light; and she talks to it: "_Ou jojoll, oui!--moin ni envie monté assou ou, pou moin ouè bien, bien!_" (Thou art pretty, pretty, aye!--I would I might climb thee, to see far, far off!) By a great grove of palms she passes;--so thickly mustered they are that against the sun their intermingled heads form one unbroken awning of green. Many rise straight as masts; some bend at beautiful angles, seeming to intercross their long pale single limbs in a fantastic dance; others curve like bows: there is one that undulates from foot to crest, like a monster serpent poised upon its tail. She loves to look at that one--"_joli pié-bois-là!_"--talks to it as she goes by,--bids it good-day. Or, looking back as she ascends, she sees the huge blue dream of the sea,--the eternal haunter, that ever becomes larger as she mounts the road; and she talks to it: "_Mi lanmé ka gaudé moin!_" (There is the great sea looking at me!) "_Màché toujou deïé moin, lanmè!_" (Walk after me, 0 Sea!) Or she views the clouds of Pelée, spreading gray from the invisible summit, to shadow against the sun; and she fears the rain, and she talks to it: "_Pas mouillé moin, laplie-à! Quitté moin rivé avant mouillé moin!_" (Do not wet me, 0 Rain! Let me get there before thou wettest me!) Sometimes a dog barks at her, menaces her bare limbs; and she talks to the dog: "_Chien-a, pas mòdé moin, chien--anh! Moin pa fé ou arien, chien, pou ou mòdé moin!_" (Do not bite me, 0 Dog! Never did I anything to thee that thou shouldst bite me, 0 Dog! Do not bite me, dear! Do not bite me, _doudoux_!) Sometimes she meets a laden sister travelling the opposite way.... "_Coument ou yé, chè?_" she cries. (How art thou, dear?) And the other makes answer, "_Toutt douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and thou?) And each passes on without pausing: they have no time! ... It is perhaps the last human voice she will hear for many a mile. After that only the whisper of the grasses--_graïe-gras, graïe-gras!_--and the gossip of the canes--_chououa, chououa!_--and the husky speech of the _pois-Angole, ka babillé conm yon vié fenme_,--that babbles like an old woman;--and the murmur of the _filao_-trees, like the murmur of the River of the Washerwomen. XII. ... Sundown approaches: the light has turned a rich yellow;--long black shapes lie across the curving road, shadows of balisier and palm, shadows of tamarind and Indian-reed, shadows of ceiba and giant-fern. And the porteuses are coming down through the lights and darknesses of the way from far Grande Anse, to halt a moment in this little village. They are going to sit down on the road-side here, before the house of the baker; and there is his great black workman, Jean-Marie, looking for them from the door-way, waiting to relieve them of their loads.... Jean-Marie is the strongest man in all the Champ-Flore: see what a torso,--as he stands there naked to the waist!... His day's work is done; but he likes to wait for the girls, though he is old now, and has sons as tall as himself. It is a habit: some say that he had a daughter once,--a porteuse like those coming, and used to wait for her thus at that very door-way until one evening that she failed to appear, and never returned till he carried her home in his arms dead,--stricken by a serpent in some mountain path where there was none to aid.... The roads were not as good then as now. ... Here they come, the girls--yellow, red, black. See the flash of the yellow feet where they touch the light! And what impossible tint the red limbs take in the changing glow!... Finotte, Pauline, Médelle,-all together, as usual,--with Ti-Clê trotting behind, very tired.... Never mind, Ti-Clê!--you will outwalk your cousins when you are a few years older,--pretty Ti-Clê.... Here come Cyrillia and Zabette, and Fêfê and Dodotte and Fevriette. And behind them are coming the two _chabines_,--golden girls: the twin-sisters who sell silks and threads and foulards; always together, always wearing robes and kerchiefs of similar color,--so that you can never tell which is Lorrainie and which Édoualise. And all smile to see Jean-Marie waiting for them, and to hear his deep kind voice calling, "_Coument ou yé, chè? coument ou kallé?_" ...(How art thou, dear?--how goes it with thee?) And they mostly make answer, _"Toutt douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and thou?) But some, over-weary, cry to him, "_Ah! déchâgé moin vite, chè! moin lasse, lasse!_" (Unload me quickly, dear; for I am very, very weary.) Then he takes off their burdens, and fetches bread for them, and says foolish little things to make them laugh. And they are pleased, and laugh, just like children, as they sit right down on the road there to munch their dry bread. ... So often have I watched that scene!... Let me but close my eyes one moment, and it will come back to me,--through all the thousand miles,--over the graves of the days.... Again I see the mountain road in the yellow glow, banded with umbrages of palm. Again I watch the light feet coming,--now in shadow, now in sun,--soundlessly as falling leaves. Still I can hear the voices crying, "_Ah! déchâgé moin vite, chè! moin lasse!_"--and see the mighty arms outreach to take the burdens away. ... Only, there is a change',--I know not what!... All vapory the road is, and the fronds, and the comely coming feet of the bearers, and even this light of sunset,--sunset that is ever larger and nearer to us than dawn, even as death than birth. And the weird way appeareth a way whose dust is the dust of generations;--and the Shape that waits is never Jean-Marie, but one darker; and stronger;--and these are surely voices of tired souls. I who cry to Thee, thou dear black Giver of the perpetual rest, "_Ah! déchâgé moin vite, chè! moin lasse!_" CHAPTER II. -- LA GRANDE ANSE. I. In the village of Morne Rouge, I was frequently impressed by the singular beauty of young girls from the north-east coast--all porteuses, who passed almost daily on their way from Grande Anse to St. Pierre and back again--a total trip of thirty-five miles.... I knew they were from Grande Anse, because the village baker, at whose shop they were wont to make brief halts, told me a good deal about them: he knew each one by name. Whenever a remarkably attractive girl appeared, and I would inquire whence she came, the invariable reply (generally preceded by that peculiarly intoned French "Ah!" signifying, "Why, you certainly ought to know!") was "Grand Anse."..._Ah! c'est de Grande Anse, ça!_ And if any commonplace, uninteresting type showed itself it would be signalled as from somewhere else--Gros-Morne, Capote, Marigot, perhaps,--but never from Grand Anse. The Grande Anse girls were distinguished by their clear yellow or brown skins, lithe light figures and a particular grace in their way of dressing. Their short robes were always of bright and pleasing colors, perectly contrasting with the ripe fruit-tint of nude limbs and faces: I could discern a partiality for white stuffs with apricot-yellow stripes, for plaidings of blue and violet, and various patterns of pink and mauve. They had a graceful way of walking under their trays, with hands clasped behind their heads, and arms uplifted in the manner of caryatides. An artist would have been wild with delight for the chance to sketch some of them.... On the whole, they conveyed the impression that they belonged to a particular race, very different from that of the chief city or its environs. "Are they all banana-colored at Grande Anse?" I asked,--"and all as pretty as these?" "I was never at Grande Anse," the little baker answered, "although I have been forty years in Martinique; but I know there is a fine class of young girls there: _il y a une belle jeunesse là, mon cher!_" Then I wondered why the youth of Grande Anse should be any finer than the youth of other places; and it seemed to me that the baker's own statement of his never having been there might possibly furnish a clew.... Out of the thirty-five thousand inhabitants of St. Pierre and its suburbs, there are at least twenty thousand who never have been there, and most probably never will be. Few dwellers of the west coast visit the east coast: in fact, except among the white creoles, who represent but a small percentage of the total population, there are few persons to be met with who are familiar with all parts of their native island. It is so mountainous, and travelling is so wearisome, that populations may live and die in adjacent valleys without climbing the intervening ranges to look at one another. Grande Anse is only about twenty miles from the principal city; but it requires some considerable inducement to make the journey on horseback; and only the professional carrier-girls, plantation messengers, and colored people of peculiarly tough constitution attempt it on foot. Except for the transportation of sugar and rum, there is practically no communication by sea between the west and the north-east coast--the sea is too dangerous--and thus the populations on either side of the island are more or less isolated from each other, besides being further subdivided and segregated by the lesser mountain chains crossing their respective territories.... In view of all these things I wondered whether a community so secluded might not assume special characteristics within two hundred years--might not develop into a population of some yellow, red, or brown type, according to the predominant element of the original race-crossing. II. I had long been anxious to see the city of the Porteuses, when the opportunity afforded itself to make the trip with a friend obliged to go thither on some important business;--I do not think I should have ever felt resigned to undertake it alone. With a level road the distance might be covered very quickly, but over mountains the journey is slow and wearisome in the perpetual tropic heat. Whether made on horseback or in a carriage, it takes between four and five hours to go from St. Pierre to Grand Anse, and it requires a longer time to return, as the road is then nearly all uphill. The young porteuse travels almost as rapidly; and the bare-footed black postman, who carries the mails in a square box at the end of a pole, is timed on leaving Morne Rouge at 4 A.M. to reach Ajoupa-Bouillon a little after six, and leaving Ajoupa-Bouillon at half-past six to reach Grande Anse at half-past eight, including many stoppages and delays on the way. Going to Grande Anse from the chief city, one can either hire a horse or carriage at St. Pierre, or ascend to Morne Rouge by the public conveyance, and there procure a vehicle or animal, which latter is the cheaper and easier plan. About a mile beyond Morne Rouge, where the old Calebasse road enters the public highway, you reach the highest point of the journey,--the top of the enormous ridge dividing the north-east from the western coast, and cutting off the trade-winds from sultry St. Pierre. By climbing the little hill, with a tall stone cross on its summit, overlooking the Champ-Flore just here, you can perceive the sea on both sides of the island at once--_lapis lazuli_ blue. From this elevation the road descends by a hundred windings and lessening undulations to the eastern shore. It sinks between mornes wooded to their summits,--bridges a host of torrents and ravines,--passes gorges from whence colossal trees tower far overhead, through heavy streaming of lianas, to mingle their green crowns in magnificent gloom. Now and then you hear a low long sweet sound like the deepest tone of a silver flute,--a bird-call, the cry of the _siffleur-de-montagne_; then all is stillness. You are not likely to see a white face again for hours, but at intervals a porteuse passes, walking very swiftly, or a field-hand heavily laden; and these salute you either by speech or a lifting of the hand to the head.... And it is very pleasant to hear the greetings and to see the smiles of those who thus pass,--the fine brown girls bearing trays, the dark laborers bowed under great burdens of bamboo-grass,--_Bonjou', Missié!_ Then you should reply, if the speaker be a woman and pretty, "Good-day, dear" (_bonjou', chè_), or, "Good-day, my daughter" (_mafi_) even if she be old; while if the passer-by be a man, your proper reply is, "Good-day, my son" (_monfi_).... They are less often uttered now than in other years, these kindly greetings, but they still form part of the good and true creole manners. [Illustration: A CREOLE CAPRE IN WORKING GARB.] The feathery beauty of the tree-ferns shadowing each brook, the grace of bamboo and arborescent grasses, seem to decrease as the road descends,--but the palms grow taller. Often the way skirts a precipice dominating some marvellous valley prospect; again it is walled in by high green banks or shrubby slopes which cut off the view; and always it serpentines so that you cannot see more than a few hundred feet of the white track before you. About the fifteenth kilometre a glorious landscape opens to the right, reaching to the Atlantic;--the road still winds very high; forests are billowing hundreds of yards below it, and rising miles away up the slopes of mornes, beyond which, here and there, loom strange shapes of mountain,--shading off from misty green to violet and faintest gray. And through one grand opening in this multicolored surging of hills and peaks you perceive the gold-yellow of cane-fields touching the sky-colored sea. Grande Anse lies somewhere in that direction.... At the eighteenth kilometre you pass a cluster of little country cottages, a church, and one or two large buildings framed in shade-trees--the hamlet of Ajoupa-Bouillon. Yet a little farther, and you find you have left all the woods behind you. But the road continues its bewildering curves around and between low mornes covered with cane or cocoa plants: it dips down very low, rises again, dips once more;--and you perceive the soil is changing color; it is taking a red tint like that of the land of the American cotton-belt. Then you pass the Rivière Falaise (marked _Filasse_ upon old maps),--with its shallow crystal torrent flowing through a very deep and rocky channel,--and the Capote and other streams; and over the yellow rim of cane-hills the long blue bar of the sea appears, edged landward with a dazzling fringe of foam. The heights you have passed are no longer verqant, but purplish or gray,--with Pelée's cloud-wrapped enormity overtopping all. A very strong warm wind is blowing upon you--the trade-wind, always driving the clouds west: this is the sunny side of Martinique, where gray days and heavy rains are less frequent. Once or twice more the sea disappears and reappears, always over canes; and then, after passing a bridge and turning a last curve, the road suddenly drops down to the shore and into the burgh of Grande Anse. III. Leaving Morne Rouge at about eight in the morning, my friend and I reached Grande Anse at half-past eleven. Everything had been arranged to make us comfortable, I was delighted with the airy corner room, commanding at once a view of the main street and of the sea--a very high room, all open to the trade-winds--which had been prepared to receive me. But after a long carriage ride in the heat of a tropical June day, one always feels the necessity of a little physical exercise. I lingered only a minute or two in the house, and went out to look at the little town and its surroundings. As seen from the high-road, the burgh of Grande Anse makes a long patch of darkness between the green of the coast and the azure of the water: it is almost wholly black and gray--suited to inspire an etching, High slopes of cane and meadow rise behind it and on either side, undulating up and away to purple and gray tips of mountain ranges. North and south, to left and right, the land reaches out in two high promontories, mostly green, and about a mile apart--the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe de Séguinau, or Croche-Mort, which latter name preserves the legend of an insurgent slave, a man of color, shot dead upon the cliff. These promontories form the semicircular bay of Grande Anse. All this Grande Anse, or "Great Creek," valley is an immense basin of basalt; and narrow as it is, no less than five streams water it, including the Riviere de la Grande Anse. There are only three short streets in the town. The principal, or Grande Rue, is simply a continuation of the national road; there is a narrower one below, which used to be called the Rue de la Paille, because the cottages lining it were formerly all thatched with cane straw; and there is one above it, edging the cane-fields that billow away to the meeting of morne and sky. There is nothing of architectural interest, and all is sombre,--walls and roofs and pavements. But after you pass through the city and follow the southern route that ascends the Séguinau promontory, you can obtain some lovely landscape views a grand surging of rounded mornes, with farther violet peaks, truncated or horned, pushing up their heads in the horizon above the highest flutterings of cane; and looking back above the town, you may see Pelée all unclouded,--not as you see it from the other coast, but an enormous ghostly silhouette, with steep sides and almost square summit, so pale as to seem transparent. Then if you cross the promontory southward, the same road will lead you into another very beautiful valley, watered by a broad rocky torrent,--the Valley of the Rivière du Lorrain. This clear stream rushes to the sea through a lofty opening in the hills; and looking westward between them, you will be charmed by the exquisite vista of green shapes piling and pushing up one behind another to reach a high blue ridge which forms the background--a vision of tooth-shaped and fantastical mountains,--part of the great central chain running south and north through nearly the whole island. It is over those blue summits that the wonderful road called _La Trace_ winds between primeval forest walls. But the more you become familiar with the face of the little town itself, the more you are impressed by the strange swarthy tone it preserves in all this splendid expanse of radiant tinting. There are only two points of visible color in it,--the church and hospital, built of stone, which have been painted yellow: as a mass in the landscape, lying between the dead-gold of the cane-clad hills and the delicious azure of the sea, it remains almost black under the prodigious blaze of light. The foundations of volcanic rock, three or four feet high, on which the frames of the wooden dwellings rest, are black; and the sea-wind appears to have the power of blackening all timber-work here through any coat of paint. Roofs and façades look as if they had been long exposed to coal-smoke, although probably no one in Grande Anse ever saw coal; and the pavements of pebbles and cement are of a deep ash-color, full of micaceous scintillation, and so hard as to feel disagreeable even to feet protected by good thick shoes. By-and-by you notice walls of black stone, bridges of black stone, and perceive that black forms an element of all the landscape about you. On the roads leading from the town you note from time to time masses of jagged rock or great bowlders protruding through the green of the slopes, and dark as ink. These black surfaces also sparkle. The beds of all the neighboring rivers are filled with dark gray stones; and many of these, broken by those violent floods which dash rocks together,--deluging the valleys, and strewing the soil of the bottom-lands (_fonds_) with dead serpents,--display black cores. Bare crags projecting from the green cliffs here and there are soot-colored, and the outlying rocks of the coast offer a similar aspect. And the sand of the beach is funereally black--looks almost like powdered charcoal; and as you walk over it, sinking three or four inches every step, you are amazed by the multitude and brilliancy of minute flashes in it, like a subtle silver effervescence. This extraordinary sand contains ninety per cent of natural steel, and efforts have been made to utilize it industrially. Some years ago a company was formed, and a machine invented to separate the metal from the pure sand,--an immense revolving magnet, which, being set in motion under a sand shower, caught the ore upon it. When the covering thus formed by the adhesion of the steel became of a certain thickness, the simple interruption of an electric current precipitated the metal into appropriate receptacles. Fine bars were made from this volcanic steel, and excellent cutting tools manufactured from it: French metallurgists pronounced the product of peculiar excellence, and nevertheless the project of the company was abandoned. Political disorganization consequent upon the establishment of universal suffrage frightened capitalists who might have aided the undertaking under a better condition of affairs; and the lack of large means, coupled with the cost of freight to remote markets, ultimately baffled this creditable attempt to found a native industry. Sometimes after great storms bright brown sand is flung up from the sea-depths; but the heavy black sand always reappears again to make the universal color of the beach. IV. Behind the roomy wooden house in which I occupied an apartment there was a small garden-plot surrounded with a hedge strengthened by bamboo fencing, and radiant with flowers of the _loseille-bois_,--the creole name for a sort of begonia, whose closed bud exactly resembles a pink and white dainty bivalve shell, and whose open blossom imitates the form of a butterfly. Here and there, on the grass, were nets drying, and _nasses_--curious fish-traps made of split bamboos interwoven and held in place with _mibi_ stalks (the mibi is a liana heavy and tough as copper wire); and immediately behind the garden hedge appeared the white flashing of the surf. The most vivid recollection connected with my trip to Grande Anse is that of the first time that I went to the end of that garden, opened the little bamboo gate, and found myself overlooking the beach--an immense breadth of soot-black sand, with pale green patches and stripings here and there upon it--refuse of cane thatch, decomposing rubbish spread out by old tides. The one solitary boat owned in the community lay there before me, high and dry. It was the hot period of the afternoon; the town slept; there was no living creature in sight; and the booming of the surf drowned all other sounds; the scent of the warm strong sea-wind annihilated all other odors. Then, very suddenly, there came to me a sensation absolutely weird, while watching the strange wild sea roaring over its beach of black sand,--the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo hedge,--or by those old green tide-lines on the desolation of the black beach,--or by some tone of the speaking of the sea,--or something indefinable in the living touch of the wind,--or by all of these, I cannot say;--but slowly there became defined within me the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago, I could not tell where,--in those child-years of which the recollections gradually become indistinguishable from dreams. Soon as darkness comes upon Grande Anse the face of the clock in the church-tower is always lighted: you see it suddenly burst into yellow glow above the roofs and the cocoa-palms,--just like a pharos. In my room I could not keep the candle lighted because of the sea-wind; but it never occurred to me to close the shutters of the great broad windows,--sashless, of course, like all the glassless windows of Martinique;--the breeze was too delicious. It seemed full of something vitalizing that made one's blood warmer, and rendered one full of contentment--full of eagerness to believe life all sweetness. Likewise, I found it soporific--this pure, dry, warm wind. And I thought there could be no greater delight in existence than to lie down at night, with all the windows open,--and the Cross of the South visible from my pillow,--and the sea-wind pouring over the bed,--and the tumultuous whispering and muttering of the surf in one's ears,--to dream of that strange sapphire sea white-bursting over its beach of black sand. V. Considering that Grande Anse lies almost opposite to St. Pierre, at a distance of less than twenty miles even by the complicated windings of the national road, the differences existing in the natural conditions of both places are remarkable enough. Nobody in St. Pierre sees the sun rise, because the mountains immediately behind the city continue to shadow its roofs long after the eastern coast is deluged with light and heat. At Grande Anse, on the other hand, those tremendous sunsets which delight west coast dwellers are not visible at all; and during the briefer West Indian days Grande Anse is all wrapped in darkness as early as half-past four,--or nearly an hour before the orange light has ceased to flare up the streets of St. Pierre from the sea;--since the great mountain range topped by Pelée cuts off all the slanting light from the east valleys. And early as folks rise in St. Pierre, they rise still earlier at Grande Anse--before the sun emerges from the rim of the Atlantic: about half-past four, doors are being opened and coffee is ready. At St. Pierre one can enjoy a sea bath till seven or half-past seven o'clock, even during the time of the sun's earliest rising, because the shadow of the mornes still reaches out upon the bay;--but bathers leave the black beach of Grande Anse by six o'clock; for once the sun's face is up, the light, levelled straight at the eyes, becomes blinding. Again, at St. Pierre it rains almost every twenty-four hours for a brief while, during at least the greater part of the year; at Grande Anse it rains more moderately and less often. The atmosphere at St. Pierre is always more or less impregnated with vapor, and usually an enervating heat prevails, which makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande Anse the warm wind keeps the skin comparatively dry, in spite of considerable exercise. It is quite rare to see a heavy surf at St, Pierre, but it is much rarer not to see it at Grande Anse.... A curious fact concerning custom is that few white creoles care to bathe in front of the town, notwithstanding the superb beach and magnificent surf, both so inviting to one accustomed to the deep still water and rough pebbly shore of St, Pierre. The creoles really prefer their rivers as bathing-places; and when willing to take a sea bath, they will walk up and down hill for kilometres in order to reach some river mouth, so as to wash off in the fresh-water afterwards. They say that the effect of sea-salt upon the skin gives _bouton chauds_ (what we call "prickly heat"). Friends took me all the way to the mouth of the Lorrain one morning that I might have the experience of such a double bath; but after leaving the tepid sea, I must confess the plunge into the river was something terrible--an icy shock which cured me of all further desire for river baths. My willingness to let the sea-water dry upon me was regarded as an eccentricity. VI. It may be said that on all this coast the ocean, perpetually moved by the blowing of the trade-winds, never rests--never hushes its roar, Even in the streets of Grande Anse, one must in breezy weather lift one's voice above the natural pitch to be heard; and then the breakers come in lines more than a mile long, between the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe de Séguinau,--every unfurling thunder-clap. There is no travelling by sea. All large vessels keep well away from the dangerous coast. There is scarcely any fishing; and although the sea is thick with fish, fresh fish at Grande Anse is a rare luxury. Communication with St. Pierre is chiefly by way of the national road, winding over mountain ridges two thousand feet high; and the larger portion of merchandise is transported from the chief city on the heads of young women. The steepness of the route soon kills draught-horses and ruins the toughest mules. At one time the managers of a large estate at Grande Anse attempted the experiment of sending their sugar to St. Pierre in iron carts, drawn by five mules; but the animals could not endure the work. Cocoa can be carried to St. Pierre by the porteuses, but sugar and rum must go by sea, or not at all; and the risk and difficulties of shipping these seriously affect the prosperity of all the north and north-east coast. Planters have actually been ruined by inability to send their products to market during a protracted spell of rough weather. A railroad has been proposed and planned: in a more prosperous era it might be constructed, with the result of greatly developing all the Atlantic side of the island, and converting obscure villages into thriving towns. Sugar is very difficult to ship; rum and tafia can be handled with less risk. It is nothing less than exciting to watch a shipment of tafia from Grande Anse to St. Pierre. A little vessel approaches the coast with extreme caution, and anchors in the bay some hundred yards beyond the breakers. She is what they call a _pirogue_ here, but not at all what is called a pirogue in the United States: she has a long narrow hull, two masts, no deck; she has usually a crew of five, and can carry thirty barrels of tafia. One of the pirogue men puts a great shell to his lips and sounds a call, very mellow and deep, that can be heard over the roar of the waves far up among the hills. The shell is one of those great spiral shells, weighing seven or eight pounds--rolled like a scroll, fluted and scalloped about the edges, and pink-pearled inside,--such as are sold in America for mantle-piece ornaments,--the shell of a _lambi_. Here you can often see the lambi crawling about with its nacreous house upon its back: an enormous sea-snail with a yellowish back and rose-colored belly, with big horns and eyes in the tip of each horn--very pretty yes, having a golden iris. This creature is a common article of food; but Its thick white flesh is almost compact as cartilage, and must be pounded before being cooked. [4] At the sound of the blowing of the lambi-shell, wagons descend to the beach, accompanied by young colored men running beside the mules. Each wagon discharges a certain number of barrels of tafia, and simultaneously the young men strip. They are slight, well built, and generally well muscled. Each man takes a barrel of tafia, pushes it before him into the surf, and then begins to swim to the pirogue,--impelling the barrel before him. I have never seen a swimmer attempt to convey more than one barrel at a time; but I am told there are experts who manage as many as three barrels together,--pushing them forward in line, with the head of one against the bottom of the next. It really requires much dexterity and practice to handle even one barrel or cask. As the swimmer advances he keeps close as possible to his charge,--so as to be able to push it forward with all his force against each breaker in succession,--making it dive through. If it once glide well out of his reach while he is in the breakers, it becomes an enemy, and he must take care to keep out of its way,--for if a wave throws it at him, or rolls it over him, he may be seriously injured; but the expert seldom abandons a barrel. Under the most favorable conditions, man and barrel will both disappear a score of times before the clear swells are reached, after which the rest of the journey is not difficult. Men lower ropes from the pirogue, the swimmer passes them under his barrel, and it is hoisted aboard. ... Wonderful surf-swimmers these men are;--they will go far out for mere sport in the roughest kind of a sea, when the waves, abnormally swollen by the peculiar conformation of the bay, come rolling in thirty and forty feet high. Sometimes, with the swift impulse of ascending a swell, the swimmer seems suspended in air as it passes beneath him, before he plunges into the trough beyond. The best swimmer is a young capre who cannot weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. Few of the Grande Anse men are heavily built; they do not compare for stature and thew with those longshoremen at St. Pierre who can be seen any busy afternoon on the landing, lifting heavy barrels at almost the full reach of their swarthy arms. ... There is but one boat owned in the whole parish of Grande Anse,--a fact due to the continual roughness of the sea. It has a little mast and sail, and can hold only three men. When the water is somewhat less angry than usual, a colored crew take it out for a fishing expedition. There is always much interest in this event; a crowd gathers on the beach; and the professional swimmers help to bring the little craft beyond the breakers. When the boat returns after a disappearance of several hours, everybody runs down from the village to meet it. Young colored women twist their robes up about their hips, and wade out to welcome it: there is a display of limbs of all colors on such occasions, which is not without grace, that untaught grace which tempts an artistic pencil. Every _bonne_ and every house-keeper struggles for the first chance to buy the fish;--young girls and children dance in the water for delight, all screaming, "_Rhalé bois-canot!_"... Then as the boat is pulled through the surf and hauled up on the sand, the pushing and screaming and crying become irritating and deafening; the fishermen lose patience and say terrible things. But nobody heeds them in the general clamoring and haggling and furious bidding for the _pouèsson-ououge_, the _dorades_, the _volants_ (beautiful purple-backed flying-fish with silver bellies, and fins all transparent, like the wings of dragon-flies). There is great bargaining even for a young shark,--which makes very nice eating cooked after the creole fashion. So seldom can the fishermen venture out that each trip makes a memorable event for the village. The St. Pierre fishermen very seldom approach the bay, but they do much fishing a few miles beyond it, almost in front of the Pointe du Rochet and the Roche à Bourgaut. There the best flying-fish are caught,--and besides edible creatures, many queer things are often brought up by the nets: monstrosities such as the _coffre_-fish, shaped almost like a box, of which the lid is represented by an extraordinary conformation of the jaws;--and the _barrique-de-vin_ ("wine cask"), with round boneless body, secreting in a curious vesicle a liquor precisely resembling wine lees;--and the "needle-fish" (_aiguille de mer_), less thick than a Faber lead-pencil, but more than twice as long;--and huge cuttle-fish and prodigious eels. One conger secured off this coast measured over twenty feet in length, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds--a veritable sea-serpent.... But even the fresh-water inhabitants of Grande Anse are amazing. I have seen crawfish by actual measurement fifty centimetres long, but these were not considered remarkable. Many are said to much exceed two feet from the tail to the tip of the claws and horns. They are of an iron-black color, and have formidable pincers with serrated edges and tip-points inwardly converging, which cannot crush like the weapons of a lobster, but which will cut the flesh and make a small ugly wound. At first sight one not familiar with the crawfish of these regions can hardly believe he is not viewing some variety of gigantic lobster instead of the common fresh-water crawfish of the east coast. When the head, tail, legs, and cuirass have all been removed, after boiling, the curved trunk has still the size and weight of a large pork sausage. These creatures are trapped by lantern-light. Pieces of manioc root tied fast to large bowlders sunk in the river are the only bait;--the crawfish will flock to eat it upon any dark night, and then they are caught with scoop-nets and dropped into covered baskets. VII. One whose ideas of the people of Grande Anse had I been formed only by observing the young porteuses of the region on their way to the other side of the Island, might expect on reaching this little town to find its population yellow as that of a Chinese city. But the dominant hue is much darker, although the mixed element is everywhere visible; and I was at first surprised by the scarcity of those clear bright skins I supposed to be so numerous. Some pretty children--notably a pair of twin-sisters, and perhaps a dozen school-girls from eight to ten years of age--displayed the same characteristics I have noted in the adult porteuses of Grande Anse; but within the town itself this brighter element is in the minority. The predominating race element of the whole commune is certainly colored (Grande Anse is even memorable because of the revolt of its _hommes de couleur_ some fifty years ago);--but the colored population is not concentrated in the town; it belongs rather to the valleys and the heights surrounding the _chef-lieu_. Most of the porteuses are country girls, and I found that even those living in the village are seldom visible on the streets except when departing upon a trip or returning from one. An artist wishing to study the type might, however, pass a day at the bridge of the Rivière Falaise to advantage, as all the carrier-girls pass it at certain hours of the morning and evening. But the best possible occasion on which to observe what my friend the baker called _la belle jeunesse_, is a confirmation day,--when the bishop drives to Grande Anse over the mountains, and all the population turns out in holiday garb, and the bells are tapped like tam-tams, and triumphal arches--most awry to behold!--span the road-way, bearing in clumsiest lettering the welcome, _Vive Monseigneur_. On that event, the long procession of young girls to be confirmed--all in white robes, white veils, and white satin slippers--is a numerical surprise. It is a moral surprise also,--to the stranger at least; for it reveals the struggle of a poverty extraordinary with the self-imposed obligations of a costly ceremonialism. No white children ever appear in these processions: there are not half a dozen white families in the whole urban population of about seven thousand souls; and those send their sons and daughters to St. Pierre or Morne Rouge for their religious training and education. But many of the colored children look very charming in their costume of confirmation;--you could not easily recognize one of them as the same little _bonne_ who brings your morning cup of coffee, or another as the daughter of a plantation _commandeur_ (overseer's assistant),--a brown slip of a girl who will probably never wear shoes again. And many of those white shoes and white veils have been obtained only by the hardest physical labor and self-denial of poor parents and relatives: fathers, brothers, and mothers working with cutlass and hoe in the snake-swarming cane-fields;--sisters walking bare-footed every day to St. Pierre and back to earn a few francs a month. [Illustration: A CONFIRMATION PROCESSION.] ... While watching such a procession it seemed to me that I could discern in the features and figures of the young confirmants something of a prevailing type and tint, and I asked an old planter beside me if he thought my impression correct. "Partly," he answered; "there is certainly a tendency towards an attractive physical type here, but the tendency itself is less stable than you imagine; it has been changed during the last twenty years within my own recollection. In different parts of the island particular types appear and disappear with a generation. There is a sort of race-fermentation going on, which gives no fixed result of a positive sort for any great length of time. It is true that certain elements continue to dominate in certain communes, but the particular characteristics come and vanish in the most mysterious way. As to color, I doubt if any correct classification can be made, especially by a stranger. Your eyes give you general ideas about a red type, a yellow type, a brown type; but to the more experienced eyes of a creole, accustomed to live in the country districts, every individual of mixed race appears to have a particular color of his own. Take, for instance, the so-called capre type, which furnishes the finest physical examples of all,--you, a stranger, are at once impressed by the general red tint of the variety; but you do not notice the differences of that tint in different persons, which are more difficult to observe than shade-differences of yellow or brown. Now, to me, every capre or capresse has an individual color; and I do not believe that in all Martinique there are two half-breeds--not having had the same father and mother--in whom the tint is precisely the same." VIII. I thought Grande Anse the most sleepy place I had ever visited. I suspect it is one of the sleepiest in the whole world. The wind, which tans even a creole of St. Pierre to an unnatural brown within forty-eight hours of his sojourn in the village, has also a peculiarly somnolent effect. The moment one has nothing particular to do, and ventures to sit down idly with the breeze in one's face, slumber comes; and everybody who can spare the time takes a long nap in the afternoon, and little naps from hour to hour. For all that, the heat of the east coast is not enervating, like that of St. Pierre; one can take a great deal of exercise in the sun without feeling much the worse. Hunting excursions, river fishing parties, surf-bathing, and visits to neighboring plantations are the only amusements; but these are enough to make existence very pleasant at Grande Anse. The most interesting of my own experiences were those of a day passed by invitation at one of the old colonial estates on the hills near the village. It is not easy to describe the charm of a creole interior, whether in the city or the country. The cool shadowy court, with its wonderful plants and fountain of sparkling mountain water, or the lawn, with its ancestral trees,--the delicious welcome of the host, whose fraternal easy manner immediately makes you feel at home,--the coming of the children to greet you, each holding up a velvety brown cheek to be kissed, after the old-time custom,--the romance of the unconventional chat, over a cool drink, under the palms and the ceibas,--the visible earnestness of all to please the guest, to inwrap him in a very atmosphere of quiet happiness,--combine to make a memory which you will never forget. And maybe you enjoy all this upon some exquisite site, some volcanic summit, overlooking slopes of a hundred greens,--mountains far winding in blue and pearly shadowing,--rivers singing seaward behind curtains of arborescent reeds and bamboos,--and, perhaps, Pelee, in the horizon, dreaming violet dreams under her foulard of vapors,--and, encircling all, the still sweep of the ocean's azure bending to the verge of day. ... My host showed or explained to me all that he thought might interest a stranger. He had brought to me a nest of the _carouge_, a bird which suspends its home, hammock-fashion, under the leaves of the banana-tree;--showed me a little fer-de-lance, freshly killed by one of his field hands; and a field lizard (_zanoli tè_ in creole), not green like the lizards which haunt the roofs of St. Pierre, but of a beautiful brown bronze, with shifting tints; and eggs of the _zanoli_, little soft oval things from which the young lizards will perhaps run out alive as fast as you open the shells; and the _matoutou falaise_, or spider of the cliffs, of two varieties, red or almost black when adult, and bluish silvery tint when young,--less in size than the tarantula, but equally hairy and venomous; and the _crabe-c'est-ma-faute_ (the "Through-my-fault Crab"), having one very small and one very large claw, which latter it carries folded up against its body, so as to have suggested the idea of a penitent striking his bosom, and uttering the sacramental words of the Catholic confession, "Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault."... Indeed I cannot recollect one-half of the queer birds, queer insects, queer reptiles, and queer plants to which my attention was called. But speaking of plants, I was impressed by the profusion of the _zhèbe-moin-misé_--a little sensitive-plant I had rarely observed on the west coast. On the hill-sides of Grande Anse it prevails to such an extent as to give certain slopes its own peculiar greenish-brown color. It has many-branching leaves, only one inch and a half to two inches long, but which recall the form of certain common ferns; these lie almost flat upon the ground. They fold together upward from the central stem at the least touch, and the plant thus makes itself almost imperceptible;--it seems to live so, that you feel guilty of murder if you break off a leaf. It is called _Zhèbe-moin-misé_, or "Plant-did-I-amuse-myself," because it is supposed to tell naughty little children who play truant, or who delay much longer than is necessary in delivering a message, whether they deserve a whipping or not. The guilty child touches the plant, and asks, "_Ess moin amisé moin?_" (Did I amuse myself?); and if the plant instantly shuts its leaves up, that means, "Yes, you did." Of course the leaves invariably close; but I suspect they invariably tell the truth, for all colored children, in Grande Anse at least, are much more inclined to play than work. The kind old planter likewise conducted me over the estate. He took me through the sugar-mill, and showed me, among other more recent inventions, some machinery devised nearly two centuries ago by the ingenious and terrible Père Labat, and still quite serviceable, in spite of all modern improvements in sugar-making;--took me through the _rhummerie_, or distillery, and made me taste some colorless rum which had the aroma and something of the taste of the most delicate gin;--and finally took me into the _cases-à-vent_, or "wind-houses,"--built as places of refuge during hurricanes. Hurricanes are rare, and more rare in this century by far than during the previous one; but this part of the island is particularly exposed to such visitations, and almost every old plantation used to have one or two cases-à-vent. They were always built in a hollow, either natural or artificial, below the land-level,--with walls of rock several feet thick, and very strong doors, but no windows. My host told me about the experiences of his family in some case-à-vent during a hurricane which he recollected. It was found necessary to secure the door within by means of strong ropes; and the mere task of holding it taxed the strength of a dozen powerful men: it would bulge in under the pressure of the awful wind,--swelling like the side of a barrel; and had not its planks been made of a wood tough as hickory, they would have been blown into splinters. I had long desired to examine a plantation drum, and see it played upon under conditions more favorable than the excitement of a holiday _caleinda_ in the villages, where the amusement is too often terminated by a _voum_ (general row) or a _goumage_ (a serious fight);--and when I mentioned this wish to the planter he at once sent word to his commandeur, the best drummer in the settlement, to come up to the house and bring his instrument with him. I was thus enabled to make the observations necessary, and also to take an instantaneous photograph of the drummer in the very act of playing. The old African dances, the _caleinda_ and the _bélé_ (which latter is accompanied by chanted improvisation) are danced on Sundays to the sound of the drum on almost every plantation in the island. The drum, indeed, is an instrument to which the country-folk are so much attached that they swear by it,--_Tambou!_ being the oath uttered upon all ordinary occasions of surprise or vexation. But the instrument is quite as often called _ka_, because made out of a quarter-barrel, or _quart_,--in the patois "ka." Both ends of the barrel having been removed, a wet hide, well wrapped about a couple of hoops, is driven on, and in drying the stretched skin obtains still further tension. The other end of the ka is always left open. Across the face of the skin a string is tightly stretched, to which are attached, at intervals of about an inch apart, very short thin fragments of bamboo or cut feather stems. These lend a certain vibration to the tones. In the time of Père Labat the negro drums had a somewhat different form. There were then two kinds of drums--a big tamtam and a little one, which used to be played together. Both consisted of skins tightly stretched over one end of a wooden cylinder, or a section of hollow tree trunk. The larger was from three to four feet long with a diameter of fifteen to sixteen inches; the smaller, called _baboula_, [5] was of the same length, but only eight or nine inches in diameter. Père Labat also speaks, in his West Indian travels, of another musical instrument, very popular among the Martinique slaves of his time--"a sort of guitar" made out of a half-calabash or _couï_, covered with some kind of skin. It had four strings of silk or catgut, and a very long neck. The tradition or this African instrument is said to survive in the modern "_banza_" (_banza nèg Guinée_). The skilful player (_bel tambouyé_) straddles his ka stripped to the waist, and plays upon it with the finger-tips of both hands simultaneously,--taking care that the vibrating string occupies a horizontal position. Occasionally the heel of the naked foot is pressed lightly or vigorously against the skin, so as to produce changes of tone. This is called "giving heel" to the drum--_baill y talon_. Meanwhile a boy keeps striking the drum at the uncovered end with a stick, so as to produce a dry clattering accompaniment. The sound of the drum itself, well played, has a wild power that makes and masters all the excitement of the dance--a complicated double roll, with a peculiar billowy rising and falling. The creole onomatopes, _b'lip-b'lib-b'lib-b'lip_, do not fully render the roll;--for each _b'lip_ or _b'lib_ stands really for a series of sounds too rapidly filliped out to be imitated by articulate speech. The tapping of a ka can be heard at surprising distances; and experienced players often play for hours at a time without exhibiting wearisomeness, or in the least diminishing the volume of sound produced. It seems there are many ways of playing--different measures familiar to all these colored people, but not easily distinguished by anybody else; and there are great matches sometimes between celebrated _tambouyé_. The same _commandè_ whose portrait I took while playing told me that he once figured in a contest of this kind, his rival being a drummer from the neighboring burgh of Marigot.... "_Aïe, aïe, yaïe! mon chè!--y fai tambou-à pàlé!_" said the commandè, describing the execution of his antagonist;--"my dear, he just made that drum talk! I thought I was going to be beaten for sure; I was trembling all the time--_aïe, aïe, yaïe!_ Then he got off that ka, mounted it; I thought a moment; then I struck up the 'River-of-the-Lizard,'--_mais, mon chè, yon larivie-Léza toutt pi!_--such a River-of-the-Lizard, ah! just perfectly pure! I gave heel to that ka; I worried that ka;--I made it mad--I made it crazy;--I made it talk;--I won!" During some dances a sort of chant accompanies the music--a long sonorous cry, uttered at intervals of seven eight seconds, which perfectly times a particular measure in the drum roll. It may be the burden of a song: a mere improvisation: "Oh! yoïe-yoïe!" (Drum roll.) "Oh! missié-à!" (Drum roll.) "Y bel tambouyé!" (Drum roll.) "Aie, ya, yaie!" (Drum roll.) "Joli tambouyé!" (Drum roll.) "Chauffé tambou-à!" (Drum roll.) "Géné tambou-à!" (Drum roll.) "Crazé tambou-à!" etc., etc. ... The _crieur_, or chanter, is also the leader of the dance. The caleinda is danced by men only, all stripped to the waist, and twirling heavy sticks in a mock fight, Sometimes, however--especially at the great village gatherings, when the blood becomes oyerheated by tafia--the mock fight may become a real one; and then even cutlasses are brought into play. But in the old days, those improvisations which gave one form of dance its name, _bélé_ (from the French _bel air_), were often remarkable rhymeless poems, uttered with natural simple emotion, and full of picturesque imagery. I cite part of one, taken down from the dictation of a common field-hand near Fort-de-France. I offer a few lines of the creole first, to indicate the form of the improvisation. There is a dancing pause at the end of each line during the performance: Toutt fois lanmou vini lacase moin Pou pàlé moin, moin ka reponne: "Khé moin deja placé," Moin ka crié, "Secou! les voisinages!" Moin ka crié, "Secou! la gàde royale!" Moin ka crié, "Secou! la gendàmerie! Lanmou pouend yon poignâ pou poignadé moin!" The best part of the composition, which is quite long, might be rendered as follows: Each time that Love comes to my cabin To speak to me of love I make answer, "My heart is already placed," I cry out, "Help, neighbors! help!" I cry out, "Help, _la Garde Royale!_" I cry out, "Help, help, gendarmes! Love takes a poniard to stab me; How can Love have a heart so hard To thus rob me of my health!" When the officer of police comes to me To hear me tell him the truth, To have him arrest my Love;-- When I see the Garde Royale Coming to arrest my sweet heart, I fall down at the feet of the Garde Royale,-- I pray for mercy and forgiveness. "Arrest me instead, but let my dear Love go!" How, alas! with this tender heart of mine, Can I bear to see such an arrest made! No, no! I would rather die! Dost not remember, when our pillows lay close together, How we told each to the other all that our hearts thought?... etc. [Illustration: MANNER OF PLAYING THE KA] The stars were all out when I bid my host good-bye;--he sent his lack servant along with me to carry a lantern and keep a sharp watch for snakes along the mountain road. IX. ... Assuredly the city of St. Pierre never could have seemed more quaintly beautiful than as I saw it on the evening of my return, while the shadows were reaching their longest, and sea and sky were turning lilac. Palm-heads were trembling and masts swaying slowly against an enormous orange sunset,--yet the beauty of the sight did not touch me! The deep level and luminous flood of the bay seemed to me for the first time a dead water;--I found myself wondering whether it could form a part of that living tide by which I had been dwelling, full of foam-lightnings and perpetual thunder. I wondered whether the air about me--heavy and hot and full of faint leafy smells--could ever have been touched by the vast pure sweet breath of the wind from the sunrising. And I became conscious of a profound, unreasoning, absurd regret for the somnolent little black village of that bare east coast,--where there are no woods, no ships, no sunsets,...only the ocean roaring forever over its beach of black sand. CHAPTER III. --UN REVENANT I. He who first gave to Martinique its poetical name, _Le Pays des Revenants_, thought of his wonderful island only as "The Country of Comers-back," where Nature's unspeakable spell bewitches wandering souls like the caress of a Circe,--never as the Land of Ghosts. Yet either translation of the name holds equal truth: a land of ghosts it is, this marvellous Martinique! Almost every plantation has its familiar spirits,--its phantoms: some may be unknown beyond the particular district in which fancy first gave them being;--but some belong to popular song and story,--to the imaginative life of the whole people. Almost every promontory and peak, every village and valley along the coast, has its special folk-lore, its particular tradition. The legend of Thomasseau of Perinnelle, whose body was taken out of the coffin and carried away by the devil through a certain window of the plantation-house, which cannot be closed up by human power;--the Demarche legend of the spectral horseman who rides up the hill on bright hot days to seek a friend buried more than a hundred years ago;--the legend of the _Habitation Dillon_, whose proprietor was one night mysteriously summoned from a banquet to disappear forever;--the legend of l'Abbé Piot, who cursed the sea with the curse of perpetual unrest;--the legend of Aimeé Derivry of Robert, captured by Barbary pirates, and sold to become a Sultana-Validé-(she never existed, though you can find an alleged portrait in M. Sidney Daney's history of Martinique): these and many similar tales might be told to you even on a journey from St. Pierre to Fort-de-France, or from Lamentin to La Trinité, according as a rising of some peak into view, or the sudden opening of an _anse_ before the vessel's approach, recalls them to a creole companion. And new legends are even now being made; for in this remote colony, to which white immigration has long ceased,--a country so mountainous that people are born (and buried) in the same valley without ever seeing towns but a few hours' journey beyond their native hills, and that distinct racial types are forming within three leagues of each other,--the memory of an event or of a name which has had influence enough to send one echo through all the forty-nine miles of peaks and craters is apt to create legend within a single generation. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, is popular imagination more oddly naive and superstitious; nowhere are facts more readily exaggerated or distorted into unrecognizability; and the forms of any legend thus originated become furthermore specialized in each separate locality where it obtains a habitat. On tracing back such a legend or tradition to its primal source, one feels amazed at the variety of the metamorphoses which the simplest fact may rapidly assume in the childish fancy of this people. I was first incited to make an effort in this direction by hearing the remarkable story of "Missié Bon." No legendary expression is more wide-spread throughout the country than _temps coudvent Missié Bon_ (in the time of the big wind of Monsieur Bon). Whenever a hurricane threatens, you will hear colored folks expressing the hope that it may not be like the _coudvent Missié Bon_. And some years ago, in all the creole police-courts, old colored witnesses who could not tell their age would invariably try to give the magistrate some idea of it by referring to the never-to-be-forgotten _temps coudvent Missié Bon_. ... "_Temps coudvent Missié Bon, moin té ka tété encò_" (I was a child at the breast in the time of the big wind of Missié Bon); or "_Temps coudvent Missié Bon, moin té toutt piti manmaill,--moin ka souvini y pouend caiie manman moin pòté allé._" (I was a very, very little child in the time of the big wind of Missié Bon,--but I remember it blew mamma's cabin away.) The magistrates of those days knew the exact date of the _coudvent_. But all could learn about Missié Bon among the country-folk was this: Missié Bon used to be a great slave-owner and a cruel master. He was a very wicked man. And he treated his slaves so terribly that at last the Good-God (_Bon-Dié_) one day sent a great wind which blew away Missié Bon and Missié Bon's house and everybody in it, so that nothing was ever heard of them again. It was not without considerable research that I suceeded at last in finding some one able to give me the true facts in the case of Monsieur Bon. My informant was a charming old gentleman, who represents a New York company in the city of St. Pierre, and who takes more interest in the history of his native island than creoles usually do. He laughed at the legend I had found, but informed me that I could trace it, with slight variations, through nearly every canton of Martinique. "And now" he continued "I can tell you the real history of 'Missié Bon'--for he was an old friend of my grandfather; and my grandfather related it to me. "It may have been in 1809--I can give you the exact date by reference to some old papers if necessary--Monsieur Bon was Collector of Customs at St. Pierre: and my grandfather was doing business in the Grande Rue. A certain captain, whose vessel had been consigned to my grandfather, invited him and the collector to breakfast in his cabin. My grandfather was so busy he could not accept the invitation;--but Monsieur Bon went with the captain on board the bark." ... "It was a morning like this; the sea was just as blue and the sky as clear. All of a sudden, while they were at breakfast, the sea began to break heavily without a wind, and clouds came up, with every sign of a hurricane. The captain was obliged to sacrifice his anchor; there was no time to land his guest: he hoisted a little jib and top-gallant, and made for open water, taking Monsieur Bon with him. Then the hurricane came; and from that day to this nothing has ever been heard of the bark nor of the captain nor of Monsieur Bon." [6] "But did Monsieur Bon ever do anything to deserve the reputation he has left among the people?" I asked. "_Ah! le pauvre vieux corps_!... A kind old soul who never uttered a harsh word to human being;--timid,--good-natured,--old-fashioned even for those old-fashioned days.... Never had a slave in his life!" II. The legend of "Missié Bon" had prepared me to hear without surprise the details of a still more singular tradition,--that of Father Labat.... I was returning from a mountain ramble with my guide, by way of the Ajoupa-Bouillon road;--the sun had gone down; there remained only a blood-red glow in the west, against which the silhouettes of the hills took a velvety blackness indescribably soft; the stars were beginning to twinkle out everywhere through the violet. Suddenly I noticed on the flank of a neighboring morne--which I remembered by day as an apparently uninhabitable wilderness of bamboos, tree-ferns, and balisiers--a swiftly moving point of yellow light. My guide had observed it simultaneously;--he crossed himself, and exclaimed: "_Moin ka couè c'est fanal Pè Labatt!_" (I believe it is the lantern of Perè Labat.) "Does he live there?" I innocently inquired. "Live there?--why he has been dead hundreds of years!... _Ouill!_ you never heard of Pè Labatt?"... "Not the same who wrote a book about Martinique?" "Yes,--himself.... They say he comes back at night. Ask mother about him;--she knows."... ...I questioned old Théréza as soon as we reached home; and she told me all she knew about "Pè Labatt." I found that the father had left a reputation far more wide-spread than the recollection of "Missié Bon,"--that his memory had created, in fact, the most impressive legend in all Martinique folk-lore. "Whether you really saw Pè Labatt's lantern," said old Thereza, "I do not know;--there are a great many queer lights to be seen after nightfall among these mornes. Some are zombi-fires; and some are lanterns carried by living men; and some are lights burning in ajoupas so high up that you can only see a gleam coming through the trees now and then. It is not everybody who sees the lantern of Pè Labatt; and it is not good-luck to see it. "Pè Labatt was a priest who lived here hundreds of years ago; and he wrote a book about what he saw. He was the first person to introduce slavery into Martinique; and it is thought that is why he comes back at night. It is his penance for having established slavery here. "They used to say, before 1848, that when slavery should be abolished, Pè Labatt's light would not be seen any more. But I can remember very well when slavery was abolished; and I saw the light many a time after. It used to move up the Morne d'Orange every clear night;--I could see it very well from my window when I lived in St. Pierre. You knew it was Pè Labatt, because the light passed up places where no man could walk. But since the statue of Notre Dame de la Garde was placed on the Morne d'Orange, people tell me that the light is not seen there any more. "But it is seen elsewhere; and it is not good-luck to see it. Everybody is afraid of seeing it.... And mothers tell their children, when the little ones are naughty: '_Mi! moin ké fai Pè Labatt vini pouend ou,--oui!_' (I will make Pè Labatt come and take you away.)".... What old Théréza stated regarding the establishment of slavery in Martinique by Père Labat, I knew required no investigation,--inasmuch as slavery was a flourishing institution in the time of Père Dutertre, another Dominican missionary and historian, who wrote his book,--a queer book in old French, [7] --before Labat was born. But it did not take me long to find out that such was the general belief about Père Labat's sin and penance, and to ascertain that his name is indeed used to frighten naughty children. _Eh! ti manmaille-là, moin ké fai Pè Labatt vini pouend ou!_--is an exclamation often heard in the vicinity of ajoupas just about the hour when all found a good little children ought to be in bed and asleep. ... The first variation of the legend I heard was on a plantation in the neighborhood of Ajoupa-Bouillon. There I was informed that Père Labat had come to his death by the bite of a snake,--the hugest snake that ever was seen in Martinique. Perè Labat had believed it possible to exterminate the fer-de-lance, and had adopted extraordinary measures for its destruction. On receiving his death-wound he exclaimed, "_C'est pè toutt sépent qui té ka mòdé moin_" (It is the Father of all Snakes that has bitten me); and he vowed that he would come back to destroy the brood, and would haunt the island until there should be not one snake left. And the light that moves about the peaks at night is the lantern of Père Labat still hunting for snakes. "_Ou pa pè suive ti limié-là piess!_" continued my informant. "You cannot follow that little light at all;--when you first see it, it is perhaps only a kilometre away; the next moment it is two, three, or four kilometres away." I was also told that the light is frequently seen near Grande Anse, on the other side of the island,--and on the heights of La Caravelle, the long fantastic promontory that reaches three leagues into the sea south of the harbor of La Trinité. [8] And on my return to St. Pierre I found a totally different version of the legend;--my informant being one Manm-Robert, a kind old soul who kept a little _boutique-lapacotte_ (a little booth where cooked food is sold) near the precipitous Street of the Friendships. ... "_Ah! Pè Labatt, oui!_" she exclaimed, at my first question,--"Pè Labatt was a good priest who lived here very long ago. And they did him a great wrong here;--they gave him a wicked _coup d'langue_ (tongue wound); and the hurt given by an evil tongue is worse than a serpent's bite. They lied about him; they slandered him until they got him sent away from the country. But before the Government 'embarked' him, when he got to that quay, he took off his shoe and he shook the dust of his shoe upon that quay, and he said: 'I curse you, 0 Martinique!--I curse you! There will be food for nothing, and your people will not even be able to buy it! There will be clothing material for nothing, and your people will not be able to get so much as one dress! And the children will beat their mothers!... You banish me;--but I will come back again.'" [9] "And then what happened, Manm-Robert?" "_Eh! fouinq! chè_, all that Pè Labatt said has come true. There is food for almost nothing, and people are starving here in St. Pierre; there is clothing for almost nothing, and poor girls cannot earn enough to buy a dress. The pretty printed calicoes (_indiennes_) that used to be two francs and a half the metre, now sell at twelve sous the metre; but nobody has any money. And if you read our papers,--_Les Colonies, La Defense Coloniale_,--you will find that there are sons wicked enough to beat their mothers: _oui! yche ka batt manman!_ It is the malediction of Pè Labatt." This was all that Manm-Robert could tell me. Who had related the story to her? Her mother. Whence had her mother obtained it? From her grandmother.... Subsequently I found many persons to confirm the tradition of the curse,--precisely as Manm-Robert had related it. Only a brief while after this little interview I was invited to pass an afternoon at the home of a gentleman residing upon the Morne d' Orange,--the locality supposed to be especially haunted by Père Labat. The house of Monsieur M-- stands on the side of the hill, fully five hundred feet up, and in a grove of trees: an antiquated dwelling, with foundations massive as the walls of a fortress, and huge broad balconies of stone. From one of these balconies there is a view of the city, the harbor and Pelée, which I believe even those who have seen Naples would confess to be one of the fairest sights in the world.... Towards evening I obtained a chance to ask my kind host some questions about the legend of his neighborhood. ... "Ever since I was a child," observed Monsieur M--, "I heard it said that Père Labat haunted this mountain, and I often saw what was alleged to be his light. It looked very much like a lantern swinging in the hand of some one climbing the hill. A queer fact was that it used to come from the direction of Carbet, skirt the Morne d'Orange a few hundred feet above the road, and then move up the face of what seemed a sheer precipice. Of course somebody carried that light,--probably a negro; and perhaps the cliff is not so inaccessible as it looks: still, we could never discover who the individual was, nor could we imagine what his purpose might have been.... But the light has not been seen here now for years." III. And who was Père Labat,--this strange priest whose memory, weirdly disguised by legend, thus lingers in the oral literature of the colored people? Various encyclopedias answer the question, but far less fully and less interestingly than Dr. Rufz, the Martinique historian, whose article upon him in the _Etudes Statistiques et Historiques_ has that charm of sympathetic comprehension by which a master-biographer sometimes reveals himself a sort of necromancer,--making us feel a vanished personality with the power of a living presence. Yet even the colorless data given by dictionaries of biography should suffice to convince most readers that Jean-Baptiste Labat must be ranked among the extraordinary men of his century. Nearly two hundred years ago--24th August, 1693--a traveller wearing the white habit of the Dominican order, partly covered by a black camlet overcoat, entered the city of Rochelle. He was very tall and robust, with one of those faces, at once grave and keen, which bespeak great energy and quick discernment. This was the Père Labat, a native of Paris, then in his thirtieth year. Half priest, half layman, one might have been tempted to surmise from his attire; and such a judgement would not have been unjust. Labat's character was too large for his calling,--expanded naturally beyond the fixed limits of the ecclesiastical life; and throughout the whole active part of his strange career we find in him this dual character of layman and monk. He had come to Rochelle to take passage for Martinique. Previously he had been professor of philosophy and mathematics at Nancy. While watching a sunset one evening from the window of his study, some one placed in his hands a circular issued by the Dominicans of the French West Indies, calling for volunteers. Death had made many wide gaps in their ranks; and various misfortunes had reduced their finances to such an extent that ruin threatened all their West Indian establishments. Labat, with the quick decision of a mind suffering from the restraints of a life too narrow for it, had at once resigned his professorship, and engaged himself for the missions. ... In those days, communication with the West Indies was slow, irregular, and difficult. Labat had to wait at Rochelle six whole months for a ship. In the convent at Rochelle, where he stayed, there were others waiting for the same chance,--including several Jesuits and Capuchins as well as Dominicans. These unanimously elected him their leader,--a significant fact considering the mutual jealousy of the various religious orders of that period, There was something in the energy and frankness of Labat's character which seems to have naturally gained him the confidence and ready submission of others. ... They sailed in November; and Labat still found himself in the position of a chief on board. His account of the voyage is amusing;--in almost everything except practical navigation, he would appear to have regulated the life of passengers and crew. He taught the captain mathematics; and invented amusements of all kinds to relieve the monotony of a two months' voyage. ... As the ship approached Martinique from the north, Labat first beheld the very grimmest part of the lofty coast,--the region of Macouba; and the impression it made upon him was not pleasing. "The island," he writes, "appeared to me all one frightful mountain, broken everywhere by precipices: nothing about it pleased me except the verdure which everywhere met the eye, and which seemed to me both novel and agreeable, considering the time of the year." Almost immediately after his arrival he was sent by the Superior of the convent to Macouba, for acclimation; Macouba then being considered the healthiest part of the island. Whoever makes the journey on horseback thither from St. Pierre to-day can testify to the exactitude of Labat's delightful narrative of the trip. So little has that part of the island changed since two centuries that scarcely a line of the father's description would need correction to adopt it bodily for an account of a ride to Macouba in 1889. At Macouba everybody welcomes him, pets him,--finally becomes enthusiastic about him. He fascinates and dominates the little community almost at first sight. "There is an inexpressible charm," says Rufz,--commenting upon this portion of Labat's narrative,--"in the novelty of relations between men: no one has yet been offended, no envy has yet been excited;--it is scarcely possible even to guess whence that ill-will you must sooner or later provoke is going to come from;--there are no rivals;--there are no enemies. You are everybody's friend; and many are hoping you will continue to be only theirs."... Labat knew how to take legitimate advantage of this good-will;--he persuaded his admirers to rebuild the church at Macouba, according to designs made by himself. At Macouba, however, he was not permitted to sojourn as long as the good people of the little burgh would have deemed even reasonable: he had shown certain aptitudes which made his presence more than desirable at Saint-Jacques, the great plantation of the order on the Capesterre, or Windward coast. It was in debt for 700,000 pounds of sugar,--an appalling condition in those days,--and seemed doomed to get more heavily in debt every successive season. Labat inspected everything, and set to work for the plantation, not merely as general director, but as engineer, architect, machinist, inventor. He did really wonderful things. You can see them for yourself if you ever go to Martinique; for the old Dominican plantation-now Government property, and leased at an annual rent of 50,000 francs--remains one of the most valuable in the colonies because of Labat's work upon it. The watercourses directed by him still excite the admiration of modern professors of hydraulics; the mills he built or invented are still good;--the treatise he wrote on sugar-making remained for a hundred and fifty years the best of its kind, and the manual of French planters. In less than two years Labat had not only rescued the plantation from bankruptcy, but had made it rich; and if the monks deemed him veritably inspired, the test of time throws no ridicule on their astonishment at the capacities of the man.... Even now the advice he formulated as far back as 1720--about secondary cultures,--about manufactories to establish,--about imports, exports, and special commercial methods--has lost little of its value. Such talents could not fail to excite wide-spread admiration,--nor to win for him a reputation in the colonies beyond precedent. He was wanted everywhere.... Auger, the Governor of Guadeloupe, sent for him to help the colonists in fortifying and defending the island against the English; and we find the missionary quite as much at home in this new role-building bastions, scarps, counterterscarps, ravelins, etc.--as he seemed to be upon the plantation of Saint-Jacques. We find him even taking part in an engagement;--himself conducting an artillery duel,--loading, pointing, and firing no less than twelve times after the other French gunners had been killed or driven from their posts. After a tremendous English volley, one of the enemy cries out to him in French: "White Father, have they told?" (_Père Blanc, ont-ils porté?_) He replies only after returning the fire with, a better-directed aim, and then repeats the mocking question: "Have they told?" "Yes, they have," confesses the Englishman, in surprised dismay; "but we will pay you back for that!"... ... Returning to Martinique with new titles to distinction, Labat was made Superior of the order in that island, and likewise Vicar-Apostolic. After building the Convent of the Mouillage, at St. Pierre, and many other edifices, he undertook that series of voyages in the interests of the Dominicans whereof the narration fills six ample volumes. As a traveller Père Labat has had few rivals in his own field;--no one, indeed, seems to have been able to repeat some of his feats. All the French and several of the English colonies were not merely visited by him, but were studied in their every geographical detail. Travel in the West Indies is difficult to a degree of which strangers have little idea; but in the time of Père Labat there were few roads,--and a far greater variety of obstacles. I do not believe there are half a dozen whites in Martinique who thoroughly know their own island,--who have even travelled upon all its roads; but Labat knew it as he knew the palm of his hand, and travelled where roads had never been made. Equally well he knew Guadeloupe and other islands; and he learned all that it was possible to learn in those years about the productions and resources of the other colonies. He travelled with the fearlessness and examined with the thoroughness of a Humboldt,--so far as his limited science permitted: had he possessed the knowledge of modern naturalists and geologists he would probably have left little for others to discover after him. Even at the present time West Indian travellers are glad to consult him for information. These duties involved prodigious physical and mental exertion, in a climate deadly to Europeans. They also involved much voyaging in waters haunted by filibusters and buccaneers. But nothing appears to daunt Labat. As for the filibusters, he becomes their comrade and personal friend;--he even becomes their chaplain, and does not scruple to make excursions with them. He figures in several sea-fights;--on one occasion he aids in the capture of two English vessels,--and then occupies himself in making the prisoners, among whom are several ladies, enjoy the event like a holiday. On another voyage Labat's vessel is captured by a Spanish ship. At one moment sabres are raised above his head, and loaded muskets levelled at his breast;--the next, every Spaniard is on his knees, appalled by a cross that Labat holds before the eyes of the captors,--the cross worn by officers of the Inquisition,--the terrible symbol of the Holy Office. "It did not belong to me," he says, "but to one of our brethren who had left it by accident among my effects." He seems always prepared in some way to meet any possible emergency. No humble and timid monk this: he has the frame and temper of those medieval abbots who could don with equal indifference the helmet or the cowl. He is apparently even more of a soldier than a priest. When English corsairs attempt a descent on the Martinique coast at Sainte-Marie they find Père Labat waiting for them with all the negroes of the Saint-Jacques plantation, to drive them back to their ships. For other dangers he exhibits absolute unconcern. He studies the phenomena of hurricanes with almost pleasurable interest, while his comrades on the ship abandon hope. When seized with yellow-fever, then known as the Siamese Sickness (_mal de Siam_), he refuses to stay in bed the prescribed time, and rises to say his mass. He faints at the altar; yet a few days later we hear of him on horseback again, travelling over the mountains in the worst and hottest season of the year.... ... Labat was thirty years old when he went to the Antilles;--he was only forty-two when his work was done. In less than twelve years he made his order the most powerful and wealthy of any in the West Indies,--lifted their property out of bankruptcy to rebuild it upon a foundation of extraordinary prosperity. As Rufz observes without exaggeration, the career of Père Labat in the Antilles seems to more than realize the antique legend of the labors of Hercules. Whithersoever he went,--except in the English colonies,--his passage was memorialized by the rising of churches, convents, and schools,--as well as mills, forts, and refineries. Even cities claim him as their founder. The solidity of his architectural creations is no less remarkable than their excellence of design;--much of what he erected still remains; what has vanished was removed by human agency, and not by decay; and when the old Dominican church at St. Pierre had to be pulled down to make room for a larger edifice, the workmen complained that the stones could not be separated,--that the walls seemed single masses of rock. There can be no doubt, moreover, that he largely influenced the life of the colonies during those years, and expanded their industrial and commercial capacities. He was sent on a mission to Rome after these things had been done, and never returned from Europe. There he travelled more or less in after-years; but finally settled at Paris, where he prepared and published the voluminous narrative of his own voyages, and other curious books;--manifesting as a writer the same tireless energy he had shown in so many other capacities. He does not, however, appear to have been happy. Again and again he prayed to be sent back to his beloved Antilles, and for some unknown cause the prayer was always refused. To such a character, the restraint of the cloister must have proved a slow agony; but he had to endure it for many long years. He died at Paris in 1738, aged seventy-five. ... It was inevitable that such a man should make bitter enemies: his preferences, his position, his activity, his business shrewdness, his necessary self-assertion, yet must have created secret hate and jealousy even when open malevolence might not dare to show itself. And to the these natural results of personal antagonism or opposition were afterwards superadded various resentments--irrational, perhaps, but extremely violent,--caused by the father's cynical frankness as a writer. He spoke freely about the family origin and personal failings of various colonists considered high personages in their own small world; and to this day his book has an evil reputation undeserved in those old creole communities, but where any public mention of a family scandal is never just forgiven or forgotten.... But probably even before his work appeared it had been secretly resolved that he should never be permitted to return to Martinique or Guadeloupe after his European mission. The exact purpose of the Government in this policy remains a mystery,--whatever ingenious writers may have alleged to the contrary. We only know that M. Adrien Dessalles,--the trustworthy historian of Martinique,--while searching among the old _Archives de la Marine_, found there a ministerial letter to the Intendant de Vaucresson in which this statement occurs;-- ... "Le Père Labat shall never be suffered to return to the colonies, whatever efforts he may make to obtain permission." IV. One rises from the perusal of the "Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l'Amêrique" with a feeling approaching regret; for although the six pursy little volumes composing it--full of quaint drawings, plans, and odd attempts at topographical maps--reveal a prolix writer, Père Labat is always able to interest. He reminds you of one of those slow, precise, old-fashioned conversationalists who measure the weight of every word and never leave anything to the imagination of the audience, yet who invariably reward the patience of their listeners sooner or later by reflections of surprising profundity or theories of a totally novel description. But what particularly impresses the reader of these volumes is not so much the recital of singular incidents and facts as the revelation of the author's personality. Reading him, you divine a character of enormous force,--gifted but unevenly balanced; singularly shrewd in worldly affairs, and surprisingly credulous in other respects; superstitious and yet cynical; unsympathetic by his positivism, but agreeable through natural desire to give pleasure; just by nature, yet capable of merciless severity; profoundly devout, but withal tolerant for his calling and his time. He is sufficiently free from petty bigotry to make fun of the scruples of his brethren in the matter of employing heretics; and his account of the manner in which he secured the services of a first-class refiner for the Martinique plantation at the Fond Saint-Jacques is not the least amusing page in the book. He writes: "The religious who had been appointed Superior in Guadeloupe wrote me that he would find it difficult to employ this refiner because the man was a Lutheran. This scruple gave me pleasure, as I had long wanted to have have him upon our plantation in the Fond Saint-Jacques, but did not know how I would be able to manage it! I wrote to the Superior at once that all he had to do was to send the man to me, because it was a matter of indifference to me whether the sugar he might make were Catholic or Lutheran sugar, provided it were very white." [10] He displays equal frankness in confessing an error or a discomfiture. He acknowledges that while Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, he used to teach that there were no tides in the tropics; and in a discussion as to whether the _diablotin_ (a now almost extinct species of West Indian nocturnal bird) were fish flesh, and might or might not be eaten in Lent, he tells us that he was fairly worsted,--(although he could cite the celebrated myth of the "barnacle-geese" as a "fact" in justification of one's right to doubt the nature of diablotins). One has reason to suspect that Père Labat, notwithstanding his references to the decision of the Church that diablotins were not birds, felt quite well assured within himself that they were. There is a sly humor in his story of these controversies, which would appear to imply that while well pleased at the decision referred to, he knew all about diablotins. Moreover, the father betrays certain tendencies to gormandize not altogether in harmony with the profession of an ascetic.... There were parrots in nearly all of the French Antilles in those days [11] and Père Labat does not attempt to conceal his fondness for cooked parrots. (He does not appear to have cared much for them as pets: if they could not talk well, he condemned them forthwith to the pot.) "They all live upon fruits and seeds," he writes, "and their flesh contracts the odor and color of that particular fruit or seed they feed upon. They become exceedingly fat in the season when the guavas are ripe; and when they eat the seeds of the _Bois d'Inde_ they have an odor of nutmeg and cloves which is delightful (_une odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_)." He recommends four superior ways of preparing them, as well as other fowls, for the table, of which the first and the best way is "to pluck them alive, then to make them swallow vinegar, and then to strangle them while they have the vinegar still in their throats by twisting their necks"; and the fourth way is "to skin them alive" (_de les écorcher tout en vie_).... "It is certain," he continues, "that these ways are excellent, and that fowls that have to be cooked in a hurry thereby obtain an admirable tenderness (_une tendreté admirable_)." Then he makes a brief apology to his readers, not for the inhumanity of his recipes, but for a display of culinary knowledge scarcely becoming a monk, and acquired only through those peculiar necessities which colonial life in the tropics imposed upon all alike. The touch of cruelty here revealed produces an impression which there is little in the entire work capable of modifying. Labat seems to have possessed but a very small quantity of altruism; his cynicism on the subject of animal suffering is not offset by any visible sympathy with human pain;--he never compassionates: you may seek in vain through all his pages for one gleam of the goodness of gentle Père Du Tertre, who, filled with intense pity for the condition of the blacks, prays masters to be merciful and just to their slaves for the love of God. Labat suggests, on the other hand, that slavery is a good means of redeeming negroes from superstition and saving their souls from hell: he selects and purchases them himself for the Saint-Jacques plantation, never makes a mistake or a bad bargain, and never appears to feel a particle of commiseration for their lot. In fact, the emotional feeling displayed by Père Du Tertre (whom he mocks slyly betimes) must have seemed to him rather condemnable than praiseworthy; for Labat regarded the negro as a natural child of the devil,--a born sorcerer,--an evil being wielding occult power. Perhaps the chapters on negro sorcery are the most astonishing in the book, displaying on the part of this otherwise hard and practical nature a credulity almost without limit. After having related how he had a certain negro sent out of the country "who predicted the arrival of vessels and other things to come,--in so far, at least, as the devil himself was able to know and reveal these matters to him," he plainly states his own belief in magic as follows: "I know there are many people who consider as pure imagination, and as silly stories, or positive false-hoods, all that is related about sorcerers and their compacts with the devil. I was myself for a long time of this opinion. Moreover, I am aware that what is said on this subject is frequently exaggerated; but I am now convinced it must be acknowledged that all which has been related is not entirely false, although perhaps it may not be entirely true."... Therewith he begins to relate stories upon what may have seemed unimpeachable authority in those days. The first incident narrated took place, he assures us, in the Martinique Dominican convent, shortly before his arrival in the colony. One of the fathers, Père Fraise, had had brought to Martinique, "from the kingdom of Juda (?) in Guinea," a little negro about nine or ten years old. Not long afterwards there was a serious drought, and the monks prayed vainly for rain. Then the negro child, who had begun to understand and speak a little French, told his masters that he was a Rain-maker, that he could obtain them all the rain they wanted. "This proposition," says Père Labat, "greatly astonished the fathers: they consulted together, and at last, curiosity overcoming reason, they gave their consent that this unbaptized child should make some rain fall on their garden." The unbaptized child asked them if they wanted "a big or a little rain"; they answered that a moderate rain would satisfy them. Thereupon the little negro got three oranges, and placed them on the ground in a line at a short distance from one another, and bowed down before each of them in turn, muttering words in an unknown tongue. Then he got three small orange-branches, stuck a branch in each orange, and repeated his prostrations and mutterings;--after which he took one of the branches, stood up, and watched the horizon. A small cloud appeared, and he pointed the branch at it. It approached swiftly, rested above the garden, and sent down a copious shower of rain. Then the boy made a hole in the ground, and buried the oranges and the branches. The fathers were amazed to find that not a single drop of rain had fallen outside their garden. They asked the boy who had taught him this sorcery, and he answered them that among the blacks on board the slave-ship which had brought him over there were some Rain-makers who had taught him. Père Labat declares there is no question as to the truth of the occurrence: he cites the names of Père Fraise, Père Rosié, Père Temple, and Père Bournot,--all members of his own order,--as trust-worthy witnesses of this incident. Père Labat displays equal credulity in his recital of a still more extravagant story told him by Madame la Comtesse du Gênes. M. le Comte du Gênes, husband of the lady in question, and commander of a French squadron, captured the English fort of Gorea in 1696, and made prisoners of all the English slaves in the service of the factory there established. But the vessel on which these were embarked was unable to leave the coast, in spite of a good breeze: she seemed bewitched. Some of the the slaves finally told the captain there was a negress on board who had enchanted the ship, and who had the power to "dry up the hearts" of all who refused to obey her. A number of deaths taking place among the blacks, the captain ordered autopsies made, and it was found that the hearts of the dead negroes were desiccated. The negress was taken on deck, tied to a gun and whipped, but uttered no cry;--the ship's surgeon, angered at her stoicism, took a hand in the punishment, and flogged her "with all his force." Thereupon she told him that inasmuch as he had abused her without reason, his heart also should be "dried up." He died next day; and his heart was found in the condition predicted. All this time the ship could not be made to move in any direction; and the negress told the captain that until he should put her and her companions on shore he would never be able to sail. To convince him of her power she further asked him to place three fresh melons in a chest, to lock the chest and put a guard over it; when she should tell him to unlock it, there would be no melons there. The capttain made the experiment. When the chest was opened, the melons appeared to be there; but on touching them it was found that only the outer rind remained: the interior had been dried up,--like the surgeon's heart. Thereupon the captain put the witch and her friends all ashore, and sailed away without further trouble. Another story of African sorcery for the truth of which Père Labat earnestly vouches is the following: A negro was sentenced to be burned alive for witchcraft at St. Thomas in 1701;--his principal crime was "having made a little figure of baked clay to speak." A certain creole, meeting the negro on his way to the place of execution, jeeringly observed, "Well, you cannot make your little figure talk any more now;--it has been broken." "If the gentleman allow me," replied the prisoner," I will make the cane he carries in his hand speak." The creole's curiosity was strongly aroused: he prevailed upon the guards to halt a few minutes, and permit the prisoner to make the experiment. The negro then took the cane, stuck it into the ground in the middle of the road, whispered something to it, and asked the gentleman what he wished to know. "I, would like to know," answered the latter, "whether the ship has yet sailed from Europe, and when she will arrive." "Put your ear to the head of the cane," said the negro. On doing so the creole distinctly heard a thin voice which informed him that the vessel in question had left a certain French port on such a date; that she would reach St. Thomas within three days; that she had been delayed on her voyage by a storm which had carried away her foretop and her mizzen sail; that she had such and such passengers on board (mentioning the names), all in good health.... After this incident the negro was burned alive; but within three days the vessel arrived in port, and the prediction or divination was found to have been absolutely correct in every particular. ... Père Labat in no way disapproves the atrocious sentence inflicted upon the wretched negro: in his opinion such predictions were made by the power and with the personal aid of the devil; and for those who knowingly maintained relations with the devil, he could not have regarded any punishment too severe. That he could be harsh enough himself is amply shown in various accounts of his own personal experience with alleged sorcerers, and especially in the narration of his dealings with one--apparently a sort of African doctor--who was a slave on a neighboring plantation, but used to visit the Saint-Jacques quarters by stealth to practise his art. One of the slaves of the order, a negress, falling very sick, the wizard was sent for; and he came with all his paraphernalia--little earthen pots and fetiches, etc.--during the night. He began to practise his incantations, without the least suspicion that Père Labat was watching him through a chink; and, after having consulted his fetiches, he told the woman she would die within four days. At this juncture the priest suddenly burst in the door and entered, followed by several powerful slaves. He dashed to pieces the soothsayer's articles, and attempted to reassure the frightened negress, by declaring the prediction a lie inspired by the devil. Then he had the sorcerer stripped and flogged in his presence. "I had him given," he calmly observes, "about (_environ_) three hundred lashes, which flayed him (_l'écorchait_) from his shoulders to his knees. He screamed like a madman. All the negroes trembled, and assured me that the devil would cause my death.... Then I had the wizard put in irons, after having had him well washed with a _pimentade_,--that is to say, with brine in which pimentos and small lemons have been crushed. This causes a horrible pain to those skinned by the whip; but it is a certain remedy against gangrene."... And then he sent the poor wretch back to his master with a note requesting the latter to repeat the punishment,--a demand that seems to have been approved, as the owner of the negro was "a man who feared God." Yet Père Labat is obliged to confess that in spite of all his efforts, the sick negress died on the fourth day,--as the sorcerer had predicted. This fact must have strongly confirmed his belief that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair, and caused him to doubt whether even a flogging of about three hundred lashes, followed by a pimentade, were sufficient chastisement for the miserable black. Perhaps the tradition of this frightful whipping may have had something to do with the terror which still attaches to the name of the Dominican in Martinique. The legal extreme punishment was twenty-nine lashes. Père Labat also avers that in his time the negroes were in the habit of carrying sticks which had the power of imparting to any portion of the human body touched by them a most severe chronic pain. He at first believed, he says, that these pains were merely rheumatic; but after all known remedies for rheumatism had been fruitlessly applied, he became convinced there was something occult and diabolical in the manner of using and preparing these sticks.... A fact worthy of note is that this belief is still prevalent in Martinique! One hardly ever meets in the country a negro who does not carry either a stick or a cutlass, or both. The cutlass is indispensable to those who work in the woods or upon plantations; the stick is carried both as a protection against snakes and as a weapon of offence and defence in village quarrels, for unless a negro be extraordinarily drunk he will not strike his fellow with a cutlass. The sticks are usually made of a strong dense wood: those most sought after of a material termed _moudongue_, [12] almost as tough, but much lighter than, our hickory. On inquiring whether any of the sticks thus carried were held to possess magic powers, I was assured by many country people that there were men who knew a peculiar method of "arranging" sticks so that to touch any person with them even lightly, _and through any thickness of clothing_, would produce terrible and continuous pain. Believing in these things, and withal unable to decide whether the sun revolved about the earth, or the earth about the sun, [13] Père Labat was, nevertheless, no more credulous and no more ignorant than the average missionary of his time: it is only by contrast with his practical perspicacity in other matters, his worldly rationalism and executive shrewdness, that this superstitious naïveté impresses one as odd. And how singular sometimes is the irony of Time! All the wonderful work the Dominican accomplished has been forgotten by the people; while all the witchcrafts that he warred against survive and flourish openly; and his very name is seldom uttered but in connection with superstitions,--has been, in fact, preserved among the blacks by the power of superstition alone, by the belief in zombis and goblins.... "_Mi! ti manmaille-là, moin ké fai Pè Labatt vini pouend ou!_"... V. Few habitants of St. Pierre now remember that the beautiful park behind the cathedral used to be called the Savanna of the White Fathers,--and the long shadowed meadow beside the Roxelane, the Savanna of the Black Fathers: the Jesuits. All the great religious orders have long since disappeared from the colony: their edifices have been either converted to other uses or demolished; their estates have passed into other hands.... Were their labors, then, productive of merely ephemeral results?--was the colossal work of a Père Labat all in vain, so far as the future is concerned? The question is not easily answered; but it is worth considering. Of course the material prosperity which such men toiled to obtain for their order represented nothing more, even to their eyes, than the means of self-maintenance, and the accumulation of force necessary for the future missionary labors of the monastic community. The real ultimate purpose was, not the acquisition of power for the order, but for the Church, of which the orders represented only a portion of the force militant; and this purpose did not fail of accomplishment. The orders passed away only when their labors had been completed,--when Martinique had become (exteriorly, at least) more Catholic than Rome itself,--after the missionaries had done all that religious zeal could do in moulding and remoulding the human material under their control. These men could scarcely have anticipated those social and political changes which the future reserved for the colonies, and which no ecclesiastical sagacity could, in any event, have provided against. It is in the existing religious condition of these communities that one may observe and estimate the character and the probable duration of the real work accomplished by the missions. ... Even after a prolonged residence in Martinique, its visible religious condition continues to impress one as somethmg phenomenal. A stranger, who has no opportunity to penetrate into the home life of the people, will not, perhaps, discern the full extent of the religious sentiment; but, nevertheless, however brief his stay, he will observe enough of the extravagant symbolism of the cult to fill him with surprise. Wherever he may choose to ride or to walk, he is certain to encounter shrines, statues of saints, or immense crucifixes. Should he climb up to the clouds of the peaks, he will find them all along the way;--he will perceive them waiting for him, looming through the mists of the heights; and passing through the loveliest ravines, he will see niches hollowed out in the volcanic rocks, above and below him, or contrived in the trunks of trees bending over precipices, often in places so difficult of access that he wonders how the work could have been accomplished. All this has been done by the various property-owners throughout the country: it is the traditional custom to do it--brings good-luck! After a longer stay in the island, one discovers also that in almost every room of every dwelling--stone residence, wooden cottage, or palm-thatched ajoupa--there is a _chapelle_: that is, a sort of large bracket fastened to the wall, on which crosses or images are placed, with vases of flowers, and lamps or wax-tapers to be burned at night. Sometimes, moreover, statues are placed in windows, or above door-ways;--and all passers-by take off their hats to these. Over the porch of the cottage in a mountain village, where I lived for some weeks, there was an absurd little window contrived,--a sort of purely ornamental dormer,--and in this a Virgin about five inches high had been placed. At a little distance it looked like a toy,--a child's doll forgotten there; and a doll I always supposed it to be, until one day that I saw a long procession of black laborers passing before the house, every, one of whom took off his hat to it.... My bedchamber in the same cottage resembled a religious museum. On the chapelle there were no less than eight Virgins, varying in height from one to sixteen inches,--a St. Joseph,--a St. John,--a crucifix,--and a host of little objects in the shape of hearts or crosses, each having some special religious significance;--while the walls were covered with framed certificates of baptism, "first-communion," confirmation, and other documents commemorating the whole church life of the family for two generations. [Illustration: A WAYSIDE SHRINE, OR CHAPELLE.] ... Certainly the first impression created by this perpetual display of crosses, statues, and miniature chapels is not pleasing,--particularly as the work is often inartistic to a degree bordering upon the grotesque, and nothing resembling art is anywhere visible. Millions of francs must have been consumed in these creations, which have the rudeness of mediaevalism without its emotional sincerity, and which--amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms--jar on the aesthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,--something strangely distorted and transformed, it is true, but recognizably conserved by the Latin race from those antique years when every home had its beloved ghosts, when every wood or hill or spring had its gracious divinity, and the boundaries of all fields were marked and guarded by statues of gods. Instances of iconoclasm are of course highly rare in a country of which no native--rich or poor, white or half-breed--fails to doff his hat before every shrine, cross, or image he may happen to pass. Those merchants of St. Pierre or of Fort-de-France living only a few miles out of the city must certainly perform a vast number of reverences on their way to or from business;--I saw one old gentleman uncover his white head about twenty times in the course of a fifteen minutes' walk. I never heard of but one image-breaker in Martinique; and his act was the result of superstition, not of any hostility to popular faith or custom: it was prompted by the same childish feeling which moves Italian fishermen sometimes to curse St. Antony or to give his image a ducking in bad weather. This Martinique iconoclast was a negro cattle-driver who one day, feeling badly in need of a glass of tafia, perhaps, left the animals intrusted to him in care of a plaster image of the Virgin, with this menace (the phrase is on record):-- "_Moin ka quitté bef-la ba ou pou gàdé ba moin. Quand moin vini, si moin pa trouvé compte-moin, moin ké fouté ou vingt-nèf coudfouètt!_" (I leave these cattle with you to take care of for me. When I come back, if I don't find them all here, I'll give you twenty-nine lashes.) Returning about half an hour later, he was greatly enraged to find his animals scattered in every direction;--and, rushing at the statue, he broke it from the pedestal, flung it upon the ground, and gave it twenty-nine lashes with his bull-whip. For this he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment, with hard labor, for life! In those days there were no colored magistrates;--the judges were all _békés_. "Rather a severe sentence," I remarked to my informant, a planter who conducted me to the scene of the alleged sacrilege. "Severe, yes," he answered;--"and I suppose the act would seem to you more idiotic than criminal. But here, in Martinique, there were large questions involved by such an offence. Relying, as we have always done to some extent, upon religious influence as a factor in the maintenance of social order, the negro's act seemed a dangerous example."... That the Church remains still rich and prosperous in Martinique there can be no question; but whether it continues to wield any powerful influence in the maintenance of social order is more than doubtful. A Polynesian laxity of morals among the black and colored population, and the history of race-hatreds and revolutions inspired by race-hate, would indicate that neither in ethics nor in politics does it possess any preponderant authority. By expelling various religious orders; by establishing lay schools, lycées, and other educational institutions where the teaching is largely characterized by aggressive antagonism to Catholic ideas;--by the removal of crucifixes and images from public buildings, French Radicalism did not inflict any great blow upon Church interests. So far as the white, and, one may say, the wealthy, population is concerned, the Church triumphs in her hostility to the Government schools; and to the same extent she holds an educational monopoly. No white creole would dream of sending his children to a lay school or a lycée--notwithstanding the unquestionable superiority of the educational system in the latter institutions;--and, although obliged, as the chief tax-paying class, to bear the burden of maintaining these establishments, the whites hold them in such horror that the Government professors are socially ostracized. No doubt the prejudice or pride which abhors mixed schools aids the Church in this respect; she herself recognizes race-feeling, keeps her schools unmixed, and even in her convents, it is said, obliges the colored nuns to serve the white! For more than two centuries every white generation has been religiously moulded in the seminaries and convents; and among the native whites one never hears an overt declaration of free-thought opinion. Except among the colored men educated in the Government schools, or their foreign professors, there are no avowed free-thinkers;--and this, not because the creole whites, many of whom have been educated in Paris, are naturally narrow-minded, or incapable of sympathy with the mental expansion of the age, but because the religious question at Martinique has become so intimately complicated with the social and political one, concerning which there can be no compromise whatever, that to divorce the former from the latter is impossible. Roman Catholicism is an element of the cement which holds creole society together; and it is noteworthy that other creeds are not represented. I knew only of one Episcopalian and one Methodist in the island,--and heard a sort of legend about a solitary Jew whose whereabouts I never could discover;--but these were strangers. It was only through the establishment of universal suffrage, which placed the white population at the mercy of its former slaves, that the Roman Church sustained any serious injury. All local positions are filled by blacks or men of color; no white creole can obtain a public office or take part in legislation; and the whole power of the black vote is ungenerously used against the interests of the class thus politically disinherited. The Church suffers in consequence: her power depended upon her intimate union with the wealthy and dominant class; and she will never be forgiven by those now in power for her sympathetic support of that class in other years. Politics yearly intensify this hostility; and as the only hope for the restoration of the whites to power, and of the Church to its old position, lies in the possibility of another empire or a revival of the monarchy, the white creoles and their Church are forced into hostility against republicanism and the republic. And political newspapers continually attack Roman Catholicism,--mock its tenets and teachings,--ridicule its dogmas and ceremonies,--satirize its priests. In the cities and towns the Church indeed appears to retain a large place in the affection of the poorer classes;--her ceremonies are always well attended; money pours into her coffers; and one can still wittness the curious annual procession of the "converted,"--aged women of color and negresses going to communion for the first time, all wearing snow-white turbans in honor of the event. But among the country people, where the dangerous forces of revolution exist, Christian feeling is almost stifled by ghastly beliefs of African origin;--the images and crucifixes still command respect, but this respect is inspired by a feeling purely fetichistic. With the political dispossession of the whites, certain dark powers, previously concealed or repressed, have obtained, formidable development. The old enemy of Père Labat, the wizard (the _quimboiseur_), already wields more authority than the priest, exercises more terror than the magistrate, commands more confidence than the physician. The educated mulatto class may affect to despise him;--but he is preparing their overthrow in the dark. Astonishing is the persistence with which the African has clung to these beliefs and practices, so zealously warred upon by the Church and so mercilessly punished by the courts for centuries. He still goes to mass, and sends his children to the priest; but he goes more often to the quimboiseur and the "_magnetise_." He finds use for both beliefs, but gives large preference to the savage one,--just as he prefers the pattering of his tam tam to the music of the military band at the _Savane du Fort_.... And should it come to pass that Martinique be ever totally abandoned by its white population,--an event by no means improbable in the present order of things,--the fate of the ecclesiastical fabric so toilsomely reared by the monastic orders is not difficult to surmise. VI. From my window in the old Rue du Bois-Morin,--which climbs the foot of Morne Labelle by successions of high stone steps,--all the southern end of the city is visible as in a bird's-eye view. Under me is a long peaking of red-scaled roofs,--gables and dormer-windows,--with clouds of bright green here and there,--foliage of tamarind and corossolier;--westward purples and flames the great circle of the Caribbean Sea;--east and south, towering to the violet sky, curve the volcanic hills, green-clad from base to summit;--and right before me the beautiful Morne d'Orange, all palm-plumed and wood-wrapped, trends seaward and southward. And every night, after the stars come out, I see moving lights there,--lantern fires guiding the mountain-dwellers home; but I look in vain for the light of Père Labat. And nevertheless,--although no believer in ghosts,--I see thee very plainly sometimes, thou quaint White Father, moving through winter-mists in the narrower Paris of another century; musing upon the churches that arose at thy bidding under tropic skies; dreaming of the primeval valleys changed by thy will to green-gold seas of cane,--and the strong mill that will bear thy name for two hundred years (it stands solid unto this day),--and the habitations made for thy brethren in pleasant palmy places,--and the luminous peace of thy Martinique convent,--and odor of roasting parrots fattened upon _grains de bois d'Inde_ and guavas,--"_l'odeur de muscade et de girofle qui fait plaisir_."... Eh, _Père Labat_!--what changes there have been since thy day! The White Fathers have no place here now; and the Black Fathers, too, have been driven from the land, leaving only as a memory of them the perfect and ponderous architecture of the Perinnelle plantation-buildings, and the appellation of the river still known as the Rivière des Pères. Also the Ursulines are gone, leaving only their name on the corner of a crumbling street. And there are no more slaves; and there are new races and colors thou wouldst deem scandalous though beautiful; and there are no more parrots; and there are no more diablotins. And the grand woods thou sawest in their primitive and inviolate beauty, as if fresh from the Creator's touch in the morning of the world, are passing away; the secular trees are being converted into charcoal, or sawn into timber for the boat-builders: thou shouldst see two hundred men pulling some forest giant down to the sea upon the two-wheeled screaming thing they call a "devil" (_yon diabe_),--cric-crac!--cric-crac!--all chanting together;-- "_Soh-soh!--yaïe-yah! Rhâlé bois-canot!_" And all that ephemeral man has had power to change has been changed,--ideas, morals, beliefs, the whole social fabric. But the eternal summer remains,--and the Hesperian magnificence of azure sky and violet sea,--and the jewel-colors of the perpetual hills;--the same tepid winds that rippled thy cane-fields two hundred years ago still blow over Sainte-Marie;--the same purple shadows lengthen and dwindle and turn with the wheeling of the sun. God's witchery still fills this land; and the heart of the stranger is even yet snared by the beauty of it; and the dreams of him that forsakes it will surely be haunted--even as were thine own, Père Labat--by memories of its Eden-summer: the sudden leap of the light over a thousand peaks in the glory of tropic dawn,--the perfumed peace of enormous azure noons,--and shapes of palm wind-rocked in the burning of colossal sunsets,--and the silent flickering of the great fire-flies through the lukewarm darkness, when mothers call their children home... "_Mi fanal Pè Labatt!--mi Pè Labatt ka vini pouend ou!_" CHAPTER IV. -- LA GUIABLESSE. I. Night in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which terrify certain imaginations;--but in the tropics it produces effects peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that startle even while the sun shines upon them assume, after his setting, a grimness,--a grotesquery,--a suggestiveness for which there is no name.... In the North a tree is simply a tree;--here it is a personality that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable _Me_: it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital B). From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend into the roads,--black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,--an endless procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;--yet these take the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a black crawling of unutterable spiders.... Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco: the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful signification for him,--do not appeal to his imagination;--if he suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes, but because he has perceived two specks of orange light, and is not yet sure whether they are only fire-flies, or the eyes of a trigonocephalus. The spectres of his fancy have nothing in common with those indistinct and monstrous umbrages: what he most fears, next to the deadly serpent, are human witchcrafts. A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might be a _malefice_ which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken and swell up to the size of the limb of an elephant;--an unopened bundle of plantain leaves or of bamboo strippings, dropped by the way-side, might contain the skin of a _Soucouyan._ But the ghastly being who doffs or dons his skin at will--and the Zombi--and the _Moun-Mò_--may be quelled or exorcised by prayer; and the lights of shrines, the white gleaming of crosses, continually remind the traveller of his duty to the Powers that save. All along the way there are shrines at intervals, not very far apart: while standing in the radiance of one niche-lamp, you may perhaps discern the glow of the next, if the road be level and straight. They are almost everywhere,--shining along the skirts of the woods, at the entrance of ravines, by the verges of precipices;--there is a cross even upon the summit of the loftiest peak in the island. And the night-walker removes his hat each time his bare feet touch the soft stream of yellow light outpoured from the illuminated shrine of a white Virgin or a white Christ. These are good ghostly company for him;--he salutes them, talks to them, tells them his pains or fears: their blanched faces seem to him full of sympathy;--they appear to cheer him voicelessly as he strides from gloom to gloom, under the goblinry of those woods which tower black as ebony under the stars.... And he has other companionship. One of the greatest terrors of darkness in other lands does not exist here after the setting of the sun,--the terror of _Silence_.... Tropical night is full of voices;--extraordinary populations of crickets are trilling; nations of tree-frogs are chanting; the _Cabri-des-bois_, [14] or _cra-cra_, almost deafens you with the wheezy bleating sound by which it earned its creole name; birds pipe: everything that bells, ululates, drones, clacks, guggles, joins the enormous chorus; and you fancy you see all the shadows vibrating to the force of this vocal storm. The true life of Nature in the tropics begins with the darkness, ends with the light. And it is partly, perhaps, because of these conditions that the coming of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. _I ni pè zombi mênm gran'-jou_ (he is afraid of ghosts even in broad daylight) is a phrase which does not sound exaggerated in these latitudes,--not, at least, to anyone knowing something of the conditions that nourish or inspire weird beliefs. In the awful peace of tropical day, in the hush of the woods, the solemn silence of the hills (broken only by torrent voices that cannot make themselves heard at night), even in the amazing luminosity, there is a something apparitional and weird,--something that seems to weigh upon the world like a measureless haunting. So still all Nature's chambers are that a loud utterance jars upon the ear brutally, like a burst of laughter in a sanctuary. With all its luxuriance of color, with all its violence of light, this tropical day has its ghostliness and its ghosts. Among the people of color there are many who believe that even at noon--when the boulevards behind the city are most deserted--the zombis will show themselves to solitary loiterers. II. ... Here a doubt occurs to me,--a doubt regarding the precise nature of a word, which I call upon Adou to explain. Adou is the daughter of the kind old capresse from whom I rent my room in this little mountain cottage. The mother is almost precisely the color of cinnamon; the daughter's complexion is brighter,--the ripe tint of an orange.... Adou tells me creole stories and _tim-tim_. Adou knows all about ghosts, and believes in them. So does Adou's extraordinarily tall brother, Yébé,--my guide among the mountains. --"Adou," I ask, "what is a zombi?" The smile that showed Adou's beautiful white teeth has instantly disappeared; and she answers, very seriously, that she has never seen a zombi, and does not want to see one. --"_Moin pa té janmain ouè zombi,--pa 'lè ouè ça, moin!_" --"But, Adou, child, I did not ask you whether you ever saw It;--I asked you only to tell me what It is like?"... Adou hesitates a little, and answers: --"_Zombi? Mais ça fai désòde lanuitt, zombi!_" Ah! it is Something which "makes disorder at night." Still, that is not a satisfactory explanation. "Is it the spectre of a dead person, Adou? Is it _one who comes back?_" --"_Non, Missié,--non; çé pa ca._" --"Not that?... Then what was it you said the other night when you were afraid to pass the cemetery on an errand,--_ça ou té ka di_, Adou?" --"Moin té ka di: 'Moin pa lé k'allé bò cimétiè-là pa ouappò moun-mò;--moun-mò ké barré moin: moin pa sé pè vini enco.'" (_I said, "I do not want to go by that cemetery because of the dead folk,--the dead folk will bar the way, and I cannot get back again._") --"And you believe that, Adou?" --"Yes, that is what they say... And if you go into the cemetery at night you cannot come out again: the dead folk will stop you--_moun-mò ké barré ou._"... --"But are the dead folk zombis, Adou?" --"No; the moun-mò are not zombis. The zombis go everywhere: the dead folk remain in the graveyard.... Except on the Night of All Souls: then they go to the houses of their people everywhere." --"Adou, if after the doors and windows were locked and barred you were to see entering your room in the middle of the night, a Woman fourteen feet high?"... --"_Ah! pa pàlé ça!!_"... --"No! tell me, Adou?" --"Why, yes: that would be a zombi. It is the zombis who make all those noises at night one cannot understand.... Or, again, if I were to see a dog that high [she holds her hand about five feet above the floor] coming into our house at night, I would scream: '_Mi Zombi!_'" ... Then it suddenly occurs to Adou that her mother knows something about zombis. --"_Ou Manman!_" --"_Eti!_" answers old Théréza's voice from the little out-building where the evening meal is being prepared over a charcoal furnace, in an earthen canari. --"_Missié-là ka mandé save ça ça yé yonne zombi;--vini ti bouin!_"... The mother laughs, abandons her canari, and comes in to tell me all she knows about the weird word. "_I ni pè zombi_"--I find from old Thereza's explanations--is a phrase indefinite as our own vague expressions, "afraid of ghosts," "afraid of the dark." But the word "Zombi" also has special strange meanings.... "Ou passé nans grand chimin lanuitt, épi ou ka ouè gouôs difé, épi plis ou ka vini assou difé-à pli ou ka ouè difé-à ka màché: çé zombi ka fai ça.... Encò, chouval ka passé,--chouval ka ni anni toua patt: ça zombi." (You pass along the high-road at night, and you see a great fire, and the more you walk to get to it the more it moves away: it is the zombi makes that.... Or a horse _with only three legs_ passes you: that is a zombi.) --"How big is the fire that the zombi makes?" I ask. --"It fills the whole road," answers Théréza: "_li ka rempli toutt chimin-là_. Folk call those fires the Evil Fires,--_mauvai difé_;--and if you follow them they will lead you into chasms,--_ou ké tombé adans labîme_."... And then she tells me this: --"Baidaux was a mad man of color who used to live at St. Pierre, in the Street of the Precipice. He was not dangerous,--never did any harm;--his sister used to take care of him. And what I am going to relate is true,--_çe zhistouè veritabe!_ "One day Baidaux said to his sister: 'Moin ni yonne yche, va!--ou pa connaitt li!' [I have a child, ah!--you never saw it!] His sister paid no attention to what he said that day; but the next day he said it again, and the next, and the next, and every day after,--so that his sister at last became much annoyed by it, and used to cry out: 'Ah! mais pé guiole ou, Baidaux! ou fou pou embeté moin conm ça!--ou bien fou!'... But he tormented her that way for months and for years. "One evening he went out, and only came home at midnight leading a child by the hand,--a black child he had found in the street; and he said to his sister:-- "'Mi yche-là moin mené ba ou! Tou léjou moin té ka di ou moin tini yonne yche: ou pa té 'lè couè,--eh, ben! MI Y!' [Look at the child I have brought you! Every day I have been telling you I had a child: you would not believe me,--very well, LOOK AT HIM!] "The sister gave one look, and cried out: 'Baidaux, oti ou pouend yche-là?'... For the child was growing taller and taller every moment.... And Baidaux,--because he was mad,--kept saying: 'Çé yche-moin! çé yche moin!' [It is my child!] "And the sister threw open the shutters and screamed to all the neighbors,--'_Sécou, sécou, sécou! Vini oué ça Baidaux mené ba moin!_' [Help! help! Come see what Baidaux has brought in here!] And the child said to Baidaux: '_Ou ni bonhè ou fou!_' [You are lucky that you are mad!]... Then all the neighbors came running in; but they could not see anything: the Zombi was gone."... III. ... As I was saying, the hours of vastest light have their weirdness here;--and it is of a Something which walketh abroad under the eye of the sun, even at high noontide, that I desire to speak, while the impressions of a morning journey to the scene of Its last alleged apparition yet remains vivid in my recollection. You follow the mountain road leading from Calebasse over long meadowed levels two thousand feet above the ocean, into the woods of La Couresse, where it begins to descend slowly, through deep green shadowing, by great zigzags. Then, at a turn, you find yourself unexpectedly looking down upon a planted valley, through plumy fronds of arborescent fern. The surface below seems almost like a lake of gold-green water,--especially when long breaths of mountain-wind set the miles of ripening cane a-ripple from verge to verge: the illusion is marred only by the road, fringed with young cocoa-palms, which serpentines across the luminous plain. East, west, and north the horizon is almost wholly hidden by surging of hills: those nearest are softly shaped and exquisitely green; above them loftier undulations take hazier verdancy and darker shadows; farther yet rise silhouettes of blue or violet tone, with one beautiful breast-shaped peak thrusting up in the midst;--while, westward, over all, topping even the Piton, is a vapory huddling of prodigious shapes--wrinkled, fissured, horned, fantastically tall.... Such at least are the tints of the morning.... Here and there, between gaps in the volcanic chain, the land hollows into gorges, slopes down into ravines;--and the sea's vast disk of turquoise flames up through the interval. Southwardly those deep woods, through which the way winds down, shut in the view.... You do not see the plantation buildings till you have advanced some distance into the valley;--they are hidden by a fold of the land, and stand in a little hollow where the road turns: a great quadrangle of low gray antiquated edifices, heavily walled and buttressed, and roofed with red tiles. The court they form opens upon the main route by an immense archway. Farther along ajoupas begin to line the way,--the dwellings of the field hands,--tiny cottages built with trunks of the arborescent fern or with stems of bamboo, and thatched with cane-straw: each in a little garden planted with bananas, yams, couscous, camanioc, choux-caraibes, or other things,--and hedged about with roseaux d'Inde and various flowering shrubs. Thereafter, only the high whispering wildernesses of cane on either hand,--the white silent road winding between its swaying cocoa-trees,--and the tips of hills that seem to glide on before you as you walk, and that take, with the deepening of the afternoon light, such amethystine color as if they were going to become transparent. IV. ... It is a breezeless and cloudless noon. Under the dazzling downpour of light the hills seem to smoke blue: something like a thin yellow fog haloes the leagues of ripening cane,--a vast reflection. There is no stir in all the green mysterious front of the vine-veiled woods. The palms of the roads keep their heads quite still, as if listening. The canes do not utter a single susurration. Rarely is there such absolute stillness among them: on the calmest days there are usually rustlings audible, thin cracklings, faint creepings: sounds that betray the passing of some little animal or reptile--a rat or a wa manicou, or a zanoli or couresse,--more often, however, no harmless lizard or snake, but the deadly _fer-de-lance_. To-day, all these seem to sleep; and there are no workers among the cane to clear away the weeds,--to uproot the pié-treffe, pié-poule, pié-balai, zhèbe-en-mè: it is the hour of rest. A woman is coming along the road,--young, very swarthy, very tall, and barefooted, and black-robed: she wears a high white turban with dark stripes, and a white foulard is thrown about her fine shoulders; she bears no burden, and walks very swiftly and noiselessly.... Soundless as shadow the motion of all these naked-footed people is. On any quiet mountain-way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than hear, behind you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb oscillations of raiment;--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter swiftly passes with creole greeting of "bon-jou'" or "bonsouè, Missié." This sudden "becoming aware" in broad daylight of a living presence unseen is even more disquieting than that sensation which, in absolute darkness, makes one halt all breathlessly before great solid objects, whose proximity has been revealed by some mute blind emanation of force alone. But it is very seldom, indeed, that the negro or half-breed is thus surprised: he seems to divine an advent by some specialized sense,--like an animal,--and to become conscious of a look directed upon him from any distance or from behind any covert;--to pass within the range of his keen vision unnoticed is almost impossible.... And the approach of this woman has been already observed by the habitants of the ajoupas;--dark faces peer out from windows and door-ways;--one half-nude laborer even strolls out to the road-side under the sun to her coming. He looks a moment, turns to the hut and calls:-- --"Ou-ou! Fafa!" --"Étí! Gabou!" --"Vini ti bouin!--mi bel negresse!" Out rushes Fafa, with his huge straw hat in his hand: "Oti, Gabou?" --"Mi!" --"'Ah! quimbé moin!" cries black Fafa, enthusiastically; "fouinq! li bel!--Jésis-Maïa! li doux!"...Neither ever saw that woman before; and both feel as if they could watch her forever. There is something superb in the port of a tall young mountain-griffone, or negress, who is comely and knows that she is comely: it is a black poem of artless dignity, primitive grace, savage exultation of movement.... "Ou marché tête enlai conm couresse qui ka passélariviè" (_You walk with your head in the air, like the couresse-serpent swimming a river_) is a creole comparison which pictures perfectly the poise of her neck and chin. And in her walk there is also a serpentine elegance, a sinuous charm: the shoulders do not swing; the cambered torso seems immobile;--but alternately from waist to heel, and from heel to waist, with each long full stride, an indescribable undulation seems to pass; while the folds of her loose robe oscillate to right and left behind her, in perfect libration, with the free swaying of the hips. With us, only a finely trained dancer could attempt such a walk;--with the Martinique woman of color it is natural as the tint of her skin; and this allurement of motion unrestrained is most marked in those who have never worn shoes, and are clad lightly as the women of antiquity,--in two very thin and simple garments;--chemise and _robe--d'indienne_.... But whence is she?--of what canton? Not from Vauclin, nor from Lamentin, nor from Marigot,--from Case-Pilote or from Case-Navire: Fafa knows all the people there. Never of Sainte-Anne, nor of Sainte-Luce, nor of Sainte-Marie, nor of Diamant, nor of Gros-Morne, nor of Carbet,--the birthplace of Gabou. Neither is she of the village of the Abysms, which is in the Parish of the Preacher,--nor yet of Ducos nor of François, which are in the Commune of the Holy Ghost.... V. ... She approaches the ajoupa: both men remove their big straw hats; and both salute her with a simultaneous "Bonjou', Manzell." --"Bonjou', Missié," she responds, in a sonorous alto, without appearing to notice Gabou,--but smiling upon Fafa as she passes, with her great eyes turned full upon his face.... All the libertine blood of the man flames under that look;--he feels as if momentarily wrapped in a blaze of black lightning. --"Ça ka fai moin pè," exclaims Gabou, turning his face towards the ajoupa. Something indefinable in the gaze of the stranger has terrified him. --"_Pa ka fai moin pè--fouinq!_" (She does not make me afraid) laughs Fafa, boldly following her with a smiling swagger. --"Fafa!" cries Gabou, in alarm. "_Fafa, pa fai ça!_" But Fafa does not heed. The strange woman has slackened her pace, as if inviting pursuit;--another moment and he is at her side. --"Oti ou ka rêté, che?" he demands, with the boldness of one who knows himself a fine specimen of his race. --"Zaffai cabritt pa zaffai lapin," she answers, mockingly. --"Mais pouki au rhabillé toutt nouè conm ça." --"Moin pòté deil pou name main mò." --"Aïe ya yaïe!... Non, vouè!--ça ou kallé atouèlement?" --"Lanmou pàti: moin pàti deïé lanmou." --"Ho!--on ni guêpe, anh?" --"Zanoli bail yon bal; épi maboya rentré ladans." --"Di moin oti ou kallé, doudoux?" --"Jouq lariviè Lezà." --"Fouinq!--ni plis passé trente kilomett!" --"Eh ben?--ess ou 'lè vini épi moin?" [15] And as she puts the question she stands still and gazes at him;--her voice is no longer mocking: it has taken another tone,--a tone soft as the long golden note of the little brown bird they call the _siffleur-de-montagne_, the mountain-whistler.... Yet Fafa hesitates. He hears the clear clang of the plantation bell recalling him to duty;--he sees far down the road--(_Ouill!_ how fast they have been walking!)--a white and black speck in the sun: Gabou, uttering through his joined hollowed hands, as through a horn, the _ouklé_, the rally call. For an instant he thinks of the overseer's anger,--of the distance,--of the white road glaring in the dead heat: then he looks again into the black eyes of the strange woman, and answers: --"Oui;--moin ké vini épi ou." With a burst of mischievous laughter, in which Fafa joins, she walks on,--Fafa striding at her side.... And Gabou, far off, watches them go,--and wonders that, for the first time since ever they worked together, his comrade failed to answer his _ouklé_. --"Coument yo ka crié ou, chè" asks Fafa, curious to know her name. --"Châché nom moin ou-menm, duviné." But Fafa never was a good guesser,--never could guess the simplest of tim-tim. --"Ess Cendrine?" --"Non, çe pa ça." --"Ess Vitaline?" --"Non çé pa ça." --"Ess Aza?" --"Non, çé pa ça." --"Ess Nini?" --"Châché encò." --"Ess Tité" --"Ou pa save,--tant pis pou ou!" --"Ess Youma?" --"Pouki ou 'lè save nom moin?--ça ou ké épi y?" --"Ess Yaiya?" --"Non, çé pa y." --"Ess Maiyotte?" --"Non! ou pa ké janmain trouvé y!" --"Ess Sounoune?--ess Loulouze?" She does not answer, but quickens her pace and begins to sing,--not as the half-breed, but as the African sings,--commencing with a low long weird intonation that suddenly breaks into fractions of notes inexpressible, then rising all at once to a liquid purling bird-tone, and descending as abruptly again to the first deep quavering strain:-- "À te--moin ka dòmi toute longue; Yon paillasse sé fai main bien, Doudoux! À te--moin ka dòmi toute longue; Yon robe biésé sé fai moin bien, Doudoux! À te--moin ka dòmi toute longue; Dè jolis foulà sé fai moin bien, Doudoux! À te--moin ka dòmi toute longue; Yon joli madras sé fai moin bien, Doudoux! À te--moin ka dòmi toute longue: Çe à tè..." ... Obliged from the first to lengthen his stride in order to keep up with her, Fafa has found his utmost powers of walking overtaxed, and has been left behind. Already his thin attire is saturated with sweat; his breathing is almost a panting;--yet the black bronze of his companion's skin shows no moisture; her rhythmic her silent respiration, reveal no effort: she laughs at his desperate straining to remain by her side. --"Marché toujou' deïé moin,--anh, chè?--marché toujou' deïé!"... And the involuntary laggard--utterly bewitched by supple allurement of her motion, by the black flame of her gaze, by the savage melody of her chant--wonders more and more who she may be, while she waits for him with her mocking smile. But Gabou--who has been following and watching from afar off, and sounding his fruitless ouklé betimes--suddenly starts, halts, turns, and hurries back, fearfully crossing himself at every step. He has seen the sign by which She is known... VI. ... None ever saw her by night. Her hour is the fulness of the sun's flood-tide: she comes in the dead hush and white flame of windless noons,--when colors appear to take a very unearthliness of intensity,--when even the flash of some colibri, bosomed with living fire, shooting hither and thither among the grenadilla blossoms, seemeth a spectral happening because of the great green trance of the land.... Mostly she haunts the mountain roads, winding from plantation to plantation, from hamlet to hamlet,--sometimes dominating huge sweeps of azure sea, sometimes shadowed by mornes deep-wooded to the sky. But close to the great towns she sometimes walks: she has been seen at mid-day upon the highway which overlooks the Cemetery of the Anchorage, behind the cathedral of St. Pierre.... A black Woman, simply clad, of lofty stature and strange beauty, silently standing in the light, _keeping her eyes fixed upon the Sun!_... VII. Day wanes. The further western altitudes shift their pearline gray to deep blue where the sky is yellowing up behind them; and in the darkening hollows of nearer mornes strange shadows gather with the changing of the light--dead indigoes, fuliginous purples, rubifications as of scoriae,--ancient volcanic colors momentarily resurrected by the illusive haze of evening. And the fallow of the canes takes a faint warm ruddy tinge. On certain far high slopes, as the sun lowers, they look like thin golden hairs against the glow,--blond down upon the skin of the living hills. Still the Woman and her follower walk together,--chatting loudly, laughing--chanting snatches of song betimes. And now the valley is well behind them;--they climb the steep road crossing the eastern peaks,--through woods that seem to stifle under burdening of creepers. The shadow of the Woman and the shadow of the man,--broadening from their feet,--lengthening prodigiously,--sometimes, mixing, fill all the way; sometimes, at a turn, rise up to climb the trees. Huge masses of frondage, catching the failing light, take strange fiery color;--the sun's rim almost touches one violet hump in the western procession of volcanic silhouettes.... Sunset, in the tropics, is vaster than sunrise.... The dawn, upflaming swiftly from the sea, has no heralding erubescence, no awful blossoming--as in the North: its fairest hues are fawn-colors, dove-tints, and yellows,--pale yellows as of old dead gold, in horizon and flood. But after the mighty heat of day has charged all the blue air with translucent vapor, colors become strangely changed, magnified, transcendentalized when the sun falls once more below the verge of visibility. Nearly an hour before his death, his light begins to turn tint; and all the horizon yellows to the color of a lemon. Then this hue deepens, through tones of magnificence unspeakable, into orange; and the sea becomes lilac. Orange is the light of the world for a little space; and as the orb sinks, the indigo darkness comes--not descending, but rising, as if from the ground--all within a few minutes. And during those brief minutes peaks and mornes, purpling into richest velvety blackness, appear outlined against passions of fire that rise half-way to the zenith,--enormous furies of vermilion. ... The Woman all at once leaves the main road,--begins to mount a steep narrow path leading up from it through the woods upon the left. But Fafa hesitates,--halts a moment to look back. He sees the sun's huge orange face sink down,--sees the weird procession of the peaks vesture themselves in blackness funereal,--sees the burning behind them crimson into awfulness; and a vague fear comes upon him as he looks again up the darkling path to the left. Whither is she now going? --"Oti ou kallé la?" he cries. --"Mais conm ça!--chimin tala plis cou't,--coument?" It may be the shortest route, indeed;--but then, the fer-de-lance!... --"Ni sèpent ciya,--en pile." No: there is not a single one, she avers; she has taken that path too often not to know: --"Pa ni sèpent piess! Moin ni coutime passé là;--pa ni piess!" ... She leads the way.... Behind them the tremendous glow deepens;--before them the gloom. Enormous gnarled forms of ceiba, balata, acoma, stand dimly revealed as they pass; masses of viny drooping things take, by the failing light, a sanguine tone. For a little while Fafa can plainly discern the figure of the Woman before him;--then, as the path zigzags into shadow, he can descry only the white turban and the white foulard;--and then the boughs meet overhead: he can see her no more, and calls to her in alarm:-- --"Oti ou?--moin pa pè ouè arien!" Forked pending ends of creepers trail cold across his face. Huge fire-flies sparkle by,--like atoms of kindled charcoal thinkling, blown by a wind. --"Içitt!--quimbé lanmain-moin!"... How cold the hand that guides him!...She walks swiftly, surely, as one knowing the path by heart. It zigzags once more; and the incandescent color flames again between the trees;--the high vaulting of foliage fissures overhead, revealing the first stars. A _cabritt-bois_ begins its chant. They reach the summit of the morne under the clear sky. The wood is below their feet now; the path curves on eastward between a long swaying of ferns sable in the gloom,--as between a waving of prodigious black feathers. Through the further purpling, loftier altitudes dimly loom; and from some viewless depth, a dull vast rushing sound rises into the night.... Is it the speech of hurrying waters, or only some tempest of insect voices from those ravines in which the night begins?... Her face is in the darkness as she stands;--Fafa's eyes turned to the iron-crimson of the western sky. He still holds her hand, fondles it,--murmurs something to her in undertones. --"Ess ou ainmein moin conm ça?" she asks, almost in a whisper, Oh! yes, yes, yes!... more than any living being he loves her!... How much? Ever so much,--_gouôs conm caze!_... Yet she seems to doubt him,--repeating her questionn over and over: --"Ess ou ainmein moin?" And all the while,--gently, caressingly, imperceptibly--she draws him a little nearer to the side of the nearer to the black waving of the ferns, nearer to the great dull rushing sound that rises from beyond them: --"Ess ou ainmein moin?" --"Oui, oui!" he responds,--"ou save ça!--oui, chè doudoux, ou save ça!"... And she, suddenly,--turning at once to him and to the last red light, the goblin horror of her face transformed,--shrieks with a burst of hideous laughter: --"_Atò, bô!_" [16] For the fraction of a moment he knows her name:--then, smitten to the brain with the sight of her, reels, recoils, and, backward falling, crashes two thousand feet down to his death upon the rocks of a mountain torrent. CHAPTER V. LA VÉRETTE. I. --ST. PIERRE, _1887_. One returning from the country to the city in the Carnival season is lucky to find any comfortable rooms for rent. I have been happy to secure one even in a rather retired street,--so steep that it is really dangerous to sneeze while descending it, lest one lose one's balance and tumble right across the town. It is not a fashionable street, the Rue du Morne Mirail; but, after all, there is no particularly fashionable street in this extraordinary city, and the poorer the neighborhood, the better one's chance to see something of its human nature. One consolation is that I have Manm-Robert for a next-door neighbor, who keeps the best bouts in town (those long thin Martinique cigars of which a stranger soon becomes fond), and who can relate more queer stories and legends of old times in the island than anybody else I know of. Manm-Robert is _yon màchanne lapacotte_, a dealer in such cheap articles of food as the poor live upon: fruits and tropical vegetables, manioc-flour, "macadam" (a singular dish of rice stewed with salt fish--_diri épi coubouyon lamori_), akras, etc.; but her bouts probably bring her the largest profit--they are all bought up by the békés. Manm-Robert is also a sort of doctor: whenever anyone in the neighborhood falls sick she is sent for, and always comes, and very often cures,--as she is skilled in the knowledge and use of medicinal herbs, which she gathers herself upon the mornes. But for these services she never accepts any reuneration: she is a sort of Mother of the poor in immediate vicinity. She helps everybody, listens to everybody's troubles, gives everybody some sort of consolation, trusts everybody, and sees a great deal of the thankless side of human nature without seeming to feel any the worse for it. Poor as she must really be she appears to have everything that everybody wants; and will lend anything to her neighbors except a scissors or a broom, which it is thought bad-luck to lend. And, finally, if anyybody is afraid of being bewitched (_quimboisé_) Manm-Robert can furnish him or her with something that will keep the bewitchment away.... II. _February 15th._ ... Ash-Wednesday. The last masquerade will appear this afternoon, notwithstanding; for the Carnival is in Martinique a day longer than elsewhere. All through the country districts since the first week of January there have been wild festivities every Sunday--dancing on the public highways to the pattering of tamtams,--African dancing, too, such as is never seen in St. Pierre. In the city, however, there has been less merriment than in previous years;--the natural gaiety of the population has been visibly affected by the advent of a terrible and unfamiliar visitor to the island,--_La Vérette_: she came by steamer from Colon. ... It was in September. Only two cases had been reported when every neighboring British colony quarantined against Martinique. Then other West Indian colonies did likewise. Only two cases of small-pox. "But there may be two thousand in another month," answered the governors and the consuls to many indignant protests. Among West Indian populations the malady has a signification unknown in Europe or the United States: it means an exterminating plague. Two months later the little capital of Fort-de-France was swept by the pestilence as by a wind of death. Then the evil began to spread. It entered St. Pierre in December, about Christmas time. Last week 173 cases were reported; and a serious epidemic is almost certain. There were only 8500 inhabitants in Fort-de-France; there are 28,000 in the three quarters of St. Pierre proper, not including her suburbs; and there is no saying what ravages the disease may make here. III. ... Three o'clock, hot and clear.... In the distance there is a heavy sound of drums, always drawing nearer: _tam!--tam!--tamtamtam!_ The Grande Rue is lined with expectant multitudes; and its tiny square,--the Batterie d'Esnotz,--thronged with békés. _Tam!--tam!--tamtamtam!_... In our own street the people are beginning to gather at door-ways, and peer out of windows,--prepared to descend to the main thoroughfare at the first glimpse of the procession. --"_Oti masque-à?_" Where are the maskers? It is little Mimi's voice: she is speaking for two besides herself, both quite as anxious as she to know where the maskers are,--Maurice, her little fair-haired and blue-eyed brother, three years old; and Gabrielle, her child-sister, aged four,--two years her junior. Every day I have been observing the three, playing in the door-way of the house across the street. Mimi, with her brilliant white skin, black hair, and laughing black eyes, is the prettiest,--though all are unusually pretty children. Were it not for the fact that their mother's beautiful brown hair is usually covered with a violet foulard, you would certainly believe them white as any children in the world. Now there are children whom everyone knows to be white, living not very far from here, but in a much more silent street, and in a rich house full of servants, children who resemble these as one _fleur-d'amour_ blossom resembles another;--there is actually another Mimi (though she is not so called at home) so like this Mimi that you could not possibly tell one from the other,--except by their dress. And yet the most unhappy experience of the Mimi who wears white satin slippers was certainly that punishment given her for having been once caught playing in the street with this Mimi, who wears no shoes at all. What mischance could have brought them thus together?--and the worst of it was they had fallen in love with each other at first sight!... It was not because the other Mimi must not talk to nice little colored girls, or that this one may not play with white children of her own age: it was because there are cases.... It was not because the other children I speak of are prettier or sweeter or more intelligent than these now playing before me;--or because the finest microscopist in the world could or could not detect any imaginable race difference between those delicate satin skins. It was only because human nature has little changed since the day that Hagar knew the hate of Sarah, and the thing was grievous in Abraham's sight because of his son..... ... The father of these children loved them very much: he had provided a home for them,--a house in the Quarter of the Fort, with an allowance of two hundred francs monthly; and he died in the belief their future was secured. But relatives fought the will with large means and shrewd lawyers, and won!... Yzore, the mother, found herself homeless and penniless, with three children to care for. But she was brave;--she abandoned the costume of the upper class forever, put on the douillette and the foulard,--the attire that is a confession of race,--and went to work. She is still comely, and so white that she seems only to be masquerading in that violet head-dress and long loose robe.... --"_Vini ouè!--vini ouè!_" cry the children to one another,--"come and see!" The drums are drawing near;--everybody is running to the Grande Rue.... IV. _Tam!--tam!--tamtamtam!_... The spectacle is interesting from the Batterie d'Esnotz. High up the Rue Peysette,--up all the precipitous streets that ascend the mornes,--a far gathering of showy color appears: the massing of maskers in rose and blue and sulphur-yellow attire.... Then what a _degringolade_ begins!--what a tumbling, leaping, cascading of color as the troupes descend. Simultaneously from north and south, from the Mouillage and the Fort, two immense bands enter the Grande Rue;--the great dancing societies these,--the _Sans-souci_ and the _Intrépides_. They are rivals; they are the composers and singers of those Carnival songs,--cruel satires most often, of which the local meaning is unintelligible to those unacquainted with the incident inspiring the improvisation,--of which the words are too often coarse or obscene,--whose burdens will be caught up and re-echoed through all the burghs of the island. Vile as may be the motive, the satire, the malice, these chants are preserved for generations by the singular beauty of the airs; and the victim of a Carnival song need never hope that his failing or his wrong will be forgotten: it will be sung of long after he is in his grave. [Illustration: RUE VICTOR HUGO (FORMERLY GRANDE RUE), ST. PIERRE] ... Ten minutes more, and the entire length of the street is thronged with a shouting, shrieking, laughing, gesticulating host of maskers. Thicker and thicker the press becomes;--the drums are silent: all are waiting for the signal of the general dance. Jests and practical jokes are being everywhere perpetrated; there is a vast hubbub, made up of screams, cries, chattering, laughter. Here and there snatches of Carnival song are being sung:--"_Cambronne, Cambronne_;" or "_Ti fenm-là doux, li doux, li doux!_ "... "Sweeter than sirup the little woman is";--this burden will be remembered when the rest of the song passes out of fashion. Brown hands reach out from the crowd of masks, pulling the beards and patting the faces of white spectators.... "_Moin connaitt ou, chè!--moin connaitt ou, doudoux! ba moin ti d'mi franc!_" It is well to refuse the half-franc,--though you do not know what these maskers might take a notion to do to-day.... Then all the great drums suddenly boom together; all the bands strike up; the mad medley kaleidoscopes into some sort of order; and the immense processional dance begins. From the Mouillage to the Fort there is but one continuous torrent of sound and color: you are dazed by the tossing of peaked caps, the waving of hands, and twinkling of feet;--and all this passes with a huge swing,--a regular swaying to right and left.... It will take at least an hour for all to pass; and it is an hour well worth passing. Band after band whirls by; the musicians all garbed as women or as monks in canary-colored habits;--before them the dancers are dancing backward, with a motion as of skaters; behind them all leap and wave hands as in pursuit. Most of the bands are playing creole airs,--but that of the _Sans-souci_ strikes up the melody of the latest French song in vogue,--_Petits amoureux aux plumes_ ("Little feathered lovers"). [17] Everybody now seems to know this song by heart; you hear children only five or six years old singing it: there are pretty lines in it, although two out of its four stanzas are commonplace enough, and it is certainly the air rather than the words which accounts for its sudden popularity. V. ... Extraordinary things are happening in the streets through which the procession passes. Pest-smitten women rise from their beds to costume themselves,--to mask face already made unrecognizable by the hideous malady,--and stagger out to join the dancers.... They do this in the Rue Longchamps, in the Rue St. Jean-de-Dieu, in the Rue Peysette, in the Rue de Petit Versailles. And in the Rue Ste.-Marthe there are three young girls sick with the disease, who hear the blowing of the horns and the pattering of feet and clapping of hands in chorus;--they get up to look through the slats of their windows on the masquerade,--and the creole passion of the dance comes upon them. "_Ah!_" cries one,--"_nou ké bien amieusé nou!--c'est zaffai si nou mò!_" [We will have our fill of fun: what matter if we die after!] And all mask, and join the rout, and dance down to the Savane, and over the river-bridge into the high streets of the Fort, carrying contagion with them!... No extraordinary example, this: the ranks of the dancers hold many and many a _verrettier_. VI. ... The costumes are rather disappointing,-though the mummery has some general characteristics that are not unpicturesquel--for example, the predominance of crimson and canary-yellow in choice of color, and a marked predilection for pointed hoods and high-peaked head-dresses, Mock religious costumes also form a striking element in the general tone of the display,--Franciscan, Dominican, or Penitent habits,--usually crimson or yellow, rarely sky-blue. There are no historical costumes, few eccentricities or monsters: only a few "vampire-bat" head-dresses abruptly break the effect of the peaked caps and the hoods.... Still there are some decidedly local ideas in dress which deserve notice,--the _congo_, the _bébé_ (or _ti-manmaille_), the _ti nègue gouos-sirop_ ("little molasses-negro"); and the _diablesse_. The congo is merely the exact reproduction of the dress worn by workers on the plantations. For the women, a gray calico shirt and coarse petticoat of percaline with two coarse handkerchiefs (_mouchoirs fatas_), one for her neck, and one for the head, over which is worn a monstrous straw hat;--she walks either barefoot or shod with rude native sandals, and she carries a hoe. For the man the costume consists of a gray shirt of Iuugh material, blue canvas pantaloons, a large mouchoir fatas to tie around his waist, and a _chapeau Bacoué_,--an enormous hat of Martinique palm-straw. He walks barefooted and carries a cutlass. The sight of a troupe of young girls _en bébé_, in baby-dress, is really pretty. This costume comprises only a loose embroidered chemise, lace-edged pantalettes, and a child's cap; the whole being decorated with bright ribbbons of various colors. As the dress is short and leaves much of the lower limbs exposed, there is ample opportunity for display of tinted stockings and elegant slippers. The "molasses-negro" wears nothing but a cloth around his loins;--his whole body and face being smeared with an atrocious mixture of soot and molasses. He is supposed to represent the original African ancestor. The _devilesses_ (_diablesses_) are few in number; for it requires a very tall woman to play deviless. These are robed all in black, with a white turban and white foulard;--they wear black masks. They also carry _boms_ (large tin cans), which they allow to fall upon the pavement and from time to time; and they walk barefoot.... The deviless (in true Bitaco idiom, "_guiablesse_") represents a singular Martinique superstition. It is said that sometimes at noonday, a beautiful negress passes silently through some isolated plantation,--smiling at the workers in the cane-fields,--tempting men to follow her. But he who follows her never comes back again; and when a field hand mysteriously disappears, his fellows say, "_Y té ka ouè la Guiablesse!_"... The tallest among the devilesses always walks first, chanting the question, "_Fou ouvè?_" (Is it yet daybreak?) And all the others reply in chorus, "_Jou pa'ncò ouvè_." (It is not yet day.) --The masks worn by the multitude include very few grotesques: as a rule, they are simply white wire masks, having the form of an oval and regular human face;--and disguise the wearer absolutely, although they can be through perfectly well from within. It struck me that this peculiar type of wire mask gave an indescribable tone of ghostliness to the whole exhibition. It is not in the least comical; it is neither comely nor ugly; it is colorless as mist,--expressionless, void,--it lies on the face like a vapor, like a cloud,--creating the idea of a spectral vacuity behind it.... VII. ... Now comes the band of the _Intrépides_, playing the _bouèné_. It is a dance melody,--also the name of a _mode_ of dancing, peculiar and unrestrained;--the dancers advance and retreat face to face; they hug each other, press together, and separate to embrace again. A very old dance, this,--of African origin; perhaps the same of which Père Labat wrote in 1722:-- --"It is not modest. Nevertheless, it has not failed to become so popular with the Spanish Creoles of America, so much in vogue among them, that it now forms the chief of their amusements, and that it enters even into their devotions. They dance it even in their Churches, in their Processions; and the Nuns seldom fail to dance it Christmas Night, upon a stage erected in their choir and immediately in front of their iron grating, which is left open, so that the People may share in the manifested by these good souls for the birth of the Saviour."... [18] VIII. ... Every year, on the last day of the Carnival, a droll ceremony used to take place called the "Burial of the Bois-bois,"--the bois-bois being a dummy, a guy, caricaturing the most unpopular thing in city life or in politics. This bois-bois, after having been paraded with mock solemnity through all the ways of St. Pierre, was either interred or "drowned,"--flung into the sea.... And yesterday the dancing societies had announced their intention to bury a _bois-bois laverette_,--a manikin that was to represent the plague. But this bois-bois does not make its appearance. _La Verette_ is too terrible a visitor to be made fun of, my friends;--you will not laugh at her, because you dare not.... No: there is one who has the courage,--a yellow goblin crying from behind his wire mask, in imitation of the màchannes: "_Ça qui lè quatòze graines laverette pou yon sou?_" (Who wants to buy fourteen verette-spots for a sou?) Not a single laugh follows that jest.... And just one week from to-day, poor mocking goblin, you will have a great many more than _quatorze graines_, which will not cost you even a sou, and which will disguise you infinitely better than the mask you now wear;--and they will pour quick-lime over you, ere ever they let you pass through this street again--in a seven franc coffin!... IX. And the multicolored clamoring stream rushes by,--swerves off at last through the Rue des Ursulines to the Savane,--rolls over the new bridge of the Roxelane to the ancient quarter of the Fort. All of a sudden there is a hush, a halt;--the drums stop beating, the songs cease. Then I see a sudden scattering of goblins and demons and devilesses in all directions: they run into houses, up alleys,--hide behind door-ways. And the crowd parts; and straight through it, walking very quickly, comes a priest in his vestments, preceded by an acolyte who rings a little bell. _C'est Bon-Dié ka passé!_ ("It is the Good-God who goes by!") The father is bearing the "viaticum" to some victim of the pestilence: one must not appear masked as a devil or a deviless in the presence of the Bon-Die. He goes by. The flood of maskers recloses behind the ominous passage;--the drums boom again; the dance recommences; and all the fantastic mummery ebbs swiftly out of sight. X. Night falls;--the maskers crowd to the ball-rooms to dance strange tropical measures that will become wilder and wilder as the hours pass. And through the black streets, the Devil makes his last Carnival-round. By the gleam of the old-fashioned oil lamps hung across the thoroughfares I can make out a few details of his costume. He is clad in red, wears a hideous blood-colored mask, and a cap of which the four sides are formed by four looking-glasses;--the whole head-dress being surmounted by a red lantern. He has a white wig made of horse-hair, to make him look weird and old,--since the Devil is older than the world! Down the street he comes, leaping nearly his own height,--chanting words without human signification,--and followed by some three hundred boys, who form the chorus to his chant--all clapping hands together and giving tongue with a simultaneity that testifies how strongly the sense of rhythm enters into the natural musical feeling of the African,--a feeling powerful enough to impose itself upon all Spanish-America, and there create the unmistakable characteristics of all that is called "creole music." --"Bimbolo!" --"Zimabolo!" --"Bimbolo!" --"Zimabolo!" --"Et zimbolo!" --"Et bolo-po!" --sing the Devil and his chorus. His chant is cavernous, abysmal,--booms from his chest like the sound of a drum beaten in the bottom of a well.... _Ti manmaille-là, baill moin lavoix!_ ("Give me voice, little folk,--give me voice!") And all chant after him, in a chanting like the rushing of many waters, and with triple clapping of hands:--"_Ti manmaille-là, baill moin lavoix!_"... Then he halts before a dwelling in the Rue Peysette, and thunders:-- --"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!--Mi! diabe-là derhò!_" That is evidently a piece of spite-work: there is somebody living there against whom he has a grudge.... "_Hey! Marie-without-teeth! look! the Devil is outside!_" And the chorus catch the clue. DEVIL.--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!_"... CHORUS.--"_Marie-sans-dent! mi!--diabe-là derhò!_" D.--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!_"'... C.--"_Marie-sans-dent! mi!--diabe-à derhò!_" D.--"_Eh! Marie-sans-dent!_"... etc. [Illustration: QUARTER OF THE FORT, ST. PIERRE (OVERLOOKING THE RIVIÈRE ROXELANE).] The Devil at last descends to the main street, always singing the same song;--follow the chorus to the Savanna, where the rout makes for the new bridge over the Roxelane, to mount the high streets of the old quarter of the Fort; and the chant changes as they cross over:-- DEVIL.--"_Oti ouè diabe-là passé lariviè?_" (Where did you see the Devil going over the river?) And all the boys repeat the words, falling into another rhythm with perfect regularity and ease:--"_Oti ouè diabe-là passé lariviè?_" DEVIL.--"_Oti ouè diabe?_"... CHORUS.--"_Oti ouè diabe-là passé lariviè?_" D.--"_Oti ouè diabe?_" C,--"_Oti ouè diabe-làp passé lariviè?_" D,-"_Oti ouè diabe?_...etc. About midnight the return of the Devil and his following arouses me from sleep:--all are chanting a new refrain, "The Devil and the zombis sleep anywhere and everywhere!" (_Diabe épi zombi ka dòmi tout-pàtout_.) The voices of the boys are still clear, shrill, fresh,--clear as a chant of frogs;--they still clap hanwith a precision of rhythm that is simply wonderful,--making each time a sound almost exactly like the bursting of a heavy wave:-- DEVIL.--"_Diable épi zombi_."... CHORUS.--"_Diable épi zombi ka d'omi tout-pàtout!_" D.--"_Diable épi zombi_." C.--"_Diable épi zombi ka dòmi tout-pàtout!_" D.--"_Diable épi zombi_."...etc. ... What is this after all but the old African method of chanting at labor, The practice of carrying the burden upon the head left the hands free for the rhythmic accompaniment of clapping. And you may still hear the women who load the transatlantic steamers with coal at Fort-de-France thus chanting and clapping.... Evidently the Devil is moving very fast; for all the boys are running;--the pattering of bare feet upon the pavement sounds like a heavy shower.... Then the chanting grows fainter in distance; the Devil's immense basso becomes inaudible;--one only distinguishes at regular intervals the _crescendo_ of the burden,--a wild swelling of many hundred boy-voices all rising together,--a retreating storm of rhythmic song, wafted to the ear in gusts, in _raifales_ of contralto.... XI. _February 17th._ ... Yzore is a _calendeuse_. The calendeuses are the women who make up the beautiful Madras turbans and color them; for the amazingly brilliant yellow of these head-dresses is not the result of any dyeing process: they are all painted by hand. When purchased the Madras is simply a great oblong handkerchief, having a pale green or pale pink ground, and checkered or plaided by intersecting bands of dark blue, purple, crimson, or maroon. The calendeuse lays the Madras upon a broad board placed across her knees,--then, taking a camel's-hair brush, she begins to fill in the spaces between the bands with a sulphur-yellow paint, which is always mixed with gum-arabic. It requires a sure eye, very steady fingers, and long experience to do this well.... After the Madras has been "calendered" (_calendé_) and has become quite stiff and dry, it is folded about the head of the purchaser after the comely Martinique fashion,--which varies considerably from the modes popular in Guadeloupe or Cayenne,--is fixed into the form thus obtained; and can thereafter be taken off or put on without arrangement or disarrangement, like a cap. The price for calendering a Madras is now two francs and fifteen sous;--and for making-up the turban, six sous additional, except in Carnival-time, or upon holiday occasions, when the price rises to twenty-five sous.... The making-up of the Madras into a turban is called "tying a head" (_marré yon tête_); and a prettily folded turban is spoken of as "a head well tied" (_yon tête bien marré_).... However, the profession of calendeuse is far from being a lucrative one: it is two or three days' work to calender a single Madras well.... But Yzore does not depend upon calendering alone for a living: she earns much more by the manufacture of _moresques_ and of _chinoises_ than by painting Madras turbans.... Everybody in Martinique who can afford it wears moresques and chinoises. The moresques are large loose comfortable pantaloons of thin printed calico (_indienne_),--having colored designs representing birds, frogs, leaves, lizards, flowers, butterflies, or kittens,--or perhaps representing nothing in particular, being simply arabesques. The chinoise is a loose body-garment, very much like the real Chinese blouse, but always of brightly colored calico with fantastic designs. These things are worn at home during siestas, after office-hours, and at night. To take a nap during the day with one's ordinary clothing on means always a terrible drenching from perspiration, and an after-feeling of exhaustion almost indescribable--best expressed, perhaps, by the local term: _corps écrasé_. Therefore, on entering one's room for the siesta, one strips, puts on the light moresques and the chinoise, and dozes in comfort. A suit of this sort is very neat, often quite pretty, and very cheap (costing only about six francs);--the colors do not fade out in washing, and two good suits will last a year.... Yzore can make two pair of moresques and two chinoises in a single day upon her machine. ... I have observed there is a prejudice here against treadle machines;--the creole girls are persuaded they injure the health. Most of the sewing-machines I have seen among this people are operated by hand,--with a sort of little crank.... XII. _February 22d._ ... Old physicians indeed predicted it; but who believed them?... It is as though something sluggish and viewless, dormant and deadly, had been suddenly upstirred to furious life by the wind of robes and tread of myriad dancing feet,--by the crash of cymbals and heavy vibration of drums! Within a few days there has been a frightful increase of the visitation, an almost incredible expansion of the invisible poison: the number of new cases and of deaths has successively doubled, tripled, quadrupled.... ... Great caldrons of tar are kindled now at night in the more thickly peopled streets,--about one hundred paces apart, each being tended by an Indian laborer in the pay of the city: this is done with the idea of purifying the air. These sinister fires are never lighted but in times of pestilence and of tempest: on hurricane nights, when enormous waves roll in from the fathomless sea upon one of the most fearful coasts in the world, and great vessels are being driven ashore, such is the illumination by which the brave men of the coast make desperate efforts to save the lives of shipwrecked men, often at the cost of their own. [19] XIII. _February 23d._ A Coffin passes, balanced on the heads of black men. It holds the body of Pascaline Z----, covered with quick-lime. She was the prettiest, assuredly, among the pretty shopgirls of the Grande Rue,--a rare type of _sang-mêlée_. So oddly pleasing, the young face, that once seen, you could never again dissociate the recollection of it from the memory of the street. But one who saw it last night before they poured quick-lime upon it could discern no features,--only a dark brown mass, like a fungus, too frightful to think about. ... And they are all going thus, the beautiful women of color. In the opinion of physicians, the whole generation is doomed.... Yet a curious fact is that the young children of octoroons are suffering least: these women have their children vaccinated,--though they will not be vaccinated themselves. I see many brightly colored children, too, recovering from the disorder: the skin is not pitted, like that of the darker classes; and the rose-colored patches finally disappear altogether, leaving no trace. ... Here the sick are wrapped in banana leaves, after having been smeared with a certain unguent.... There is an immense demand for banana leaves. In ordinary times these leaves--especially the younger ones, still unrolled, and tender and soft beyond any fabric possible for man to make--are used for poultices of all kinds, and sell from one to two sous each, according to size and quality. XIV. _February 29th._ ... The whites remain exempt from the malady. One might therefore hastily suppose that liability of contagion would be diminished in proportion to the excess of white blood over African; but such is far from being the case;--St. Pierre is losing its handsomest octoroons. Where the proportion of white to black blood is 116 to 8, as in the type called _mamelouc_;--or 122 to 4, as in the _quarteronné_ (not to be confounded with the _quarteron_ or quadroon);--or even 127 to 1, as in the _sang-mêlé_, the liability to attack remains the same, while the chances of recovery are considerably less than in the case of the black. Some few striking instances of immunity appear to offer a different basis for argument; but these might be due to the social position of the individual rather than to any constitutional temper: wealth and comfort, it must be remembered, have no small prophylactic value in such times. Still,--although there is reason to doubt whether mixed races have a constitutional vigor comparable to that of the original parent-races,--the liability to diseases of this class is decided less, perhaps, by race characteristics than by ancestral experience. The white peoples of the world have been practically inoculated, vaccinated, by experience of centuries;--while among these visibly mixed or black populations the seeds of the pest find absolutely fresh soil in which to germinate, and its ravages are therefore scarcely less terrible than those it made among the American-Indian or the Polynesian races in other times. Moreover, there is an unfortunate prejudice against vaccination here. People even now declare that those vaccinated die just as speedily of the plague as those who have never been;--and they can cite cases in proof. It is useless to talk to them about averages of immunity, percentage of liability, etc.;--they have seen with their own eyes persons who had been well vaccinated die of the verette, and that is enough to destroy their faith in the system.... Even the priests, who pray their congregations to adopt the only known safeguard against the disease, can do little against this scepticism. XV. _March 5th._ ... The streets are so narrow in this old-fashioned quarter that even a whisper is audible across them; and after dark I hear a great many things,--sometimes sounds of pain, sobbing, despairing cries as Death makes his round,--sometimes, again, angry words, and laughter, and even song,--always one melancholy chant: the voice has that peculiar metallic timbre that reveals the young negress:-- "_Pauv' ti Lélé, Pauv' ti Lélé! Li gagnin doulè, doulè, doulè,-- Li gagnin doulè Tout-pàtout!_" I want to know who little Lélé was, and why she had pains "all over";--for however artless and childish these creole songs seem, they are invariably originated by some real incident. And at last somebody tells me that "poor little Lélé" had the reputation in other years of being the most unlucky girl in St. Pierre; whatever she tried to do resulted only in misfortune;--when it was morning she wished it were evening, that she might sleep and forget; but when the night came she could not sleep for thinking of the trouble she had had during the day, so that she wished it were morning.... More pleasant it is to hear the chatting of Yzore's childlren across the way, after the sun has set, and the stars come out.... Gabrielle always wants to know what the stars are:-- --"_Ça qui ka clairé conm ça, manman?_" (What is it shines like that?) And Yzore answers:-- --"_Ça, mafi,--c'est ti limiè Bon-Dié._" (Those are the little lights of the Good-God.) --"It is so pretty,--eh, mamma? I want to count them." --"You cannot count them, child." --"One-two-three-four-five-six-seven." Gabrielle can only count up to seven. "_Moin peide!_--I am lost, mamma!" The moon comes up;--she cries:--"_Mi! manman!--gàdé gouôs difé qui adans ciel-à!_ Look at the great fire in the sky." --"It is the Moon, child!... Don't you see St. Joseph in it, carrying a bundle of wood?" --"Yes, mamma! I see him!... A great big bundle of wood!"... But Mimi is wiser in moon-lore: she borrows half a franc from her mother "to show to the Moon." And holding it up before the silver light, she sings:-- "Pretty Moon, I show you my little money;--now let me always have money so long as you shine!" [20] Then the mother takes them up to bed;--and in a little while there floats to me, through the open window, the murmur of the children's evening prayer:-- "Ange-gardien Veillez sur moi; * * * * Ayez pitié de ma faiblesse; Couchez-vous sur mon petit lit; Suivez-moi sans cesse."... [21] I can only catch a line here and there.... They do not sleep immediately;--they continue to chat in bed. Gabrielle wants to know what a guardian-angel is like. And I hear Mimi's voice replying in creole:-- --"_Zange-gàdien, c'est yon jeine fi, toutt bel_." (The guardian-angel is a young girl, all beautiful.) A little while, and there is silence; and I see Yzore come out, barefooted, upon the moonlit balcony of her little room,--looking up and down the hushed street, looking at the sea, looking up betimes at the high flickering of stars,--moving her lips as in prayer.... And, standing there white-robed, with her rich dark hair loose-falling, there is a weird grace about her that recalls those long slim figures of guardian-angels in French religious prints.... XVI. _March 6th_ This morning Manm-Robert brings me something queer,--something hard tied up in a tiny piece of black cloth, with a string attached to hang it round my neck. I must wear it, she says, --"_Ça ça ye, Manm-Robert?_" --"_Pou empêché ou pouend laverette_," she answers. It to keep me from catching the _verette_!... And what is inside it? --"_Toua graines maïs, épi dicamfre_." (Three grains of corn, with a bit of camphor!)... XVII. _March 8th_ ... Rich households throughout the city are almost helpless for the want of servants. One can scarcely obtain help at any price: it is true that young country-girls keep coming into town to fill the places of the dead; but these new-comers fall a prey to the disease much more readily than those who preceded them, And such deaths en represent more than a mere derangement in the mechanism of domestic life. The creole _bonne_ bears a relation to the family of an absolutely peculiar sort,--a relation of which the term "house-servant" does not convey the faintest idea. She is really a member of the household: her association with its life usually begins in childhood, when she is barely strong enough to carry a dobanne of water up-stairs;--and in many cases she has the additional claim of having been born in the house. As a child, she plays with the white children,--shares their pleasures and presents. She is very seldom harshly spoken to, or reminded of the fact that she is a servitor: she has a pet name;--she is allowed much familiarity,--is often permitted to join in conversation when there is no company present, and to express her opinion about domestic affairs. She costs very little to keep; four or five dollars a year will supply her with all necessary clothing;--she rarely wears shoes;--she sleeps on a little straw mattress (_paillasse_) on the floor, or perhaps upon a paillasse supported upon an "elephant" (_lèfan_)--two thick square pieces of hard mattress placed together so as to form an oblong. She is only a nominal expense to the family; and she is the confidential messenger, the nurse, the chamber-maid, the water-carrier,--everything, in short, except cook and washer-woman. Families possessing a really good bonne would not part with her on any consideration. If she has been brought up in the house-hold, she is regarded almost as a kind of adopted child. If she leave that household to make a home of her own, and have ill-fortune afterwards, she will not be afraid to return with her baby, which will perhaps be received and brought up as she herself was, under the old roof. The stranger may feel puzzled at first by this state of affairs; yet the cause is not obscure. It is traceable to the time of the formation of creole society--to the early period of slavery. Among the Latin races,--especially the French,--slavery preserved in modern times many of the least harsh features of slavery in the antique world,--where the domestic slave, entering the _familia_, actually became a member of it. XVIII. _March 10th._ ... Yzore and her little ones are all in Manm-Robert's shop;--she is recounting her troubles,--fresh troubles: forty-seven francs' worth of work delivered on time, and no money received.... So much I hear as I enter the little boutique myself, to buy a package of "_bouts_." --"_Assise!_" says Manm-Robert, handing me her own hair;--she is always pleased to see me, pleased to chat lith me about creole folk-lore. Then observing, a smile exchanged between myself and Mimi, she tells the children to bid me good-day:--"_Alle di bonjou' Missié-a!_" One after another, each holds up a velvety cheek to kiss. And Mimi, who has been asking her mother the same question over and over again for at least five minutes without being able to obtain an answer, ventures to demand of me on the strength of this introduction:-- --"_Missié, oti masque-à?_" --"_Y ben fou, pouloss!_" the mother cries out;--"Why, the child must be going out of her senses!... _Mimi pa 'mbêté moune conm ça!--pa ni piess masque: c'est la-vérette qui ni_." (Don't annoy people like that!--there are no maskers now; there is nothing but the verette!) [You are not annoying me at all, little Mimi; but I would not like to answer your question truthfully. I know where the maskers are,--most of them, child; and I do not think it would be well for you to know. They wear no masks now; but if you were to see them for even one moment, by some extraordinary accident, pretty Mimi, I think you would feel more frightened than you ever felt before.]... --"_Toutt lanuite y k'anni rêvé masque-à_," continues Yzore.... I am curious to know what Mimi's dreams are like;--wonder if I can coax her to tell me.... XIX. ... I have written Mimi's last dream from the child's dictation:-- [22] --"I saw a ball," she says, "I was dreaming: I saw everybody dancing with masks on;--I was looking at them, And all at once I saw that the folks who were dancing were all made of pasteboard. And I saw a commandeur: he asked me what I was doing there, I answered him: 'Why, I saw a ball, and I came to look--what of it?' He answered me:--'Since you are so curious to come and look at other folks' business, you will have to stop here and dance too!' I said to him:--'No! I won't dance with people made of pasteboard;--I am afraid of them!'...And I ran and ran and ran,--I was so much afraid. And I ran into a big garden, where I saw a big cherry-tree that had only leaves upon it; and I saw a man sitting under the cherry-tree, He asked me:--'What are you doing here?' I said to him:--'I am trying to find my way out,' He said:--'You must stay here.' I said:--'No, no!'--and I said, in order to be able to get away:--'Go up there!--you will see a fine ball: all pasteboard people dancing there, and a pasteboard commandeur commanding them!'... And then I got so frightened that I awoke."... ... "And why were you so afraid of them, Mimi?" I ask. --"_Pace yo té toutt vide endedans!_" answers Mimi. (_Because they were all hollow inside_!) XX. _March 19th._ ... The death-rate in St. Pierre is now between three hundred and fifty and four hundred a month. Our street is being depopulated. Every day men come with immense stretchers,--covered with a sort of canvas awning,--to take somebody away to the _lazaretto_. At brief intervals, also, coffins are carried into houses empty, and carried out again followed by women who cry so loud that their sobbing can be heard a great way off. ... Before the visitation few quarters were so densely peopled: there were living often in one small house as many as fifty. The poorer classes had been accustomed from birth to live as simply as animals,--wearing scarcely any clothing, sleeping on bare floors, exposing themselves to all changes of weather, eating the cheapest and coarsest food. Yet, though living under such adverse conditions, no healthier people could be found, perhaps, in the world,--nor a more cleanly. Every yard having its fountain, almost everybody could bathe daily,--and with hundreds it was the custom to enter the river every morning at daybreak, or to take a swim in the bay (the young women here swim as well as the men).... But the pestilence, entering among so dense and unprotected a life, made extraordinarily rapid havoc; and bodily cleanliness availed little against the contagion. Now all the bathing resorts are deserted,--because the lazarettos infect the bay with refuse, and because the clothing of the sick is washed in the Roxelane. ... Guadeloupe, the sister colony, now sends aid;--the sum total is less than a single American merchant might give to a charitable undertaking: but it is a great deal for Guadeloupe to give. And far Cayenne sends money too; and the mother-country will send one hundred thousand francs. XXI. _March 20th._ ... The infinite goodness of this colored population to one another is something which impresses with astonishment those accustomed to the selfishness of the world's great cities. No one is suffered to go to the pest-house who has a bed to lie upon, and a single relative or tried friend to administer remedies;--the multitude who pass through the lazarettos are strangers,--persons from the country who have no home of their own, or servants who are not permitted to remain sick in houses of employers.... There are, however, many cases where a mistress will not suffer her bonne to take the risks of the pest-house,--especially in families where there are no children: the domestic is carefully nursed; a physician hired for her, remedies purchased for her.... But among the colored people themselves the heroism displayed is beautiful, is touching,--something which makes one doubt all accepted theories about the natural egotism of mankind, and would compel the most hardened pessimist to conceive a higher idea of humanity. There is never a moment's hesitation in visiting a stricken individual: every relative, and even the most intimate friends of every relative, may be seen hurrying to the bedside. They take turns at nursing, sitting up all night, securing medical attendance and medicines, without ever thought of the danger,--nay, of the almost absolute certainty of contagion. If the patient have no means, all contribute: what the sister or brother has not, the uncle or the aunt, the godfather or godmother, the cousin, brother-in-law or sister-in-law, may be able to give. No one dreams of refusing money or linen or wine or anything possible to give, lend, or procure on credit. Women seem to forget that they are beautiful, that they are young, that they are loved,--forget everything but sense of that which they hold to be duty. You see young girls of remarkably elegant presence,--young colored girls well educated and _élevées-en-chapeau_ [23] (that is say, brought up like white creole girls, dressed and accomplished like them), voluntarily leave rich homes to nurse some poor mulatress or capresse in the indigent quarters of the town, because the sick one happens to be a distant relative. They will not trust others to perform this for them;--they feel bound to do it in person. I heard such a one say, in reply to some earnest protest about thus exposing herself (she had never been vaccinated);--"_Ah! quand il s'agit du devoir, la vie ou la mort c'est pour moi la même chose_." ... But without any sanitary law to check this self-immolation, and with the conviction that in the presence of duty, or what is believed to be duty, "life or death is same thing," or ought to be so considered,--you can readily imagine how soon the city must become one vast hospital. XXII. ... By nine o'clock, as a general rule, St. Pierre becomes silent: everyone here retires early and rises with the sun. But sometimes, when the night is exceptionally warm, people continue to sit at their doors and chat until a far later hour; and on such a night one may hear and see curious things, in this period of plague.... It is certainly singular that while the howling of a dog at night has no ghastly signification here (nobody ever pays the least attention to the sound, however hideous), the moaning and screaming of cats is believed to bode death; and in these times folks never appear to feel too sleepy to rise at any hour and drive them away when they begin their cries.... To-night--a night so oppressive that all but the sick are sitting up--almost a panic is created in our street by a screaming of cats;--and long after the creatures have been hunted out of sight and hearing, everybody who has a relative ill with the prevailing malady continues to discuss the omen with terror. ... Then I observe a colored child standing bare-footed in the moonlight, with her little round arms uplifted and hands joined above her head. A more graceful little figure it would be hard to find as she appears thus posed; but, all unconsciously, she is violating another superstition by this very attitude; and the angry mother shrieks:-- --"_Ti manmaille-là!--tiré lanmain-ou assous tête-ou, foute! pisse moin encò là!... Espéré moin allé lazarett avant metté lanmain conm ça!_" (Child, take down your hands from your head... because I am here yet! Wait till I go to the lazaretto before you put up your hands like that!) For it was the savage, natural, primitive gesture of mourning,--of great despair. ... Then all begin to compare their misfortunes, to relate their miseries;--they say grotesque things,--even make jests about their troubles. One declares:-- --"_Si moin té ka venne chapeau, à fòce moin ni malhè, toutt manman sé fai yche yo sans tête._" (I have that ill-luck, that if I were selling hats all the mothers would have children without heads!) --Those who sit at their doors, I observe, do not sit, a rule, upon the steps, even when these are of wood. There is a superstition which checks such a practice. "_Si ou assise assous pas-lapòte, ou ké pouend doulè toutt moune_." (If you sit upon the door-step, you will take the pain of all who pass by.) XXIII. _March 30th._ Good Friday.... The bells have ceased to ring,--even the bells for the dead; the hours are marked by cannon-shots. The ships in the harbor form crosses with their spars, turn their flags upside down. And the entire colored population put on mourning:--it is a custom among them centuries old. You will not perceive a single gaudy robe to-day, a single calendered Madras: not a speck of showy color visible through all the ways of St. Pierre. The costumes donned are all similar to those worn for the death relatives: either full mourning,--a black robe with violet foulard, and dark violet-banded headkerchief; or half-mourning,--a dark violet robe with black foulard and turban;--the half-mourning being worn only by those who cannot afford the more sombre costume. From my winndow I can see long processions climbing the mornes about the city, to visit the shrines and crucifixes, and to pray for the cessation of the pestilence. ... Three o'clock. Three cannon-shots shake the hill: it is the supposed hour of the Saviour's death. All believers--whether in the churches, on the highways, or in their homes--bow down and kiss the cross thrice, or, if there be no cross, press their lips three times to the ground or the pavement, and utter those three wishes which if expressed precisely at this traditional moment will surely, it is held, be fulfilled. Immense crowds are assembled before the crosses on the heights, and about the statue of Notre Dame de la Garde. ... There is no hubbub in the streets; there is not even the customary loud weeping to be heard as the coffins go by. One must not complain to-day, nor become angry, nor utter unkind words,--any fault committed on Good Friday is thought to obtain a special and awful magnitude in the sight of Heaven.... There is a curious saying in vogue here. If a son or daughter grow up vicious,--become a shame to the family and a curse to the parents,--it is observed of such:--"_Ça, c'est yon péché Vendredi-Saint!_" (Must be a _Good-Friday sin!_) There are two other strange beliefs connected with Good Friday. One is that it always rains on that day,--that the sky weeps for the death of the Saviour; and that this rain, if caught in a vessel, will never evaporate or spoil, and will cure all diseases. The other is that only Jesus Christ died precisely at three o'clock. Nobody else ever died exactly at that hour;--they may die a second before or a second after three, but never exactly at three. XXIV. _March 31st._ ... Holy Saturday morning;--nine o'clock. All the bells suddenly ring out; the humming of the bourdon blends with the thunder of a hundred guns: this is the _Gloria!_... At this signal it is a religious custom for the whole coast-population to enter the sea, and for those living too far from the beach to bathe in the rivers. But rivers and sea are now alike infected;--all the linen of the lazarettos has been washed therein; and to-day there are fewer bathers than usual. But there are twenty-seven burials. Now they are ring the dead two together: the cemeteries are over-burdened.... XXV. ... In most of the old stone houses you will occasionally see spiders of terrifying size,--measuring across perhaps as much as six inches from the tip of one out-stretched leg to the tip of its opposite fellow, as they cling to the wall. I never heard of anyone being bitten by them; and among the poor it is deemed unlucky to injure or drive them away.... But early this morning Yzore swept her house clean, and ejected through door-way quite a host of these monster insects. Manm-Robert is quite dismayed:-- --"_Fesis-Maïa!_--ou 'lè malhè encò pou fai ça, chè?" (You want to have still more bad luck, that you do such a thing?) And Yzore answers:-- --"_Toutt moune içitt pa ni yon sou!--gouôs conm ça fil zagrignin, et moin pa menm mangé! Epi laverette encò.... Moin couè toutt ça ka pòté malhè!_" (No one here has a sou!--heaps of cobwebs like that, and nothing to eat yet; and the verette into the bargain... I think those things bring bad luck.) --"Ah! you have not eaten yet!" cries Manm-Robert. "_Vini épi moin!_" (Come with me!) And Yzore--already feeling a little remorse for her treatment of the spiders--murmurs apologetically as she crosses over to Manm-Robert's little shop:--"_Moin pa tchoué yo; moin chassé yo--ké vini encò_." (I did not kill them; I only put them out;--they will come back again.) But long afterwards, Manm-Robert remarked to me that they never went back.... XXVI. _April 5th._ --"_Toutt bel bois ka allé_," says Manm-Robert. (All the beautiful trees are going.)... I do not understand. --"_Toutt bel bois--toutt bel moune ka alle_," she adds, interpretatively. (All the "beautiful trees,"--all the handsome people,--are passing away.)... As in the speech of the world's primitive poets, so in the creole patois is a beautiful woman compared with a comely tree: nay, more than this, the name of the object is actually substituted for that of the living being. _Yon bel bois_ may mean a fine tree: it more generally signifies a graceful woman: this is the very comparison made by Ulysses looking upon Nausicaa, though more naively expressed. ... And now there comes to me the recollection of a creole ballad illustrating the use of the phrase,--a ballad about a youth of Fort-de-France sent to St. Pierre by his father to purchase a stock of dobannes, [24] who, falling in love with a handsome colored girl, spent all his father's money in buying her presents and a wedding outfit:-- "Moin descenne Saint-Piè Acheté dobannes Auliè ces dobannes C'est yon _bel-bois_ moin mennein monté!" ("I went down to Saint-Pierre to buy dobannes: instead of the dobannes, 'tis a pretty tree--a charming girl--that I bring back with me") --"Why, who is dead now, Manm-Robert?" --"It is little Marie, the porteuse, who has got the verette. She is gone to the lazaretto." XXVII. _April 7th._ --_Toutt bel bois ka allé_.... News has just come that Ti Marie died last night at the lazaretto of the Fort: she was attacked by what they call the _lavérette-pouff_,--a form of the disease which strangles its victim within a few hours. Ti Marie was certainly the neatest little màchanne I ever knew. Without being actually pretty, her face had a childish charm which made it a pleasure to look at her;--and she had a clear chocolate-red skin, a light compact little figure, and a remarkably symmetrical pair of little feet which had never felt the pressure of a shoe. Every morning I used to hear her passing cry, just about daybreak:--"_Qui 'lè café?--qui 'lè sirop?_" (Who wants coffee?--who wants syrup?) She looked about sixteen, but was a mother. "Where is her husband?" I ask. "_Nhomme-y mò laverette 'tou_." (Her man died of the verette also.) "And the little one, her _yche_?" "Y lazarett." (At the lazaretto.)... But only those without friends or relatives in the city are suffered to go to the lazaretto;--Ti Marie cannot have been of St. Pierre? --"No: she was from Vauclin," answers Manrn-Robert. "You do not often see pretty red girls who are natives of St. Pierre. St. Pierre has pretty _sang-mêlées_. The pretty red girls mostly come from Vauclin. The yellow ones, who are really _bel-bois_, are from Grande Anse: they are banana-colored people there. At Gros-Morne they are generally black."... XXVIII. ... It appears that the red race here, the _race capresse_, is particularly liable to the disease. Every family employing capresses for house-servants loses them;--one family living at the next corner has lost four in succession.... The tint is a cinnamon or chocolate color;--the skin is naturally clear, smooth, glossy: it is of the capresse especially that the term "sapota-skin" (_peau-chapoti_) is used,--coupled with all curious creole adjectives to express what is comely,--_jojoll, beaujoll_, etc. [25] The hair is long, but bushy; the limbs light and strong, and admirably shaped.... I am told that when transported to a colder climate, the capre or capresse partly loses this ruddy tint. Here, under the tropic sun, it has a beauty only possible to imitate in metal.... And because photography cannot convey any idea of this singular color, the capresse hates a photograph.--"_Moin pas nouè_," she says;--"_moin ouôuge: ou fai moin nouè nans pòtrait-à_." (I am not black: I am red:--you make me black in that portrait.) It is difficult to make her pose before the camera: she is red, as she avers, beautifully red; but the malicious instrument makes her gray or black--_nouè conm poule-zo-nouè_ ("black as a black-boned hen!") ... And this red race is disappearing from St. Pierre--doubtless also from other plague-stricken centres. XXIX. _April 10th._ Manm-Robert is much annoyed and puzzled because the American steamer--the _bom-mangé_, as she calls does not come. It used to bring regularly so many barrels of potatoes and beans, so much lard and cheese garlic and dried pease--everything, almost, of which she keeps a stock. It is now nearly eight weeks since the cannon of a New York steamer aroused the echoes the harbor. Every morning Manm-Robert has been sending out her little servant Louis to see if there is any sign of the American packet:--"_Allé ouè Batterie d' Esnotz si bom-mangé-à pas vini_." But Louis always returns with same rueful answer:-- --"_Manm-Robert, pa ni piess bom-mangé_" (there is not so much as a bit of a _bom-mangé_). ... "No more American steamers for Martinique:" that is the news received by telegraph! The disease has broken out among the shipping; the harbors have been delared infected. United States mail-packets drop their Martinique mails at St. Kitt's or Dominica, and pass us by. There will be suffering now among the _canotiers_, the _caboteurs_, all those who live by stowing or unloading cargo;--great warehouses are being closed up, and strong men discharged, because there will be nothing for them to do. ... They are burying twenty-five _verettiers_ per day in city. But never was this tropic sky more beautiful;--never was this circling sea more marvellously blue;--never were the mornes more richly robed in luminous green, under a more golden day.... And it seems strange that Nature should remain so lovely.... ... Suddenly it occurs to me that I have not seen Yzore nor her children for some days; and I wonder if they have moved away.... Towards evening, passing by Manm-Robert's, I ask about them. The old woman answers me very gravely:-- --"_Atò, mon chè, c'est Yzore qui ni laverette!_" The mother has been seized by the plague at last. But Manm-Robert will look after her; and Manm-Robert has taken charge of the three little ones, who are not now allowed to leave the house, for fear some one should tell them what it were best they should not know.... _Pauv ti manmaille!_ XXX. _April 13th._ ... Still the vérette does not attack the native whites. But the whole air has become poisoned; the sanitary condition of the city becomes unprecedentedly bad; and a new epidemic makes its appearance,--typhoid fever. And now the békés begin to go, especially the young and strong; and the bells keep sounding for them, and the tolling bourdon fills the city with its enormous hum all day and far into the night. For these are rich; and the high solemnities of burial are theirs--the coffin of acajou, and the triple ringing, and the Cross of Gold to be carried before them as they pass to their long sleep under the palms,--saluted for the last time by all the population of St. Pierre, standing bareheaded in the sun.... ... Is it in times like these, when all the conditions are febrile, that one is most apt to have queer dreams? Last night it seemed to me that I saw that Carnival dance again,--the hooded musicians, the fantastic torrent of peaked caps, and the spectral masks, and the swaying of bodies and waving of arms,--but soundless as a passing of smoke. There were figures I thought I knew;--hands I had somewhere seen reached out and touched me in silence;--and then, all suddenly, a Viewless Something seemed to scatter the shapes as leaves are blown by a wind.... And waking, I thought I heard again,--plainly as on that last Carnival afternoon,--the strange cry of fear:--"_C'est Bon-Dié ka passé!_"... XXXI. _April 20th._ Very early yesterday morning Yzore was carried away under a covering of quick-lime: the children do not know; Manm-Robert took heed they should not see. They have been told their mother has been taken to the country to get well,--that the doctor will bring her back.... All the furniture is to be sold at auction to debts;--the landlord was patient, he waited four months; the doctor was kindly: but now these must have their due. Everything will be bidden off, except the chapelle, with its Virgin and angels of porcelain: _yo pa ka pè venne Bon-Dié_ (the things of the Good-God must not be sold). And Manm-Robert will take care little ones. The bed--a relic of former good-fortune,--a great Martinique bed of carved heavy native wood,--a _lit-à-bateau_ (boat-bed), so called because shaped almost like a barge, perhaps--will surely bring three hundred francs;--the armoire, with its mirror doors, not less than two hundred and fifty. There is little else of value: the whole will not fetch enough to pay all the dead owes. XXXII. _April 28th._ _--Tam-tam-tam!--tam-tam-tam!_... It is the booming of the auction-drum from the Place: Yzore's furniture is about to change hands. The children start at the sound, so vividly associated in their minds with the sights of Carnival days, with the fantastic mirth of the great processional dance: they run to the sunny street, calling to each other.--_Vini ouè!_--they look up and down. But there is a great quiet in the Rue du Morne Mirail;--the street is empty. ... Manm-Robert enters very weary: she has been at the sale, trying to save something for the children, but the prices were too high. In silence she takes her accustomed seat at the worn counter of her little shop; the young ones gather about her, caress her;--Mimi looks up laughing into the kind brown face, and wonders why Manm-Robert will not smile. Then Mimi becomes afraid to ask where the maskers are,--why they do not come, But little Maurice, bolder and less sensitive, cries out:-- --"_Manm-Robert, oti masque-à?_" Manm-Robert does not answer;--she does not hear. She is gazing directly into the young faces clustered about her knee,--yet she does not see them: she sees far, far beyond them,--into the hidden years. And, suddenly, with a savage tenderness in her voice, she utters all the dark thought of her heart for them:-- --"_Toua ti blancs sans lesou!--qutitté moin châché papaou qui adans cimétiè pou vini pouend ou tou!_" (Ye three little penniless white ones!--let me go call your father, who is in the cemetery, to come and take you also away!) CHAPTER VI. LES BLANCHISSEUSES. I. Whoever stops for a few months in St. Pierre is certain, sooner or later, to pass an idle half-hour in that charming place of Martinique idlers,--the beautiful Savane du Fort,--and, once there, is equally certain to lean a little while over the mossy parapet of the river-wall to watch the _blanchisseuses_ at work. It has a curious interest, this spectacle of primitive toil: the deep channel of the Roxelane winding under the palm-crowned heights of the Fort; the blinding whiteness of linen laid out to bleach for miles upon the huge bowlders of porphyry and prismatic basalt; and the dark bronze-limbed women, with faces hidden under immense straw hats, and knees in the rushing torrent,--all form a scene that makes one think of the earliest civilizations. Even here, in this modern colony, it is nearly three centuries old; and it will probably continue thus at the Rivière des Blanchisseuses for fully another three hundred years. Quaint as certain weird Breton legends whereof it reminds you,--especially if you watch it before daybreak while the city still sleeps,--this fashion of washing is not likely to change. There is a local prejudice against new methods, new inventions, new ideas;--several efforts at introducing a less savage style of washing proved unsuccessful; and an attempt to establish a steam-laundry resulted in failure. The public were quite contented with the old ways of laundrying, and saw no benefits to be gained by forsaking them;--while the washers and ironers engaged by the laundry proprietor at higher rates than they had ever obtained before soon wearied of in-door work, abandoned their situations, and returned with a sense of relief to their ancient way of working out in the blue air and the wind of the hills, with their feet in the mountain-water and their heads in the awful sun. ... It is one of the sights of St. Pierre,--this daily scene at the River of the Washerwomen: everybody likes to watch it;--the men, because among the blanchisseuses there are not a few decidedly handsome girls; the wormen, probably because a woman feels always interested in woman's work. All the white bridges of the Roxelane are dotted with lookers-on during fine days, and particularly in the morning, when every bonne on her way to and from the market stops a moment to observe or to greet those blanchisseuses whom she knows. Then one hears such a calling and clamoring,--such an intercrossing of cries from the bridge to the river, and the river to the bridge.... "Ouill! Noémi!"... "Coument ou yé, chè?"... "Eh! Pascaline!",..."Bonjou', Youtte!--Dede!-Fifi!--Henrillia!"... "Coument ou kallé, Cyrillia?"... "Toutt douce, chè!--et Ti Mémé?"... "Y bien;--oti Ninotte?"... "Bo ti manmaille pou moin, chè--ou tanne?"... But the bridge leading to the market of the Fort is the poorest point of view; for the better classes of blanchisseuses are not there: only the lazy, the weak, or non-professionals--house-servants, who do washing at the river two or three times a month as part of their family-service--are apt to get so far down. The experienced professionals and early risers secure the best places and choice of rocks; and among the hundreds at work you can discern something like a physical gradation. At the next bridge the women look better, stronger; more young faces appear; and the further you follow the river-course towards the Jardin des Plantes, the more the appearance of the blanchisseuses improves,--so that within the space of a mile you can see well exemplified one natural law of life's struggle,--the best chances to the best constitutions. [Illustration: RIVIÈRE DES BLANCHISSEUSES.] You might also observe, if you watch long enough, that among the blanchisseuses there are few sufficiently light of color to be classed as bright mulatresses;--the majority are black or of that dark copper-red race which is perhaps superior to the black creole in strength and bulk; for it requires a skin insensible to sun as well as the toughest of constitutions to be a blanchisseuse. A porteuse can begin to make long trips at nine or ten years; but no girl is strong enough to learn the washing-trade until she is past twelve. The blanchisseuse is the hardest worker among the whole population;--her daily labor is rarely less than thirteen hours; and during the greater part of that time she is working in the sun, and standing up to her knees in water that descends quite cold from the mountain peaks. Her labor makes her perspire profusely and she can never venture to cool herself by further immersion without serious danger of pleurisy. The trade is said to kill all who continue at it beyond a certain number of years:--"_Nou ka mò toutt dleau_" (we all die of the water), one told me, replying to a question. No feeble or light-skinned person can attempt to do a single day's work of this kind without danger; and a weak girl, driven by necessity to do her own washing, seldom ventures to go to the river. Yet I saw an instance of such rashness one day. A pretty sang-mêlée, perhaps about eighteen or nineteen years old,--whom I afterwards learned had just lost her mother and found herself thus absolutely destitute,--began to descend one of the flights of stone steps leading to the river, with a small bundle upon her head; and two or three of the blanchisseuses stopped their work to look at her. A tall capresse inquired mischievously:-- --"_Ou vini pou pouend yon bain?_" (Coming to take a bath?) For the river is a great bathing-place. --"_Non; moin vini lavé_." (No; I am coming to wash.) --"_Aïe! aïe! aïe!--y vini lavé!_"... And all within hearing laughed together. "Are you crazy, girl?--_ess ou fou?_" The tall capresse snatched the bundle from her, opened it, threw a garment to her nearest neighbor, another to the next one, dividing the work among a little circle of friends, and said to the stranger, "_Non ké lavé toutt ça ba ou bien vite, chè,--va, amisé ou!_" (We'll wash this for you very quickly, dear--go and amuse yourself!) These kind women even did more for the poor girl;--they subscribed to buy her a good breakfast, when the food-seller--the màchanne-mangé--made her regular round among them, with fried fish and eggs and manioc flour and bananas. II. All of the multitude who wash clothing at the river are not professional blanchisseuses. Hundreds of women, too poor to pay for laundrying, do their own work at the Roxelane;--and numerous bonnes there wash the linen of their mistresses as a regular part of their domestic duty. But even if the professionals did not always occupy a certain well-known portion of the channel, they could easily be distinguished from others by their rapid and methodical manner of work, by the ease with which immense masses of linen are handled by them, and, above all, by their way of whipping it against the rocks. Furthermore, the greater number of professionals are likewise teachers, mistresses (_bou'geoises_), and have their apprentices beside them,--young girls from twelve to sixteen years of age. Among these _apprenti_, as they are called in the patois, there are many attractive types, such as idlers upon the bridges like to look at. If, after one year of instruction, the apprentice fails to prove a good washer, it is not likely she will ever become one; and there are some branches of the trade requiring a longer period of teaching and of practice. The young girl first learns simply to soap and wash the linen in the river, which operation is called "rubbing" (_frotté_ in creole);--after she can do this pretty well, she is taught the curious art of whipping it (_fessé_). You can hear the sound of the fesse a great way off, echoing and re-echoing among the mornes: it is not a sharp smacking noise, as the name might seem to imply, but a heavy hollow sound exactly like that of an axe splitting dry timber. In fact, it so closely resembles the latter sound that you are apt on first hearing it to look up at the mornes with the expectation of seeing woodmen there at work. And it is not made by striking the linen with anything, but only by lashing it against the sides of the rocks.... After a piece has been well rubbed and rinsed, it is folded up into a peculiar sheaf-shape, and seized by the closely gathered end for the fessé. Then the folding process is repeated on the reverse, and the other end whipped. This process expels suds that rinsing cannot remove: it must be done very dexterously to avoid tearing or damaging the material. By an experienced hand the linen is never torn; and even pearl and bone buttons are much less often broken than might be supposed. The singular echo is altogether due to the manner of folding the article for the fessé. After this, all the pieces are spread out upon the rocks, in the sun, for the "first bleaching" (_pouèmiè lablanie_). In the evening they are gathered into large wooden trays or baskets, and carried to what is called the "lye-house" (_lacaïe lessive_)--overlooking the river from a point on the fort bank opposite to the higher end of the Savane. There each blanchisseuse hires a small or a large vat, or even several,--according to the quantity of work done,--at two, three, or ten sous, and leaves her washing to steep in lye (_coulé_ is the creole word used) during the night. There are watchmen to guard it. Before daybreak it is rinsed in warm water; then it is taken back to the river,--is rinsed again, bleached again, blued and starched. Then it is ready for ironing. To press and iron well is the most difficult part of the trade. When an apprentice is able to iron a gentleman's shirt nicely, and a pair of white pantaloons, she is considered to have finished her time;--she becomes a journey-woman (_ouvouïyé_). Even in a country where wages are almost incredibly low, the blanchisseuse earns considerable money. There is no fixed scale of prices: it is even customary to bargain with these women beforehand. Shirts and white pantaloons figure at six and eight cents in laundry bills; but other washing is much cheaper. I saw a lot of thirty-three pieces--including such large ones as sheets, bed-covers, and several douillettes (the long Martinique trailing robes of one piece from neck to feet)--for which only three francs was charged. Articles are frequently stolen or lost by house-servants sent to do washing at the river; but very seldom indeed by the regular blanchisseuses. Few of them can read or write or understand owners' marks on wearing apparel; and when you see at the river the wilderness of scattered linen, the seemingly enormous confusion, you cannot understand how these women manage to separate and classify it all. Yet they do this admirably,--and for that reason perhaps more than any other, are able to charge fair rates;--it is false economy to have your washing done by the house-servant;--with the professionals your property is safe. And cheap as her rates are, a good professional can make from twenty-five to thirty francs a week; averaging fully a hundred francs a month,--as much as many a white clerk can earn in the stores of St. Pierre, and quite as much (considering local differences in the purchasing power of money) as $60 per month would represent in the United States. Probably the ability to earn large wages often tempts the blanchisseuse to continue at her trade until it kills her. The "water-disease," as she calls it (_maladie-dleau_), makes its appearance after middle-life: the feet, lower limbs, and abdomen swell enormously, while the face becomes almost fleshless;--then, gradually tissues give way, muscles yield, and the whole physical structure crumbles. Nevertheless, the blanchisseuse is essentially a sober liver,--never a drunkard. In fact, she is sober from rigid necessity: she would not dare to swallow one mouthful of spirits while at work with her feet in the cold water;--everybody else in Martinique, even the little children, can drink rum; the blanchisseuse cannot, unless she wishes to die of a congestion. Her strongest refreshment is _mabi_,--a mild, effervescent, and, I think, rather disagreeable, beer made from molasses. III. Always before daybreak they rise to work, while the vapors of the mornes fill the air with scent of mouldering vegetation,--clayey odors,--grassy smells: there is only a faint gray light, and the water of the river is very chill. One by one they arrive, barefooted, under their burdens built up tower-shape on their trays;--silently as ghosts they descend the steps to the river-bed, and begin to unfold and immerse their washing. They greet each other as they come, then become silent again; there is scarcely any talking: the hearts of all are heavy with the heaviness of the hour. But the gray light turns yellow; the sun climbs over the peaks: light changes the dark water to living crystal; and all begin to chatter a little. Then the city awakens; the currents of its daily life circulate again,--thinly and slowly at first, then swiftly and strongly,--up and down every yellow street, and through the Savane, and over the bridges of the river. Passers-by pause to look down, and cry "_bonjou', che!_" Idle men stare at some pretty washer, till she points at them and cries:--"_Gadé Missie-à ka guetté nou!--anh!--anh!--anh!_" And all the others look up and repeat the groan--"_anh!--anh!--anh!_" till the starers beat a retreat. The air grows warmer; the sky blue takes fire: the great light makes joy for the washers; they shout to each other from distance to distance, jest, laugh, sing. Gusty of speech these women are: long habit of calling to one another through the roar of the torrent has given their voices a singular sonority and force: it is well worth while to hear them sing. One starts the song,--the next joins her; then another and another, till all the channel rings with the melody from the bridge of the Jardin des Plantes to the Pont-bois:- "C'est main qui té ka lavé, Passé, raccommodé: Y té néf hè disouè Ou metté moin derhò,--Yche main assous bouas moin;--Laplie té ka tombé--Léfan moin assous tête moin! Doudoux, ou m'abandonne! Moin pa ni pèsonne pou soigné moin." [26] ... A melancholy chant--originally a Carnival improvisation made to bring public shame upon the perpetrator of a cruel act;--but it contains the story of many of these lives--the story of industrious affectionate women temporarily united to brutal and worthless men in a country where legal marriages are rare. Half of the creole songs which I was able to collect during a residence of nearly two years in the island touch upon the same sad theme. Of these, "Chè Manman Moin," a great favorite still with the older blanchisseuses, has a simple pathos unrivalled, I believe, in the oral literature of this people. Here is an attempt to translate its three rhymeless stanzas into prose; but the childish sweetness of the patois original is lost:-- CHÈ MANMAN MOIN. I. ... "Dear mamma, once you were young like I;--dear papa, you also have been young;--dear great elder brother, you too have been young. Ah! let me cherish this sweet friendship!--so sick my heart is--yes, 'tis very, very ill, this heart of mine: love, only love can make it well again."... II. "0 cursed eyes he praised that led me to him! 0 cursed lips of mine which ever repeated his name! 0 cursed moment in which I gave up my heart to the ingrate who no longer knows how to love."... III. "Doudoux, you swore to me by heaven!--doudoux, you swore to me by your faith!... And now you cannot come to me?... Oh! my heart is withering with pain!... I was passing by the cemetery;--I saw my name upon a stone--all by itself. I saw two white roses; and in a moment one faded and fell before me.... So my forgotten heart will be!"... The air is not so charming, however, as that of a little song which every creole knows, and which may be often heard still at the river: I think it is the prettiest of all creole melodies. "To-to-to" (patois for the French _toc_) is an onomatope for the sound of knocking at a door. "_To, to, to!_--Ça qui là?'-- 'C'est moin-mênme, lanmou;--Ouvé lapott ba moin!' "_To, to, to!_--Ça qui là?'-- 'C'est moin-mênme lanmou, Qui ka ba ou khè moin!' "_To, to, to!_--Ça qui là?'-- 'C'est moin-mênme lanmou, Laplie ka mouillé moin!'" [_To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self Love: open the door for me." _To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--"'Tis mine own self Love, who give my heart to thee." _To-to-to_... "Who taps there?"--" "'Tis mine own self Love: open thy door to me;--the rain is wetting me!"] ... But it is more common to hear the blanchisseuses singing merry, jaunty, sarcastic ditties,--Carnival compositions,--in which the African sense of rhythmic melody is more marked:--"Marie-Clémence maudi," "Loéma tombé," "Quand ou ni ti mari jojoll." --At mid-day the màchanne-mangé comes, with her girls,--carrying trays of fried fish, and _akras_, and cooked beans, and bottles of mabi. The blanchisseuses buy, and eat with their feet in the water, using rocks for tables. Each has her little tin cup to drink her mabi in... Then the washing and the chanting and the booming of the fessé begin again. Afternoon wanes;--school-hours close; and children of many beautiful colors come to the river, and leap down the steps crying, "_Eti! manman!"--"Sésé!"--"Nenneine!_" calling their elder sisters, mothers, and godmothers: the little boys strip naked to play in the water a while.... Towards sunset the more rapid and active workers begin to gather in their linen, and pile it on trays. Large patches of bald rock appear again.... By six o'clock almost the whole bed of the river is bare;--the women are nearly all gone. A few linger a while on the Savane, to watch the last-comer. There is always a great laugh at the last to leave the channel: they ask her if she has not forgotten "to lock up the river." --"_Ou fèmé lapòte lariviè, chè-anh?_" --"_Ah! oui, chè!--moin fèmé y, ou tanne?--moin ni laclé-à!_" (Oh yes, dear. I locked it up,--you hear?--I've got the key!) But there are days and weeks when they do not sing,--times of want or of plague, when the silence of the valley is broken only by the sound of linen beaten upon the rocks, and the great voice of the Roxelane, which will sing on when the city itself shall have ceased to be, just as it sang one hundred thousand years ago.... "Why do they not sing to-day?" I once asked during the summer of 1887, --a year of pestilence. "_Yo ka pensé toutt lanmizè yo,--toutt lapeine yo_," I was answered. (They are thinking of all their trouble, all their misery.) Yet in all seasons, while youth and strength stay with them, they work on in wind and sun, mist and rain, washing the linen of the living and the dead,--white wraps for the newly born, white robes for the bride, white shrouds for them that pass into the Great Silence. And the torrent that wears away the ribs of the perpetual hills wears away their lives,--sometimes slowly, slowly as black basalt is worn,--sometimes suddenly,--in the twinkling of an eye. For a strange danger ever menaces the blanchisseuse,--the treachery of the stream!... Watch them working, and observe how often they turn their eyes to the high north-east, to look at Pelée. Pelée gives them warning betimes. When all is sunny in St. Pierre, and the harbor lies blue as lapis-lazuli, there may be mighty rains in the region of the great woods and the valleys of the higher peaks; and thin streams swell to raging floods which burst suddenly from the altitudes, rolling down rocks and trees and wreck of forests, uplifting crags, devastating slopes. And sometimes, down the ravine of the Roxelane, there comes a roar as of eruption, with a rush of foaming water like a moving mountain-wall; and bridges and buildings vanish with its passing. In 1865 the Savane, high as it lies above the river-bed, was flooded;--and all the bridges were swept into the sea. So the older and wiser blanchisseuses keep watch upon Pelée; and if a blackness gather over it, with lightnings breaking through, then--however fair the sun shine on St. Pierre--the alarm is given, the miles of bleaching linen vanish from the rocks in a few minutes, and every one leaves the channel. But it has occasionally happened that Pelée gave no such friendly signal before the river rose: thus lives have been lost. Most of the blanchisseuses are swimmers, and good ones,--I have seen one of these girls swim almost out of sight in the harbor, during an idle hour;--but no swimmer has any chances in a rising of the Roxelane: all overtaken by it are stricken by rocks and drift;--_yo crazé_, as a creole term expresses it,--a term signifying to crush, to bray, to dash to pieces. ... Sometimes it happens that one who has been absent at home for a brief while returns to the river only to meet her comrades fleeing from it,--many leaving their linen behind them. But she will not abandon the linen intrusted to her: she makes a run for it,--in spite of warning screams,--in spite of the vain clutching of kind rough fingers. She gains the river-bed;--the flood has already reached her waist, but she is strong; she reaches her linen,--snatches it up, piece by piece, scattered as it is--"one!--two!--five!--seven!"--there is a roaring in her ears--"eleven!--thirteen!" she has it all... but now the rocks are moving! For one instant she strives to reach the steps, only a few yards off;--another, and the thunder of the deluge is upon her,--and the crushing crags,--and the spinning trees.... Perhaps before sundown some canotier may find her floating far in the bay,--drifting upon her face in a thousand feet of water,--with faithful dead hands still holding fast the property of her employer. CHAPTER VII. LA PELÉE. I. The first attempt made to colonize Martinique was abandoned almost as soon as begun, because the leaders of the expedition found the country "too rugged and too mountainous," and were "terrified by the prodigious number of serpents which covered its soil." Landing on June 25, 1635, Olive and Duplessis left the island after a few hours' exploration, or, rather, observation, and made sail for Guadeloupe,--according to the quaint and most veracious history of Père Dutertre, of the Order of Friars-Preachers. A single glance at the topographical map of Martinique would suffice to confirm the father's assertion that the country was found to be _trop haché et trop montueux_: more than two-thirds of it is peak and mountain;--even to-day only 42,445 of its supposed 98,782 hectares have been cultivated; and on page 426 of the last "Annuaire" (1887) I find the statement that in the interior there are extensive Government lands of which the area is "not exactly known." Yet mountainous as a country must be which--although scarcely forty-nine miles long and twenty miles in average breadth--remains partly unfamiliar to its own inhabitants after nearly three centuries of civilization (there are not half a dozen creoles who have travelled all over it), only two elevations in Martinique bear the name _montagne_. These are La Montagne Pelée, in the north, and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south. The term _morne_, used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain altitudes of volcanic origin, a term rather unsatisfactorily translated in certain dictionaries as "a small mountain," is justly applied to the majority of Martinique hills, and unjustly sometimes even to its mightiest elevation,--called Morne Pelé, or Montagne Pelée, or simply "La Montagne," according, perhaps, to the varying degree of respect it inspires in different minds. But even in the popular nomenclature one finds the orography of Martinique, as well as of other West Indian islands, regularly classified by _pitons_, _mornes_, and _monts_ or _montagnes_. Mornes usually have those beautiful and curious forms which bespeak volcanic origin even to the unscientific observer: they are most often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height; but have summits either rounded or truncated;--their sides, green with the richest vegetation, rise from valley-levels and coast-lines with remarkable abruptness, and are apt to be curiously ribbed or wrinkled. The pitons, far fewer in number, are much more fantastic in form;--volcanic cones, or volcanic upheavals of splintered strata almost at right angles,--sometimes sharp of line as spires, and mostly too steep for habitation. They are occasionally mammiform, and so symmetrical that one might imagine them artificial creations,--particularly when they occur in pairs. Only a very important mass is dignified by the name _montagne_... there are, as I have already observed, but two thus called in all Martinique,--Pelée, the head and summit of the island; and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south-east. Vauclin is inferior in height and bulk to several mornes and pitons of the north and north-west,--and owes its distinction probably to its position as centre of a system of ranges: but in altitude and mass and majesty, Pelée far outranks everything in the island, and well deserves its special appellation, "La Montagne." No description could give the reader a just idea of what Martinique is, configuratively, so well as the simple statement that, although less than fifty miles in extreme length, and less than twenty in average breadth, there are upwards of _four hundred mountains_ in this little island, or of what at least might be termed mountains elsewhere. These again are divided and interpeaked, and bear hillocks on their slopes;--and the lowest hillock in Martinique is fifty metres high. Some of the peaks are said to be totally inaccessible: many mornes are so on one or two or even three sides. Ninety-one only of the principal mountains have been named; and among these several bear similar appellations: for example, there are two Mornes-Rouges, one in the north and one in the south; and there are four or five Gros-Mornes. All the elevations belong to six great groups, clustering about or radiating from six ancient volcanic centres,--1. La Pelée; 2. Pitons du Carbet; 3. Roches Carrées; [27] 4. Vauclin; 5. Marin; 6. Morne de la Plaine. Forty-two distinct mountain-masses belong to the Carbet system alone,--that of Pelée including but thirteen; and the whole Carbet area has a circumference of 120,000 metres,--much more considerable than that of Pelée. But its centre is not one enormous pyramidal mass like that of "La Montagne": it is marked only by a group of five remarkable porphyritic cones,--the Pitons of Carbet;--while Pelée, dominating everything, and filling the north, presents an aspect and occupies an area scarcely inferior to those of AEtna. --Sometimes, while looking at La Pelée, I have wondered if the enterprise of the great Japanese painter who made the Hundred Views of Fusiyama could not be imitated by some creole artist equally proud of his native hills, and fearless of the heat of the plains or the snakes of the slopes. A hundred views of Pelée might certainly be made: for the enormous mass is omnipresent to dwellers in the northern part of the island, and can be seen from the heights of the most southern mornes. It is visible from almost any part of St. Pierre,--which nestles in a fold of its rocky skirts. It overlooks all the island ranges, and overtops the mighty Pitons of Carbet by a thousand feet;--you can only lose sight of it by entering gorges, or journeying into the valleys of the south.... But the peaked character of the whole country, and the hot moist climate, oppose any artistic undertaking of the sort suggested: even photographers never dream of taking views in the further interior; nor on the east coast. Travel, moreover, is no less costly than difficult: there are no inns or places of rest for tourists; there are, almost daily, sudden and violent rains, which are much dreaded (since a thorough wetting, with the pores all distended by heat, may produce pleurisy); and there are serpents! The artist willing to devote a few weeks of travel and study to Pelée, in spite of these annoyances and risks, has not yet made his appearance in Martinique. [28] [Illustration: FOOT OF PELÉE, BEHIND THE QUARTER OF THE FORT.] Huge as the mountain looks from St. Pierre, the eye under-estimates its bulk; and when you climb the mornes about the town, Labelle, d'Orange, or the much grander Parnasse, you are surprised to find how much vaster Pelée appears from these summits. Volcanic hills often seem higher, by reason of their steepness, than they really are; but Pelée deludes in another manner. From surrounding valleys it appears lower, and from adjacent mornes higher than it really is: the illusion in the former case being due to the singular slope of its contours, and the remarkable breadth of its base, occupying nearly all the northern end of the island; in the latter, to misconception of the comparative height of the eminence you have reached, which deceives by the precipitous pitch of its sides. Pelée is not very remarkable in point of altitude, however: its height was estimated by Moreau de Jonnes at 1600 metres; and by others at between 4400 and 4500 feet. The sum of the various imperfect estimates made justify the opinion of Dr. Cornilliac that the extreme summit is over 5000 feet above the sea--perhaps 5200. [29] The clouds of the summit afford no indication to eyes accustomed to mountain scenery in northern countries; for in these hot moist latitudes clouds hang very low, even in fair weather. But in bulk Pelée is grandiose: it spurs out across the island from the Caribbean to the Atlantic: the great chains of mornes about it are merely counter-forts; the Piton Pierreux and the Piton Pain-à-Sucre (_Sugar-loaf Peak_), and other elevations varying from 800 to 2100 feet, are its volcanic children. Nearly thirty rivers have their birth in its flanks,--besides many thermal springs, variously mineralized. As the culminant point of the island, Pelée is also the ruler of its meteorologic life,--cloud-herder, lightning-forger, and rain-maker. During clear weather you can see it drawing to itself all the white vapors of the land,--robbing lesser eminences of their shoulder-wraps and head-coverings;--though the Pitons of Carbet (3700 feet) usually manage to retain about their middle a cloud-clout,--a _lantchô_. You will also see that the clouds run in a circle about Pelée,--gathering bulk as they turn by continual accessions from other points. If the crater be totally bare in the morning, and shows the broken edges very sharply against the blue, it is a sign of foul rather than of fair weather to come. [30] Even in bulk, perhaps, Pelée might not impress those who know the stupendous scenery of the American ranges; but none could deny it special attractions appealing to the senses of form and color. There is an imposing fantasticality in its configuraion worth months of artistic study: one does not easily tire of watching its slopes undulating against the north sky,--and the strange jagging of its ridges,--and the succession of its terraces crumbling down to other terraces, which again break into ravines here and there bridged by enormous buttresses of basalt: an extravaganza of lava-shapes overpitching and cascading into sea and plain. All this is verdant wherever surfaces catch the sun: you can divine what the frame is only by examining the dark and ponderous rocks of the torrents. And the hundred tints of this verdure do not form the only colorific charms of the landscape. Lovely as the long upreaching slopes of cane are,--and the loftier bands of forest-growths, so far off that they look like belts of moss,--and the more tender-colored masses above, wrinkling and folding together up to the frost-white clouds of the summit,--you will be still more delighted by the shadow-colors,--opulent, diaphanous. The umbrages lining the wrinkles, collecting in the hollows, slanting from sudden projections, may become before your eyes almost as unreally beautiful as the landscape colors of a Japanese fan;--they shift most generally during the day from indigo-blue through violets and paler blues to final lilacs and purples; and even the shadows of passing clouds have a faint blue tinge when they fall on Pelée. ... Is the great volcano dead?... Nobody knows. Less than forty years ago it rained ashes over all the roofs of St. Pierre;--within twenty years it has uttered mutterings. For the moment, it appears to sleep; and the clouds have dripped into the cup of its highest crater till it has become a lake, several hundred yards in circumference. The crater occupied by this lake--called L'Étang, or "The Pool"--has never been active within human memory. There are others,--difficult and dangerous to visit because opening on the side of a tremendous gorge; and it was one of these, no doubt, which has always been called _La Souffrière_, that rained ashes over the city in 1851. The explosion was almost concomitant with the last of a series of earthquake shocks, which began in the middle of May and ended in the first week of August,--all much more severe in Guadeloupe than in Martinique. In the village Au Prêcheur, lying at the foot of the western slope of Pelée, the people had been for some time complaining of an oppressive stench of sulphur,--or, as chemists declared it, sulphuretted hydrogen,--when, on the 4th of August, much trepidation was caused by a long and appalling noise from the mountain,--a noise compared by planters on the neighboring slopes to the hollow roaring made by a packet blowing off steam, but infinitely louder. These sounds continued through intervals until the following night, sometimes deepening into a rumble like thunder. The mountain guides declared: "_C'est la Souffrière qui bout!_" (the Souffrière is boiling); and a panic seized the negroes of the neighboring plantations. At 11 P.M. the noise was terrible enough to fill all St. Pierre with alarm; and on the morning of the 6th the city presented an unwonted aspect, compared by creoles who had lived abroad to the effect of a great hoar-frost. All the roofs, trees, balconies, awnings, pavements, were covered with a white layer of ashes. The same shower blanched the roofs of Morne Rouge, and all the villages about the chief city,--Carbet, Fond-Corré, and Au Prêcheur; also whitening the neighboring country: the mountain was sending up columns of smoke or vapor; and it was noticed that the Rivière Blanche, usually of a glaucous color, ran black into the sea like an outpouring of ink, staining its azure for a mile. A committee appointed to make an investigation, and prepare an official report, found that a number of rents had either been newly formed, or suddenly become active, in the flank of the mountain: these were all situated in the immense gorge sloping westward from that point now known as the Morne de la Croix. Several were visited with much difficulty,--members of the commission being obliged to lower themselves down a succession of precipices with cords of lianas; and it is noteworthy that their researches were prosecuted in spite of the momentary panic created by another outburst. It was satisfactorily ascertained that the main force of the explosion had been exerted within a perimeter of about one thousand yards; that various hot springs had suddenly gushed out,--the temperature of the least warm being about 37° Réaumur (116° F.);--that there was no change in the configuration of the mountain;--and that the terrific sounds had been produced only by the violent outrush of vapor and ashes from some of the rents. In hope of allaying the general alarm, a creole priest climbed the summit of the volcano, and there planted the great cross which gives the height its name and still remains to commemorate the event. There was an extraordinary emigration of serpents from the high woods, and from the higher to the lower plantations,--where they were killed by thousands. For a long time Pelée continued to send up an immense column of white vapor; but there were no more showers of ashes; and the mountain gradually settled down to its present state of quiescence. II. From St. Pierre, trips to Pelée can be made by several routes;--the most popular is that by way of Morne Rouge and the Calebasse; but the summit can be reached in much less time by making the ascent from different points along the coast-road to Au Prêcheur,--such as the Morne St. Martin, or a well-known path further north, passing near the celebrated hot springs (_Fontaines Chaudes_). You drive towards Au Prêcheur, and begin the ascent on foot, through cane-plantations.... The road by which you follow the north-west coast round the skirts of Pelée is very picturesque:--you cross the Roxelane, the Rivière des Pères, the Rivière Sèche (whose bed is now occupied only by a motionless torrent of rocks);--passing first by the suburb of Fond-Corré, with its cocoa groves, and broad beach of iron-gray sand,--a bathing resort;--then Pointe Prince, and the Fond de Canonville, somnolent villages that occupy wrinkles in the hem of Pelée's lava robe. The drive ultimately rises and lowers over the undulations of the cliff, and is well shadowed along the greater part of its course: you will admire many huge _fromagers_, or silk-cotton trees, various heavy lines of tamarinds, and groups of _flamboyants_ with thick dark feathery foliage, and cassia-trees with long pods pending and blackening from every branch, and hedges of _campêche_, or logwood, and calabash-trees, and multitudes of the pretty shrubs bearing the fruit called in creole _raisins-bò-lanmè_, or "sea-side grapes." Then you reach Au Prêcheur: a very antiquated village, which boasts a stone church and a little public square with a fountain in it. If you have time to cross the Rivière du Prêcheur, a little further on, you can obtain a fine view of the coast, which, rising suddenly to a grand altitude, sweeps round in a semicircle over the Village of the Abysses (_Aux Abymes_),--whose name was doubtless suggested by the immense depth of the sea at that point.... It was under the shadow of those cliffs that the Confederate cruiser _Alabama_ once hid herself, as a fish hides in the shadow of a rock, and escaped from her pursuer, the _Iroquois_. She had long been blockaded in the harbor of St. Pierre by the Northern man-of-war,--anxiously awaiting a chance to pounce upon her the instant she should leave French waters;--and various Yankee vessels in port were to send up rocket-signals should the _Alabama_ attempt to escape under cover of darkness. But one night the privateer took a creole pilot on board, and steamed out southward, with all her lights masked, and her chimneys so arranged that neither smoke nor sparks could betray her to the enemy in the offing. However, some Yankee vessels near enough to discern her movements through the darkness at once shot rockets south; and the _Iroquois_ gave chase. The _Alabama_ hugged the high shore as far as Carbet, remaining quite invisible in the shadow of it: then she suddenly turned and recrossed the harbor. Again Yankee rockets betrayed her manreuvre to the _Iroquois;_ but she gained Aux Abymes, laid herself close to the enormous black cliff, and there remained indistinguishable; the _Iroquois_ steamed by north without seeing her. Once the Confederate cruiser found her enemy well out of sight, she put her pilot ashore and escaped into the Dominica channel. The pilot was a poor mulatto, who thought himself well paid with five hundred francs! ... The more popular route to Pelée by way of Morne Rouge is otherwise interesting... Anybody not too much afraid of the tropic sun must find it a delightful experience to follow the mountain roads leading to the interior from the city, as all the mornes traversed by them command landscapes of extraordinary beauty. According to the zigzags of the way, the scenery shifts panoramically. At one moment you are looking down into valleys a thousand feet below, at another, over luminous leagues of meadow or cane-field, you see some far crowding of cones and cratered shapes;--sharp as the teeth of a saw, and blue as sapphire,--with further eminences ranging away through pearline color to high-peaked remotenesses of vapory gold. As you follow the windings of such a way as the road of the Morne Labelle, or the Morne d'Orange, the city disappears and reappears many times,--always diminishing, till at last it looks no bigger than a chess-board. Simultaneously distant mountain shapes appear to unfold and lengthen;--and always, always the sea rises with your rising. Viewed at first from the bulwark (_boulevard_) commanding the roofs of the town, its horizon-line seemed straight and keen as a knife-edge;--but as you mount higher, it elongates, begins to curve; and gradually the whole azure expanse of water broadens out roundly like a disk. From certain very lofty summits further inland you behold the immense blue circle touching the sky all round you,--except where a still greater altitude, like that of Pelée or the Pitons, breaks the ring; and this high vision of the sea has a phantasmal effect hard to describe, and due to vapory conditions of the atmosphere. There are bright cloudless days when, even as seen from the city, the ocean-verge has a spectral vagueness; but on any day, in any season, that you ascend to a point dominating the sea by a thousand feet, the rim of the visible world takes a ghostliness that startles,--because the prodigious light gives to all near shapes such intense sharpness of outline and vividness of color. Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain routes from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to Morne Rouge surpasses them, notwithstanding that it almost immediately leaves the city behind, and out of sight. Excepting only _La Trace_,--the long route winding over mountain ridges and between primitive forests south to Fort-de-France,--there is probably no section of national highway in the island more remarkable than the Morne Rouge road. Leaving the Grande Rue by the public conveyance, you drive out through the Savane du Fort, with its immense mango and tamarind trees, skirting the Roxelane. Then reaching the boulevard, you pass high Morne Labelle,--and then the Jardin des Plantes on the right, where white-stemmed palms are lifting their heads two hundred feet,--and beautiful Parnasse, heavily timbered to the top;--while on your left the valley of the Roxelane shallows up, and Pelée shows less and less of its tremendous base. Then you pass through the sleepy, palmy, pretty Village of the Three Bridges (_Trois Ponts_),--where a Fahrenheit thermometer shows already three degrees of temperature lower than at St. Pierre;--and the national road, making a sharp turn to the right, becomes all at once very steep--so steep that the horses can mount only at a walk. Around and between the wooded hills it ascends by zigzags,--occasionally overlooking the sea,--sometimes following the verges of ravines. Now and then you catch glimpses of the road over which you passed half an hour before undulating far below, looking narrow as a tape-line,--and of the gorge of the Roxelane,--and of Pelée, always higher, now thrusting out long spurs of green and purple land into the sea. You drive under cool shadowing of mountain woods--under waving bamboos like enormous ostrich feathers dyed green,--and exquisite tree-ferns thirty to forty feet high,--and imposing ceibas, with strangely buttressed trunks,--and all sorts of broad-leaved forms: cachibous, balisiers, bananiers.... Then you reach a plateau covered with cane, whose yellow expanse is bounded on the right by a demilune of hills sharply angled as crystals;--on the left it dips seaward; and before you Pelée's head towers over the shoulders of intervening mornes. A strong cool wind is blowing; and the horses can trot a while. Twenty minutes, and the road, leaving the plateau, becomes steep again;--you are approaching the volcano over the ridge of a colossal spur. The way turns in a semicircle,--zigzags,--once more touches the edge of a valley,--where the clear fall might be nearly fifteen hundred feet. But narrowing more and more, the valley becomes an ascending gorge; and across its chasm, upon the brow of the opposite cliff, you catch sight of houses and a spire seemingly perched on the verge, like so many birds'-nests,--the village of Morne Rouge. It is two thousand feet above the sea; and Pelée, although looming high over it, looks a trifle less lofty now. One's first impression of Morne Rouge is that of a single straggling street of gray-painted cottages and shops (or rather booths), dominated by a plain church, with four pursy-bodied palmistes facing the main porch. Nevertheless, Morne Rouge is not a small place, considering its situation;--there are nearly five thousand inhabitants; but in order to find out where they live, you must leave the public road, which is on a ridge, and explore the high-hedged lanes leading down from it on either side. Then you will find a veritable city of little wooden cottages,--each screened about with banana-trees, Indian-reeds, and _pommiers-roses_. You will also see a number of handsome private residences--country-houses of wealthy merchants; and you will find that the church, though uninteresting exteriorly, is rich and impressive within: it is a famous shrine, where miracles are alleged to have been wrought. Immense processions periodically wend their way to it from St. Pierre,--starting at three or four o'clock in the morning, so as to arrive before the sun is well up.... But there are no woods here,--only fields. An odd tone is given to the lanes by a local custom of planting hedges of what are termed _roseaux d' Inde_, having a dark-red foliage; and there is a visible fondness for ornamental plants with crimson leaves. Otherwise the mountain summit is somewhat bare; trees have a scrubby aspect. You must have noticed while ascending that the palmistes became smaller as they were situated higher: at Morne Rouge they are dwarfed,--having a short stature, and very thick trunks. In spite of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray tint of the buildings,--very melancholy by comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne Rouge, where people are literally dwelling in the clouds. Rolling down like white smoke from Pelée, these often create a dismal fog; and Morne Rouge is certainly one of the rainiest places in the world. When it is dry everywhere else, it rains at Morne Rouge. It rains at least three hundred and sixty days and three hundred and sixty nights of the year. It rains almost invariably once in every twenty-four hours; but oftener five or six times. The dampness is phenomenal. All mirrors become patchy; linen moulds in one day; leather turns while woollen goods feel as if saturated with moisture; new brass becomes green; steel crumbles into red powder; wood-work rots with astonishing rapidity; salt is quickly transformed into brine; and matches, unless kept in a very warm place, refuse to light. Everything moulders and peels and decomposes; even the frescos of the church-interior lump out in immense blisters; and a microscopic vegetation, green or brown, attacks all exposed surfaces of timber or stone. At night it is often really cold;--and it is hard to understand how, with all this dampness and coolness and mouldiness, Morne Rouge can be a healthy place. But it is so, beyond any question: it is the great Martinique resort for invalids; strangers debilitated by the climate of Trinidad or Cayenne come to it for recuperation. [Illustration: VILLAGE OF MORNE ROUGE, MARTINIQUE] Leaving the village by the still uprising road, you will be surprised, after a walk of twenty minutes northward, by a magnificent view,--the vast valley of the Champ-Flore, watered by many torrents, and bounded south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of mountains,--mountains broken, peaked, tormented-looking, and tinted (_irisées_, as the creoles say) with all those gem-tones distance gives in a West Indian atmosphere. Particularly impressive is the beauty of one purple cone in the midst of this many-colored chain: the Piton Gélé. All the valley-expanse of rich land is checkered with alternations of meadow and cane and cacao,--except northwestwardly, where woods billow out of sight beyond a curve. Facing this landscape, on your left, are mornes of various heights,--among which you will notice La Calebasse, overtopping everything but Pelée shadowing behind it;--and a grass-grown road leads up westward from the national highway towards the volcano. This is the Calebasse route to Pelée. III. We must be very sure of the weather before undertaking the ascent of Pelée; for if one merely selects some particular leisure day in advance, one's chances of seeing anything from the summit are considerably less than an astronomer's chances of being able to make a satisfactory observation of the next transit of Venus. Moreover, if the heights remain even partly clouded, it may not be safe to ascend the Morne de la Croix,--a cone-point above the crater itself, and ordinarily invisible from below. And a cloudless afternoon can never be predicted from the aspect of deceitful Pelée: when the crater edges are quite clearly cut against the sky at dawn, you may be tolerably certain there will be bad weather during the day; and when they are all bare at sundown, you have no good reason to believe they will not be hidden next morning. Hundreds of tourists, deluded by such appearances, have made the weary trip in vain,--found themselves obliged to return without having seen anything but a thick white cold fog. The sky may remain perfectly blue for weeks in every other direction, and Pelée's head remain always hidden. In order to make a successful ascent, one must not wait for a period of dry weather,--one might thus wait for years! What one must look for is a certain periodicity in the diurnal rains,--a regular alternation of sun and cloud; such as characterizes a certain portion of the _hivernage_, or rainy summer season, when mornings and evenings are perfectly limpid, with very heavy sudden rains in the middle of the day. It is of no use to rely on the prospect of a dry spell. There is no really dry weather, notwithstanding there recurs--in books--a _Saison de la Sécheresse_. In fact, there are no distinctly marked seasons in Martinique:--a little less heat and rain from October to July, a little more rain and heat from July to October: that is about all the notable difference! Perhaps the official notification by cannon-shot that the hivernage, the season of heavy rains and hurricanes, begins on July 15th, is no more trustworthy than the contradictory declarations of Martinique authors who have attempted to define the vague and illusive limits of the tropic seasons. Still, the Government report on the subject is more satisfactory than any: according to the "Annuaire," there are these seasons:--1. _Saison fraîche_. December to March. Rainfall, about 475 millimetres. 2. _Saison chaude et sèche_. April to July. Rainfall, about 140 millimetres. 3. _Saison chaude et pluvieuse_. July to November. Rainfall average, 121 millimetres. Other authorities divide the _saison chaude et sèche_ into two periods, of which the latter, beginning about May, is called the _Renouveau_; and it is at least true that at the time indicated there is a great burst of vegetal luxuriance. But there is always rain, there are almost always clouds, there is no possibility of marking and dating the beginnings and the endings of weather in this country where the barometer is almost useless, and the thermometer mounts in the sun to twice the figure it reaches in the shade. Long and patient observation has, however, established the fact that during the hivernage, if the heavy showers have a certain fixed periodicity,--falling at midday or in the heated part of the afternoon,--Pelée is likely to be clear early in the morning; and by starting before daylight one can then have good chances of a fine view from the summit. IV. At five o'clock of a September morning, warm and starry, I leave St. Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent by the shortest route of all,--that of the Morne St. Martin, one of Pelée's western counterforts. We drive north along the shore for about half an hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a winding mountain road, leading to the upper plantations, between leagues of cane. The sky begins to brighten as we ascend, and a steely glow announces that day has begun on the other side of the island. Miles up, the crest of the volcano cuts sharp as a saw-edge against the growing light: there is not a cloud visible. Then the light slowly yellows behind the vast cone; and one of the most beautiful dawns I ever saw reveals on our right an immense valley through which three rivers flow. This deepens very quickly as we drive; the mornes about St. Pierre, beginning to catch the light, sink below us in distance; and above them, southwardly, an amazing silouette begins to rise,--all blue,--a mountain wall capped with cusps and cones, seeming high as Pelée itself in the middle, but sinking down to the sea-level westward. There are a number of extraordinary acuminations; but the most impressive shape is the nearest,--a tremendous conoidal mass crowned with a group of peaks, of which two, taller than the rest, tell their name at once by the beauty of their forms,--the Pitons of Carbet. They wear their girdles of cloud, though Pelée is naked to-day. All this is blue: the growing light only deepens the color, does not dissipate it;--but in the nearer valleys gleams of tender yellowish green begin to appear. Still the sun has not been able to show himself;--it will take him some time yet to climb Pelée. Reaching the last plantation, we draw rein in a village of small wooden cottages,--the quarters of the field hands,--and receive from the proprietor, a personal friend of my friends, the kindest welcome. At his house we change clothing and prepare for the journey;--he provides for our horses, and secures experienced guides for us,--two young colored men belonging to the plantation. Then we begin the ascent. The guides walk before, barefoot, each carrying a cutlass in his hand and a package on his head--our provisions, photographic instruments, etc. The mountain is cultivated in spots up to twenty-five hundred feet; and for three-quarters of an hour after leaving the planter's residence we still traverse fields of cane and of manioc. The light is now strong in the valley; but we are in the shadow of Pelée. Cultivated fields end at last; the ascending path is through wild cane, wild guavas, guinea-grass run mad, and other tough growths, some bearing pretty pink blossoms. The forest is before us. Startled by our approach, a tiny fer-de-lance glides out from a bunch of dead wild-cane, almost under the bare feet of our foremost guide, who as instantly decapitates it with a touch of his cutlass. It is not quite fifteen inches long, and almost the color of the yellowish leaves under which it had been hiding.... The conversation turns on snakes as we make our first halt at the verge of the woods. Hundreds may be hiding around us; but a snake never shows himself by daylight except under the pressure of sudden alarm. We are not likely, in the opinion of all present, to meet with another. Every one in the party, except myself, has some curious experience to relate. I hear for the first time, about the alleged inability of the trigonocephalus to wound except at a distance from his enemy of not less than one-third of his length;--about M. A--, a former director of the Jardin des Plantes, who used to boldly thrust his arm into holes where he knew snakes were, and pull them out,--catching them just behind the head and wrapping the tail round his arm,--and place them alive in a cage without ever getting bitten;--about M. B--, who, while hunting one day, tripped in the coils of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his fright that the serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite him;--about M. C--, who could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail, and "crack it like a whip" until the head would fly off;--about an old white man living in the Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-meat, and who always kept in his ajoupa "a keg of salted serpents" (_yon ka sèpent-salé_);--about a monster eight feet long which killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles Fabre's white cat, but was also killed by the cat after she had been caught in the folds of the reptile;--about the value of snakes as protectors of the sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats;--about an unsuccessful effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe, to introduce the fer-de-lance there;--about the alleged power of a monstrous toad, the _crapaud-ladre_, to cause the death of the snake that swallows it;--and, finally, about the total absence of the idyllic and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to the presence of reptiles everywhere. "Even the flora and fauna of the country remain to a large extent unknown,"--adds the last speaker, an amiable old physician of St. Pierre,--"because the existence of the fer-de-lance renders all serious research dangerous in the extreme." My own experiences do not justify my taking part in such a conversation;--I never saw alive but two very small specimens of the trigonocephalus. People who have passed even a considerable time in Martinique may have never seen a fer-de-lance except in a jar of alcohol, or as exhibited by negro snake-catchers, tied fast to a bamboo, But this is only because strangers rarely travel much in the interior of the country, or find themselves on country roads after sundown. It is not correct to suppose that snakes are uncommon even in the neighborhood of St. Pierre: they are often killed on the bulwarks behind the city and on the verge of the Savane; they have been often washed into the streets by heavy rains; and many washer-women at the Roxelane have been bitten by them. It is considered very dangerous to walk about the bulwarks after dark;--for the snakes, which travel only at night, then descend from the mornes towards the river, The Jardin des Plantes shelters great numbers of the reptiles; and only a few days prior to the writing of these lines a colored laborer in the garden was stricken and killed by a fer-de-lance measuring one metre and sixty-seven centimetres in length. In the interior much larger reptiles are sometimes seen: I saw one freshly killed measuring six feet five inches, and thick as a man's leg in the middle. There are few planters in the island who have not some of their hands bitten during the cane-cutting and cocoa-gathering seasons;--the average annual mortality among the class of _travailleurs_ from serpent bite alone is probably fifty, [31]--always fine young men or women in the prime of life. Even among the wealthy whites deaths from this cause are less rare than might be supposed: I know one gentleman, a rich citizen of St, Pierre, who in ten years lost three relatives by the trigonocephalus,--the wound having in each case been received in the neighborhood of a vein. When the vein has been pierced, cure is impossible. V. ... We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields, and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening in the west. It has already broadened surprisingly, the sea appears to have risen up, not as a horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure precipice: what will it look like when we shall have reached the top? Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands--the whole _atelier_, as it is called, of a plantation slowly descending a slope, hewing the canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder (_amarreuse_): she gathers the canes as they are cut down; binds them with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and carries them away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so beautifully that it is a delight to watch them. One cannot often enjoy such a spectacle nowadays; for the introduction of the piece-work system has destroyed the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the island, with rare exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an army;--first advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then the amareuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the ka, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the song;--and lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old days, too, it was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an English corsair on the coast converted this soldiery of labor into veritable military: more than one attack was repelled by the cutlasses of a plantation atelier. At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though not distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice, powerful as a bugle, rings out,--the voice of the Commandeur: he walks along the line, looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I ask one of our guides what the cry is:-- --"_Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent_," he replies. (He is telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the cutlassers approach the end of their task, the greater the danger: for the reptiles, retreating before them to the last clump of cane, become massed there, and will fight desperately. Regularly as the ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human lives from among the workers. But when one falls, another steps into the vacant place,--perhaps the Commandeur himself: these dark swordsmen never retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as before; there is hardly any emotion; the travailleur is a fatalist.... [32] VI. ... We enter the grands-bois,--the primitive forest,--the "high woods." As seen with a field-glass from St. Pierre, these woods present only the appearance of a band of moss belting the volcano, and following all its corrugations,--so densely do the leafy crests intermingle. But on actually entering them, you find yourself at once in green twilight, among lofty trunks uprising everywhere like huge pillars wrapped with vines;--and the interspaces between these bulks are all occupied by lianas and parasitic creepers,--some monstrous,--veritable parasite-trees,--ascending at all angles, or dropping straight down from the tallest crests to take root again. The effect in the dim light is that of innumerable black ropes and cables of varying thicknesses stretched taut from the soil to the tree-tops, and also from branch to branch, like rigging. There are rare and remarkable trees here,--acomats, courbarils, balatas, ceibas or fromagers, acajous, gommiers;--hundreds have been cut down by charcoal-makers; but the forest is still grand. It is to be regretted that the Government has placed no restriction upon the barbarous destruction of trees by the _charbonniers_, which is going on throughout the island. Many valuable woods are rapidly disappearing. The courbaril, yielding a fine-grained, heavy, chocolate-colored timber; the balata, giving a wood even heavier, denser, and darker; the acajou, producing a rich red wood, with a strong scent of cedar; the bois-de-fer; the bois d'Inde; the superb acomat,--all used to flourish by tens of thousands upon these volcanic slopes, whose productiveness is eighteen times greater than that of the richest European soil. All Martinique furniture used to be made of native woods; and the colored cabinet-makers still produce work which would probably astonish New York or London manufacturers. But to-day the island exports no more hard woods: it has even been found necessary to import much from neighboring islands;--and yet the destruction of forests still goes on. The domestic fabrication of charcoal from forest-trees has been estimated at 1,400,000 hectolitres per annum. Primitive forest still covers the island to the extent of 21.37 per cent; but to find precious woods now, one must climb heights like those of Pelée and Carbet, or penetrate into the mountains of the interior. [Illustration: LA MONTAGNE PELÉE, AS SEEN FROM GRANDE ANSE.] Most common formerly on these slopes were the gommiers, from which canoes of a single piece, forty-five feet long by seven wide, used to be made. There are plenty of gommiers still; but the difficulty of transporting them to the shore has latterly caused a demand for the gommiers of Dominica. The dimensions of canoes now made from these trees rarely exceed fifteen feet in length by eighteen inches in width: the art of making them is an inheritance from the ancient Caribs. First the trunk is shaped to the form of the canoe, and pointed at both ends; it is then hollowed out. The width of the hollow does not exceed six inches at the widest part; but the cavity is then filled with wet sand, which in the course of some weeks widens the excavation by its weight, and gives the boat perfect form. Finally gunwales of plank are fastened on; seats are put in--generally four;--and no boat is more durable nor more swift. ... We climb. There is a trace rather than a foot-path;--no visible soil, only vegetable detritus, with roots woven over it in every direction. The foot never rests on a flat surface,--only upon surfaces of roots; and these are covered, like every protruding branch along the route, with a slimy green moss, slippery as ice. Unless accustomed to walking in tropical woods, one will fall at every step. In a little while I find it impossible to advance. Our nearest guide, observing my predicament, turns, and without moving the bundle upon his head, cuts and trims me an excellent staff with a few strokes of his cutlass. This staff not only saves me from dangerous slips, but also serves at times to probe the way; for the further we proceed, the vaguer the path becomes. It was made by the _chasseurs-de-choux_ (cabbage-hunters),--the negro mountaineers who live by furnishing heads of young cabbage-palm to the city markets; and these men also keep it open,--otherwise the woods would grow over it in a month. Two chasseurs-de-choux stride past us as we advance, with their freshly gathered palm-salad upon their heads, wrapped in cachibou or balisier leaves, and tied with lianas. The palmiste-franc easily reaches a stature of one hundred feet; but the young trees are so eagerly sought for by the chasseurs-de-choux that in these woods few reach a height of even twelve feet before being cut. ... Walking becomes more difficult;--there seems no termination to the grands-bois: always the same faint green light, the same rude natural stair-way of slippery roots,--half the time hidden by fern leaves and vines. Sharp ammoniacal scents are in the air; a dew, cold as ice-water, drenches our clothing. Unfamiliar insects make trilling noises in dark places; and now and then a series of soft clear notes ring out, almost like a thrush's whistle: the chant of a little tree-frog. The path becomes more and more overgrown; and but for the constant excursions of the cabbage-hunters, we should certainly have to cutlass every foot of the way through creepers and brambles. More and more amazing also is the interminable interweaving of roots: the whole forest is thus spun together--not underground so much as overground. These tropical trees do not strike deep, although able to climb steep slopes of porphyry and basalt: they send out great far-reaching webs of roots,--each such web interknotting with others all round it, and these in turn with further ones;--while between their reticulations lianas ascend and descend: and a nameless multitude of shrubs as tough as india-rubber push up, together with mosses, grasses, and ferns. Square miles upon square miles of woods are thus interlocked and interbound into one mass solid enough to resist the pressure of a hurricane; and where there is no path already made, entrance into them can only be effected by the most dexterous cutlassing. An inexperienced stranger might be puzzled to understand how this cutlassing is done. It is no easy feat to sever with one blow a liana thick as a man's arm; the trained cutlasser does it without apparent difficulty: moreover, he cuts horizontally, so as to prevent the severed top presenting a sharp angle and proving afterwards dangerous. He never appears to strike hard,--only to give light taps with his blade, which flickers continually about him as he moves. Our own guides in cutlassing are not at all inconvenienced by their loads; they walk perfectly upright, never stumble, never slip, never hesitate, and do not even seem to perspire: their bare feet are prehensile. Some creoles in our party, habituated to the woods, walk nearly as well in their shoes; but they carry no loads. ... At last we are rejoiced to observe that the trees are becoming smaller;--there are no more colossal trunks;--there are frequent glimpses of sky: the sun has risen well above the peaks, and sends occasional beams down through the leaves. Ten minutes, and we reach a clear space,--a wild savane, very steep, above which looms a higher belt of woods. Here we take another short rest. Northward the view is cut off by a ridge covered with herbaceous vegetation;--but to the south-west it is open, over a gorge of which both sides are shrouded in sombre green-crests of trees forming a solid curtain against the sun. Beyond the outer and lower cliff valley-surfaces appear miles away, flinging up broad gleams of cane-gold; further off greens disappear into blues, and the fantastic masses of Carbet loom up far higher than before. St. Pierre, in a curve of the coast, is a little red-and-yellow semicircular streak, less than two inches long. The interspaces between far mountain chains,--masses of pyramids, cones, single and double humps, queer blue angles as of raised knees under coverings,--resemble misty lakes: they are filled with brume;--the sea-line has vanished altogether. Only the horizon, enormously heightened, can be discerned as a circling band of faint yellowish light,--auroral, ghostly,--almost on a level with the tips of the Pitons. Between this vague horizon and the shore, the sea no longer looks like sea, but like a second hollow sky reversed. All the landscape has unreal beauty:--there are no keen lines; there are no definite beginnings or endings; the tints are half-colors only;--peaks rise suddenly from mysteries of bluish fog as from a flood; land melts into sea the same hue. It gives one the idea of some great aquarelle unfinished,--abandoned before tones were deepened and details brought out. VII. We are overlooking from this height the birthplaces of several rivers; and the rivers of Pelée are the clearest and the coolest of the island. From whatever direction the trip be undertaken, the ascent of the volcano must be made over some one of those many immense ridges sloping from the summit to the sea west, north, and east,--like buttresses eight to ten miles long,--formed by ancient lava-torrents. Down the deep gorges between them the cloud-fed rivers run,--receiving as they descend the waters of countless smaller streams gushing from either side of the ridge. There are also cold springs,--one of which furnishes St. Pierre with her _Eau-de-Gouyave_ (guava-water), which is always sweet, clear, and cool in the very hottest weather. But the water of almost everyone of the seventy-five principal rivers of Martinique is cool and clear and sweet. And these rivers are curious in their way. Their average fall has been estimated at nine inches to every six feet;--many are cataracts;--the Rivière de Case-Navire has a fall of nearly 150 feet to every fifty yards of its upper course. Naturally these streams cut for themselves channels of immense depth. Where they flow through forests and between mornes, their banks vary from 1200 to 1600 feet high,--so as to render their beds inaccessible; and many enter the sea through a channel of rock with perpendicular walls from 100 to 200 feet high. Their waters are necessarily shallow in normal weather; but during rain-storms they become torrents thunderous, and terrific beyond description. In order to comprehend their sudden swelling, one must know what tropical rain is. Col. Boyer Peyreleau, in 1823, estimated the annual rainfall in these colonies at 150 inches on the coast, to 350 on the mountains,--while the annual fall at Paris was only eighteen inches. The character of such rain is totally different from that of rain in the temperate zone: the drops are enormous, heavy, like hailstones,--one will spatter over the circumference of a saucer;--and the shower roars so that people cannot hear each other speak without shouting. When there is a true storm, no roofing seems able to shut out the cataract; the best-built houses leak in all directions; and objects but a short distance off become invisible behind the heavy curtain of water. The ravages of such rain may be imagined! Roads are cut away in an hour; trees are overthrown as if blown down;--for there are few West Indian trees which plunge their roots even as low as two feet; they merely extend them over a large diameter; and isolated trees will actually slide under rain. The swelling of rivers is so sudden that washer-women at work in the Roxelane and other streams have been swept away and drowned without the least warning of their danger; the shower occurring seven or eight miles off. Most of these rivers are well stocked with fish, of which the _tétart_, _banane_, _loche_, and _dormeur_ are the principal varieties. The tétart (best of all) and the loche climb the torrents to the height of 2500 and even 3000 feet: they have a kind of pneumatic sucker, which enables them to cling to rocks. Under stones in the lower basins crawfish of the most extraordinary size are taken; some will measure thirty-six inches from claw to tail. And at all the river-mouths, during July and August, are caught vast numbers of "_titiri_" [33] --tiny white fish, of which a thousand might be put into one teacup. They are delicious when served in oil,--infinitely more delicate than the sardine. Some regard them as a particular species: others believe them to be only the fry of larger fish,--as their periodical appearance and disappearance would seem to indicate. They are often swept by millions into the city of St. Pierre, with the flow of mountain-water which purifies the streets: then you will see them swarming in the gutters, fountains, and bathing-basins;--and on Saturdays, when the water is temporarily shut off to allow of the pipes being cleansed, the titiri may die in the gutters in such numbers as to make the air offensive. [Illustration: ARBORESCENT FERNS ON A MOUNTAIN ROAD.] The mountain-crab, celebrated for its periodical migrations, is also found at considerable heights. Its numbers appear to have been diminished extraordinarily by its consumption as an article of negro diet; but in certain islands those armies of crabs described by the old writers are still occasionally to be seen. The Père Dutertre relates that in 1640, at St. Christophe, thirty sick emigrants, temporarily left on the beach, were attacked and devoured alive during the night by a similar species of crab. "They descended from the mountains in such multitude," he tells us, "that they were heaped higher than houses over the bodies of the poor wretches... whose bones were picked so clean that not one speck of flesh could be found upon them."... VIII. ... We enter the upper belt of woods--green twilight again. There are as many lianas as ever: but they are less massive in stem;--the trees, which are stunted, stand closer together; and the web-work of roots is finer and more thickly spun. These are called the _petits-bois_ (little woods), in contradistinction to the grands-bois, or high woods. Multitudes of balisiers, dwarf-palms, arborescent ferns, wild guavas, mingle with the lower growths on either side of the path, which has narrowed to the breadth of a wheel-rut, and is nearly concealed by protruding grasses and fern leaves. Never does the sole of the foot press upon a surface large as itself,--always the slippery backs of roots crossing at all angles, like loop-traps, over sharp fragments of volcanic rock or pumice-stone. There are abrupt descents, sudden acclivities, mud-holes, and fissures;--one grasps at the ferns on both sides to keep from falling; and some ferns are spiked sometimes on the under surface, and tear the hands. But the barefooted guides stride on rapidly, erect as ever under their loads,--chopping off with their cutlasses any branches that hang too low. There are beautiful flowers here,--various unfamiliar species of lobelia;--pretty red and yellow blossoms belonging to plants which the creole physician calls _Bromeliacoe_; and a plant like the _Guy Lussacia_ of Brazil, with violet-red petals. There is an indescribable multitude of ferns,--a very museum of ferns! The doctor, who is a great woodsman, says that he never makes a trip to the hills without finding some new kind of fern; and he had already a collection of several hundred. The route is continually growing steeper, and makes a number of turns and windings: we reach another bit of savane, where we have to walk over black-pointed stones that resemble slag;--then more petits-bois, still more dwarfed, then another opening. The naked crest of the volcano appears like a peaked precipice, dark-red, with streaks of green, over a narrow but terrific chasm on the left: we are almost on a level with the crater, but must make a long circuit to reach it, through a wilderness of stunted timber and bush. The creoles call this undergrowth _razié_: it is really only a prolongation of the low jungle which carpets the high forests below, with this difference, that there are fewer creepers and much more fern.... Suddenly we reach a black gap in the path about thirty inches wide--half hidden by the tangle of leaves,--_La Fente_. It is a volcanic fissure which divides the whole ridge, and is said to have no bottom: for fear of a possible slip, the guides insist upon holding our hands while we cross it. Happily there are no more such clefts; but there are mud-holes, snags, roots, and loose rocks beyond counting. Least disagreeable are the _bourbiers_, in which you sink to your knees in black or gray slime. Then the path descends into open light again;--and we find ourselves at the Étang,--in the dead Crater of the Three Palmistes. An immense pool, completely encircled by high green walls of rock, which shut out all further view, and shoot up, here and there, into cones, or rise into queer lofty humps and knobs. One of these elevations at the opposite side has almost the shape of a blunt horn: it is the Morne de la Croix. The scenery is at once imposing and sinister: the shapes towering above the lake and reflected in its still surface have the weirdness of things seen in photographs of the moon. Clouds are circling above them and between them;--one descends to the water, haunts us a moment, blurring everything; then rises again. We have travelled too slow; the clouds have had time to gather. I look in vain for the Three Palmistes which gave the crater a name: they were destroyed long ago. But there are numbers of young ones scattered through the dense ferny covering of the lake-slopes,--just showing their heads like bunches of great dark-green feathers. --The estimate of Dr. Rufz, made in 1851, and the estimate of the last "Annuaire" regarding the circumference of the lake, are evidently both at fault. That of the "Annuaire," 150 metres, is a gross error: the writer must have meant the diameter,--following Rufz, who estimated the circumference at something over 300 paces. As we find it, the Étang, which is nearly circular, must measure 200 yards across;--perhaps it has been greatly swollen by the extraordinary rains of this summer. Our guides say that the little iron cross projecting from the water about two yards off was high and dry on the shore last season. At present there is only one narrow patch of grassy bank on which we can rest, between the water and the walls of the crater. The lake is perfectly clear, with a bottom of yellowish shallow mud, which rests--according to investigations made in 1851--upon a mass of pumice-stone mixed in places with ferruginous sand; and the yellow mud itself is a detritus of pumice-stone. We strip for a swim. Though at an elevation of nearly 5000 feet, this water is not so cold as that of the Roxelane, nor of other rivers of the north-west and north-east coasts. It has an agreeable fresh taste, like dew. Looking down into it, I see many larvae of the _maringouin_, or large mosquito: no fish. The maringouins themselves are troublesome,--whirring around us and stinging. On striking out for the middle, one is surprised to feel the water growing slightly warmer. The committee of investigation in 1851 found the temperature of the lake, in spite of a north wind, 20.5 Centigrade, while that of the air was but 19 (about 69 F. for the water, and 66.2 for the air). The depth in the centre is over six feet; the average is scarcely four. Regaining the bank, we prepare to ascend the Morne de la Croix. The circular path by which it is commonly reached is now under water; and we have to wade up to our waists. All the while clouds keep passing over us in great slow whirls. Some are white and half-transparent; others opaque and dark gray;--a dark cloud passing through; a white one looks like a goblin. Gaining the opposite shore, we find a very rough path over splintered stone, ascending between the thickest fern-growths possible to imagine. The general tone of this fern is dark green; but there are paler cloudings of yellow and pink,--due to the varying age of the leaves, which are pressed into a cushion three or four feet high, and almost solid enough to sit upon. About two hundred and fifty yards from the crater edge, the path rises above this tangle, and zigzags up the morne, which now appears twice as lofty as from the lake, where we had a curiously foreshortened view of it. It then looked scarcely a hundred feet high; it is more than double that. The cone is green to the top with moss, low grasses, small fern, and creeping pretty plants, like violets, with big carmine flowers. The path is a black line: the rock laid bare by it looks as if burned to the core. We have now to use our hands in climbing; but the low thick ferns give a good hold. Out of breath, and drenched in perspiration, we reach the apex,--the highest point of the island. But we are curtained about with clouds,--moving in dense white and gray masses: we cannot see fifty feet away. The top of the peak has a slightly slanting surface of perhaps twenty square yards, very irregular in outline;--southwardly the morne pitches sheer into a frightful chasm, between the converging of two of those long corrugated ridges already described as buttressing the volcano on all sides. Through a cloud-rift we can see another crater-lake twelve hundred feet below--said to be five times larger than the Étang we have just left: it is also of more irregular outline. This is called the _Étang Sec_, or "Dry Pool," because dry in less rainy seasons. It occupies a more ancient crater, and is very rarely visited: the path leading to it is difficult and dangerous,--a natural ladder of roots and lianas over a series of precipices. Behind us the Crater of the Three Palmistes now looks no larger than the surface on which we stand;--over its further boundary we can see the wall of another gorge, in which there is a third crater-lake. West and north are green peakings, ridges, and high lava walls steep as fortifications. All this we can only note in the intervals between passing of clouds. As yet there is no landscape visible southward;--we sit down and wait. IX. ... Two crosses are planted nearly at the verge of the precipice; a small one of iron; and a large one of wood--probably the same put up by the Abbé Lespinasse during the panic of 1851, after the eruption. This has been splintered to pieces by a flash of lightning; and the fragments are clumsily united with cord. There is also a little tin plate let into a slit in a black post: it bears a date,--_8 Avril, 1867_.... The volcanic vents, which were active in 1851, are not visible from the peak: they are in the gorge descending from it, at a point nearly on a level with the Étang Sec. The ground gives out a peculiar hollow sound when tapped, and is covered with a singular lichen,--all composed of round overlapping leaves about one-eighth of an inch in diameter, pale green, and tough as fish-scales. Here and there one sees a beautiful branching growth, like a mass of green coral: it is a gigantic moss. _Cabane-Jésus_ ("bed of-Jesus") the patois name is: at Christmas-time, in all the churches, those decorated cribs in which the image of the Child-Saviour is laid are filled with it. The creeping crimson violet is also here. Fire-flies with bronze-green bodies are crawling about;-I notice also small frogs, large gray crickets, and a species of snail with a black shell. A solitary humming-bird passes, with a beautiful blue head, flaming like sapphire. All at once the peak vibrates to a tremendous sound from somewhere below.... It is only a peal of thunder; but it startled at first, because the mountain rumbles and grumbles occasionally.... From the wilderness of ferns about the lake a sweet long low whistle comes--three times;-a _siffleur-de-montagne_ has its nest there. There is a rain-storm over the woods beneath us: clouds now hide everything but the point on which we rest; the crater of the Palmistes becomes invisible. But it is only for a little while that we are thus befogged: a wind comes, blows the clouds over us, lifts them up and folds them like a drapery, and slowly whirls them away northward. And for the first time the view is clear over the intervening gorge,--now spanned by the rocket-leap of a perfect rainbow. ... Valleys and mornes, peaks and ravines,--succeeding each other swiftly as surge succeeds surge in a storm,--a weirdly tossed world, but beautiful as it is weird: all green the foreground, with all tints of green, shadowing off to billowy distances of purest blue. The sea-line remains invisible as ever: you know where it is only by the zone of pale light ringing the double sphericity of sky and ocean. And in this double blue void the island seems to hang suspended: far peaks seem to come up from nowhere, to rest on nothing--like forms of mirage. Useless to attempt photography;--distances take the same color as the sea. Vauclin's truncated mass is recognizable only by the shape of its indigo shadows. All is vague, vertiginous;--the land still seems to quiver with the prodigious forces that up-heaved it. High over all this billowing and peaking tower the Pitons of Carbet, gem-violet through the vapored miles,--the tallest one filleted with a single soft white band of cloud. Through all the wonderful chain of the Antilles you might seek in vain for other peaks exquisite of form as these. Their beauty no less surprises the traveller today than it did Columbus three hundred and eighty-six years ago, when--on the thirteenth day of June, 1502--his caravel first sailed into sight of them, and he asked his Indian guide the name of the unknown land, and the names of those marvellous shapes. Then, according to Pedro Martyr de Anghiera, the Indian answered that the name of the island was Madiana; that those peaks had been venerated from immemorial time by the ancient peoples of the archipelago as the birthplace of the human race; and that the first brown habitants of Madiana, having been driven from their natural heritage by the man-eating pirates of the south--the cannibal Caribs,--remembered and mourned for their sacred mountains, and gave the names of them, for a memory, to the loftiest summits of their new home,--Hayti.... Surely never was fairer spot hallowed by the legend of man's nursing-place than the valley blue-shadowed by those peaks,--worthy, for their gracious femininity of shape, to seem the visible breasts of the All-nourishing Mother,--dreaming under this tropic sun. Touching the zone of pale light north-east, appears a beautiful peaked silhouette,--Dominica. We had hoped to perceive Saint Lucia; but the atmosphere is too heavily charged with vapor to-day. How magnificent must be the view on certain extraordinary days, when it reaches from Antigua to the Grenadines--over a range of three hundred miles! But the atmospheric conditions which allow of such a spectacle are rare indeed. As a general rule, even in the most unclouded West Indian weather, the loftiest peaks fade into the light at a distance of one hundred miles. A sharp ridge covered with fern cuts off the view of the northern slopes: one must climb it to look down upon Macouba. Macouba occupies the steepest slope of Pelée, and the grimmest part of the coast: its little _chef-lieu_ is industrially famous for the manufacture of native tobacco, and historically for the ministrations of Père Labat, who rebuilt its church. Little change has taken place in the parish since his time. "Do you know Macouba?" asks a native writer;--"it is not Pelion upon Ossa, but ten or twelve Pelions side by side with ten or twelve Ossae, interseparated by prodigious ravines. Men can speak to each other from places whence, by rapid walking, it would require hours to meet;--to travel there is to experience on dry land the sensation of the sea." With the diminution of the warmth provoked by the exertion of climbing, you begin to notice how cool it feels;--you could almost doubt the testimony of your latitude. Directly east is Senegambia: we are well south of Timbuctoo and the Sahara,--on a line with southern India. The ocean has cooled the winds; at this altitude the rarity of the air is northern; but in the valleys below the vegetation is African. The best alimentary plants, the best forage, the flowers of the gardens, are of Guinea;--the graceful date-palms are from the Atlas region: those tamarinds, whose thick shade stifles all other vegetal life beneath it, are from Senegal. Only, in the touch of the air, the vapory colors of distance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not of Africa: that strange fascination which has given to the island its poetic creole name,--_le Pays de Revenants_. And the charm is as puissant in our own day as it was more than two hundred years ago, when Père Dutertre wrote:--"I have never met one single man, nor one single woman, of all those who came back therefrom, in whom I have not remarked a most passionate desire to return thereunto." Time and familiarity do not weaken the charm, either for those born among these scenes who never voyaged beyond their native island, or for those to whom the streets of Paris and the streets of St. Pierre are equally well known. Even at a time when Martinique had been forsaken by hundreds of her ruined planters, and the paradise-life of the old days had become only a memory to embitter exile,--a Creole writes:-- "Let there suddenly open before you one of those vistas, or _anses_, with colonnades of cocoa-palm--at the end of which you see smoking the chimney of a sugar-mill, and catch a glimpse of the hamlet of negro cabins (_cases_);--or merely picture to yourself one of the most ordinary, most trivial scenes: nets being hauled by two ranks of fishermen; a _canot_ waiting for the _embellie_ to make a dash for the beach; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and running along the shore to get to market;--and illuminate that with the light of our sun! What landscapes!--O Salvator Rosa! 0 Claude Lorrain,--if I had your pencil!... Well do I remember the day on which, after twenty years of absence, I found myself again in presence of these wonders;--I feel once more the thrill of delight that made all my body tremble, the tears that came to my eyes. It was my land, my own land, that appeared so beautiful."... [34] X. At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new impressions: every face was radiant.... Now all look serious;--none speak. The first physical joy of finding oneself on this point in violet air, exalted above the hills, soon yields to other emotions inspired by the mighty vision and the colossal peace of the heights. Dominating all, I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is looking upon,--such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in that tremendous question of the Book of Job:--"_Wast thou brought forth before the hills?_"... And the blue multitude of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,--telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath,--until something like the fulness of a great grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and color, will surely endure,--marvellous as now,--after we shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it. [34] CHAPTER VIII. 'TI CANOTIÉ I. One might almost say that commercial time in St. Pierre is measured by cannon-shots,--by the signal-guns of steamers. Every such report announces an event of extreme importance to the whole population. To the merchant it is a notification that mails, money, and goods have arrived;--to consuls and Government officials it gives notice of fees and dues to be collected;--for the host of lightermen, longshoremen, port laborers of all classes, it promises work and pay;--for all it signifies the arrival of food. The island does not feed itself: cattle, salt meats, hams, lard, flour, cheese, dried fish, all come from abroad,--particularly from America. And in the minds of the colored population the American steamer is so intimately associated with the idea of those great tin cans in which food-stuffs are brought from the United States, that the onomatope applied to the can, because of the sound outgiven by it when tapped,--_bom!_--is also applied to the ship itself. The English or French or Belgian steamer, however large, is only known as _packett-à_, _batiment-là_; but the American steamer is always the "bom-ship"--_batiment-bom-à_, or, the "food-ship"--_batiment-mangé-à_.... You hear women and men asking each other, as the shock of the gun flaps through all the town, "_Mi! gadé ça qui là, chè?_" And if the answer be, "_Mais c'est bom-là, chè,--bom-mangé-à ka rivé_" (Why, it is the bom, dear,--the food-bom that has come), great is the exultation. Again, because of the sound of her whistle, we find a steamer called in this same picturesque idiom, _batiment-cône_,--"the horn-ship." There is even a song, of which the refrain is:-- "Bom-là rivé, chè.-Batiment-cône-là rivé." ... But of all the various classes of citizens, those most joyously excited by the coming of a great steamer, whether she be a "bom" or not,--are the _'ti canotié_, who swarm out immediately in little canoes of their own manufacture to dive for coins which passengers gladly throw into the water for the pleasure of witnessing the graceful spectacle. No sooner does a steamer drop anchor--unless the water be very rough indeed--than she is surrounded by a fleet of the funniest little boats imaginable, full of naked urchins screaming creole. These _'ti canotié_--these little canoe-boys and professional divers--are, for the most part, sons of boatmen of color, the real _canotiers_. I cannot find who first invented the _'ti canot_: the shape and dimensions of the little canoe are fixed according to a tradition several generations old; and no improvements upon the original model seem to have ever been attempted, with the sole exception of a tiny water-tight box contrived sometimes at one end, in which the _palettes_, or miniature paddles, and various other trifles may be stowed away. The actual cost of material for a canoe of this kind seldom exceeds twenty-five or thirty cents; and, nevertheless, the number of canoes is not very large--I doubt if there be more than fifteen in the harbor;--as the families of Martinique boatmen are all so poor that twenty-five sous are difficult to spare, in spite of the certainty that the little son can earn fifty times the amount within a month after owning a canoe. For the manufacture of a Canoe an American lard-box or kerosene-oil box is preferred by reason of its shape; but any well-constructed shipping-case of small size would serve the purpose. The top is removed; the sides and the corners of the bottom are sawn out at certain angles; and the pieces removed are utilized for the sides of the bow and stern,--sometimes also in making the little box for the paddles, or palettes, which are simply thin pieces of tough wood about the form and size of a cigar-box lid. Then the little boat is tarred and varnished: it cannot sink,--though it is quite easily upset. There are no seats. The boys (there are usually two to each canot) simply squat down in the bottom,--facing each other, they can paddle with surprising swiftness over a smooth sea; and it is a very pretty sight to witness one of their prize contests in racing,--which take place every 14th of July.... [Illustration: 'TI CANOT.] ... It was five o'clock in the afternoon: the horizon beyond the harbor was turning lemon-color;--and a thin warm wind began to come in weak puffs from the south-west,--the first breaths to break the immobility of the tropical air. Sails of vessels becalmed at the entrance of the bay commenced to flap lazily: they might belly after sundown. The _La Guayra_ was in port, lying well out: her mountainous iron mass rising high above the modest sailing craft moored in her vicinity,--barks and brigantines and brigs and schooners and barkentines. She had lain before the town the whole afternoon, surrounded by the entire squadron of _'ti canots_; and the boys were still circling about her flanks, although she had got up steam and was lifting her anchor. They had been very lucky, indeed, that afternoon,--all the little canotiers;--and even many yellow lads, not fortunate enough to own canoes, had swum out to her in hope of sharing the silver shower falling from her saloon-deck. Some of these, tired out, were resting themselves by sitting on the slanting cables of neighboring ships. Perched naked thus,--balancing in the sun, against the blue of sky or water, their slender bodies took such orange from the mellowing light as to seem made of some self-luminous substance,--flesh of sea-fairies.... Suddenly the _La Guayra_ opened her steam-throat and uttered such a moo that all the mornes cried out for at least a minute after;--and the little fellows perched on the cables of the sailing craft tumbled into the sea at the sound and struck out for shore. Then the water all at once burst backward in immense frothing swirls from beneath the stern of the steamer; and there arose such a heaving as made all the little canoes dance. The _La Guayra_ was moving. She moved slowly at first, making a great fuss as she turned round: then she began to settle down to her journey very majestically,--just making the water pitch a little behind her, as the hem of a woman's robe tosses lightly at her heels while she walks. And, contrary to custom, some of the canoes followed after her. A dark handsome man, wearing an immense Panama hat, and jewelled rings upon his hands, was still throwing money; and still the boys dived for it. But only one of each crew now plunged; for, though the _La Guayra_ was yet moving slowly, it was a severe strain to follow her, and there was no time to be lost. The captain of the little band--black Maximilien, ten years old, and his comrade Stéphane--nicknamed _Ti Chabin_, because of his bright hair,--a slim little yellow boy of eleven--led the pursuit, crying always, "_Encò, Missié,--encò!_"... The _La Guayra_ had gained fully two hundred yards when the handsome passenger made his final largess,--proving himself quite an expert in flinging coin. The piece fell far short of the boys, but near enough to distinctly betray a yellow shimmer as it twirled to the water. That was gold! In another minute the leading canoe had reached the spot, the other canotiers voluntarily abandoning the quest,--for it was little use to contend against Maximilien and Stéphane, who had won all the canoe contests last 14th of July. Stéphane, who was the better diver, plunged. He was much longer below than usual, came up at quite a distance, panted as he regained the canoe, and rested his arms upon it. The water was so deep there, he could not reach the coin the first time, though he could see it: he was going to try again,--it was gold, sure enough. --"_Fouinq! ça fond içitt!_" he gasped. Maximilien felt all at once uneasy. Very deep water, and perhaps sharks. And sunset not far off! The _La Guayra_ was diminishing in the offing. --"_Boug-là 'lé fai nou néyé!--laissé y, Stéphane!_" he cried. (The fellow wants to drown us. _Laissé_--leave it alone.) But Stéphane had recovered breath, and was evidently resolved to try again. It was gold! --"_Mais ça c'est lò!_" --"_Assez, non!_" screamed Maximilien. "_Pa plongé 'ncò, moin ka di ou! Ah! foute!_"... Stéphane had dived again! ... And where were the others? "_Bon-Dié, gadé oti yo yé!_" They were almost out of sight,--tiny specks moving shoreward.... The _La Guayra_ now seemed no bigger than the little packet running between St. Pierre and Fort-de-France. Up came Stéphane again, at a still greater distance than before,--holding high the yellow coin in one hand. He made for the canoe, and Maximilien paddled towards him and helped him in. Blood was streaming from the little diver's nostrils, and blood colored the water he spat from his mouth. --"_Ah! moin té ka di ou laissé y!_" cried Maximilien, in anger and alarm.... "_Gàdé, gàdé sang-à ka coulé nans nez ou,-nans bouche ou!...Mi oti Iézautt!_" _Lèzautt_, the rest, were no longer visible. --"_Et mi oti nou yé!_" cried Maximilien again. They had never ventured so far from shore. But Stéphane answered only, "_C'est lò!_" For the first time in his life he held a piece of gold in his fingers. He tied it up in a little rag attached to the string fastened about his waist,--a purse of his own invention,--and took up his paddles, coughing the while and spitting crimson. --"_Mi! mi!--mi oti nou yé!_" reiterated Maximilien. "_Bon-Dié!_ look where we are!" The Place had become indistinct;--the light-house, directly behind half an hour earlier, now lay well south: the red light had just been kindled. Seaward, in advance of the sinking orange disk of the sun, was the _La Guayra_, passing to the horizon. There was no sound from the shore: about them a great silence had gathered,--the Silence of seas, which is a fear. Panic seized them: they began to paddle furiously. But St. Pierre did not appear to draw any nearer. Was it only an effect of the dying light, or were they actually moving towards the semicircular cliffs of Fond Corré?... Maximilien began to cry. The little chabin paddled on,--though the blood was still trickling over his breast. Maximilien screamed out to him:-- --"_Ou pa ka pagayé,--anh?--ou ni bousoin dòmi?_" (Thou dost not paddle, eh?--thou wouldst go to sleep?) --"_Si! moin ka pagayé,--epi fò!_" (I am paddling, and hard, too!) responded Stéphane.... --"_Ou ka pagayé!--ou ka menti!_" (Thou art paddling!--thou liest!) vociferated Maximilien.... "And the fault is all thine. I cannot, all by myself, make the canoe to go in water like this! The fault is all thine: I told thee not to dive, thou stupid!" --"_Ou fou!_" cried Stéphane, becoming angry. "_Moin ka pagayé!_" (I am paddling.) --"Beast! never may we get home so! Paddle, thou lazy!--paddle, thou nasty!" --"_Macaque_ thou!--monkey!" --"_Chabin!_--must be chabin, for to be stupid so!" --"Thou black monkey!--thou species of _ouistiti!_" --"Thou tortoise-of-the-land!--thou slothful more than _molocoye!_" --"Why, thou cursed monkey, if thou sayest I do not paddle, thou dost not know how to paddle!"... ... But Maximilien's whole expression changed: he suddenly stopped paddling, and stared before him and behind him at a great violet band broadening across the sea northward out of sight; and his eyes were big with terror as he cried out:-- --"_Mais ni qui chose qui douôle içitt!_... There is something queer, Stéphane; there is something queer."... --"Ah! you begin to see now, Maximilien!-it is the current!" --"A devil-current, Stéphane.... We are drifting: we will go to the horizon!"... To the horizon--"_nou kallé lhorizon!_"--a phrase of terrible picturesqueness.... In the creole tongue, "to the horizon" signifies to the Great Open--into the measureless sea. --"_C'est pa lapeine pagayé atouèlement_" (It is no use to paddle now), sobbed Maximilien, laying down his palettes. --"_Si! si!_" said Stéphane, reversing the motion: "paddle with the current." --"With the current! It runs to La Dominique!" --"_Pouloss_," phlegmatically returned Stéphane,--"_ennou!_--let us make for La Dominique!" --"Thou fool!--it is more than past forty kilometres.... _Stéphane, mi! gadé!--mi quz" gouôs requ'em!_" A long black fin cut the water almost beside them, passed, and vanished,--a _requin_ indeed! But, in his patois, the boy almost re-echoed the name as uttered by quaint Père Dutertre, who, writing of strange fishes more than two hundred years ago, says it is called REQUIEM, because for the man who findeth himself alone with it in the midst of the sea, surely a requiem must be sung. --"Do not paddle, Stéphane!--do not put thy hand in the water again!" III. ... The _La Guayra_ was a point on the sky-verge;--the sun's face had vanished. The silence and the darkness were deepening together. --"_Si lanmè ka vini plis fò, ça nou ké fai?_" (If the sea roughens, what are we to do?) asked Maximilien. --"Maybe we will meet a steamer," answered Stéphane: "the _Orinoco_ was due to-day." --"And if she pass in the night?" --"They can see us."... --"No, they will not be able to see us at all. There is no moon." --"They have lights ahead." --"I tell thee, they will not see us at all,--pièss! pièss! pièss!" --"Then they will hear us cry out." --"NO,--we cannot cry so loud. One can hear nothing but a steam-whistle or a cannon, with the noise of the wind and the water and the machine.... Even on the Fort-de-France packet one cannot hear for the machine. And the machine of the _Orinoco_ is more big than the church of the 'Centre.'" --"Then we must try to get to La Dominique." ... They could now feel the sweep of the mighty current;--it even seemed to them that they could hear it,--a deep low whispering. At long intervals they saw lights,--the lights of houses in Pointe-Prince, in Fond-Canonville,--in Au Prêcheur. Under them the depth was unfathomed:--hydrographic charts mark it _sans-fond_. And they passed the great cliffs of Aux Abymes, under which lies the Village of the Abysms. The red glare in the west disappeared suddenly as if blown out;--the rim of the sea vanished into the void of the gloom;--the night narrowed about them, thickening like a black fog. And the invisible, irresistible power of the sea was now bearing them away from the tall coast,--over profundities unknown,--over the _sans-fond_,--out to the horizon. IV. ... Behind the canoe a long thread of pale light quivered and twisted: bright points from time to time mounted up, glowered like eyes, and vanished again;--glimmerings of faint flame wormed away on either side as they floated on. And the little craft no longer rocked as before;--they felt another and a larger motion,--long slow ascents and descents enduring for minutes at a time;--they were riding the great swells,--_riding the horizon!_ Twice they were capsized. But happily the heaving was a smooth one, and their little canoe could not sink: they groped for it, found it, righted it, and climbed in, and baled out the water with their hands. From time to time they both cried out together, as loud as they could,--"_Sucou!--sucou!--sucou!_"--hoping that some one might be looking for them.... The alarm had indeed been given; and one of the little steam-packets had been sent out to look for them,--with torch-fires blazing at her bows; but she had taken the wrong direction. --"Maximilien," said Stéphane, while the great heaving seemed to grow vaster,--"_fau nou ka prié Bon-Dié_."... Maximilien answered nothing. --"_Fau prié Bon-Dié_" (We must pray to the Bon-Dié), repeated Stéphane. --"_Pa lapeine, li pas pè ouè nou atò!_" (It is not worth while: He cannot see us now) answered the little black.... In the immense darkness even the loom of the island was no longer visible. --"O Maximilien!--_Bon-Dié ka ouè toutt, ka connaitt toutt_" (He sees all; He knows all), cried Stéphane. --"_Y pa pè ouè non pièss atouèelement, moin ben sur!_" (He cannot see us at all now,--I am quite sure) irreverently responded Maximilien.... --"Thou thinkest the Bon-Dié like thyself!--He has not eyes like thou," protested Stéphane. "_Li pas ka tini coulè; li pas ka tini zié_" (He has not color; He has not eyes), continued the boy, repeating the text of his catechism,--the curious creole catechism of old Perè Goux, of Carbet. [Quaint priest and quaint catechism have both passed away.] --"_Moin pa save si li pa ka tini coulè_" (I know not if He has not color), answered Maximilien. "But what I well know is that if He has not eyes, He cannot see.... _Fouinq!_--how idiot!" --"Why, it is in the Catechism," cried Stéphane.... "_'Bon-Dié, li conm vent: vent tout-patout, et nou pa save ouè li;-li ka touché nou,--li ka boulvésé lanmè.'_" (The Good-God is like the Wind: the Wind is everywhere, and we cannot see It;--It touches us,--It tosses the sea.) --"If the Bon-Dié is the Wind," responded Maximilien, "then pray thou the Wind to stay quiet." --"The Bon-Dié is not the Wind," cried Stéphane: "He is like the Wind, but He is not the Wind."... --"_Ah! soc-soc--fouinq!_... More better past praying to care we be not upset again and eaten by sharks." * * * * * * * ... Whether the little chabin prayed either to the Wind or to the Bon-Dié, I do not know. But the Wind remained very quiet all that night,--seemed to hold its breath for fear of ruffling the sea. And in the Mouillage of St. Pierre furious American captains swore at the Wind because it would not fill their sails. V. Perhaps, if there had been a breeze, neither Stéphane nor Maximilien would have seen the sun again. But they saw him rise. Light pearled in the east, over the edge of the ocean, ran around the rim of the sky and yellowed: then the sun's brow appeared;--a current of gold gushed rippling across the sea before him;--and all the heaven at once caught blue fire from horizon to zenith. Violet from flood to cloud the vast recumbent form of Pelée loomed far behind,--with long reaches of mountaining: pale grays o'ertopping misty blues. And in the north another lofty shape was towering,--strangely jagged and peaked and beautiful,--the silhouette of Dominica: a sapphire Sea!... No wandering clouds:--over far Pelée only a shadowy piling of nimbi.... Under them the sea swayed dark as purple ink--a token of tremendous depth.... Still a dead calm, and no sail in sight. --"_Ça c'est la Dominique_," said Maximilien,--"_Ennou pou ouivage-à!_" They had lost their little palettes during the night;--they used their naked hands, and moved swiftly. But Dominica was many and many a mile away. Which was the nearer island, it was yet difficult to say;--in the morning sea-haze, both were vapory,--difference of color was largely due to position.... _Sough!--sough!--sough!_--A bird with a white breast passed overhead; and they stopped paddling to look at it,-a gull. Sign of fair weather!--it was making for Dominica. --"_Moin ni ben faim_," murmured Maximilien. Neither had eaten since the morning of the previous day,--most of which they had passed sitting in their canoe. --"_Moin ni anni soif_," said Stéphane. And besides his thirst he complained of a burning pain in his head, always growing worse. He still coughed, and spat out pink threads after each burst of coughing. The heightening sun flamed whiter and whiter: the flashing of waters before his face began to dazzle like a play of lightning.... Now the islands began to show sharper lines, stronger colors; and Dominica was evidently the nearer;--for bright streaks of green were breaking at various angles through its vapor-colored silhouette, and Martinique still remained all blue. ... Hotter and hotter the sun burned; more and more blinding became his reverberation. Maximilien's black skin suffered least; but both lads, accustomed as they were to remaining naked in the sun, found the heat difficult to bear. They would gladly have plunged into the deep water to cool themselves, but for fear of sharks;--all they could do was to moisten their heads, and rinse their mouths with sea-water. Each from his end of the canoe continually watched the horizon. Neither hoped for a sail, there was no wind; but they looked for the coming of steamers,--the _Orinoco_ might pass, or the English packet, or some one of the small Martinique steamboats might be sent out to find them. Yet hours went by; and there still appeared no smoke in the ring of the sky,--never a sign in all the round of the sea, broken only by the two huge silhouettes.... But Dominica was certainly nearing;--the green lights were spreading through the luminous blue of her hills. ... Their long immobility in the squatting posture began to tell upon the endurance of both boys,--producing dull throbbing aches in thighs, hips, and loins.... Then, about mid-day, Stéphane declared he could not paddle any more;--it seemed to him as if his head must soon burst open with the pain which filled it: even the sound of his own voice hurt him,--he did not want to talk. VI. ... And another oppression came upon them,--in spite of all the pains, and the blinding dazzle of waters, and the biting of the sun: the oppression of drowsiness. They began to doze at intervals,--keeping their canoe balanced in some automatic way,--as cavalry soldiers, overweary, ride asleep in the saddle. But at last, Stéphane, awaking suddenly with a paroxysm of coughing, so swayed himself to one side as to overturn the canoe; and both found themselves in the sea. Maximilien righted the craft, and got in again; but the little chabin twice fell back in trying to raise himself upon his arms. He had become almost helplessly feeble. Maximilien, attempting to aid him, again overturned the unsteady little boat; and this time it required all his skill and his utmost strength to get Stéphane out of the water. Evidently Stéphane could be of no more assistance;--the boy was so weak he could not even sit up straight. --"_Aïe! ou ké jété nou encò_," panted Maximilien,--"_metté ou toutt longue_." Stéphane slowly let himself down, so as to lie nearly all his length in the canoe,--one foot on either side of Maximilien's hips. Then he lay very still for a long time,--so still that Maximilien became uneasy. --"_Ou ben malade?_" he asked.... Stéphane did not seem to hear: his eyes remained closed. --"Stéphane!" cried Maximilien, in alarm,--"Stéphane!" --"_C'est lò, papoute_," murmured Stéphane, without lifting his eyelids,--"_ça c'est lò!--ou pa janmain ouè yon bel pièce conm ça?_" (It is gold, little father.... Didst thou ever see a pretty piece like that?... No, thou wilt not beat me, little father?--no, _papoute!_) --"_Ou ka dòmi, Stéphane?_"--queried Maximilien, wondering,--"art asleep?" But Stéphane opened his eyes and looked at him so strangely! Never had he seen Stéphane look that way before. --"_C'a ou ni, Stéphane?--what ails thee?--aïe, Bon-Dié, Bon-Dié!_" --"_Bon-Dié!_"--muttered Stéphane, closing his eyes again at the sound of the great Name,--"He has no color!--He is like the Wind."... --"Stéphane!"... --"He feels in the dark--He has not eyes."... --"_Stéphane, pa pàlé ça!!_" --"He tosses the sea.... He has no face;--He lifts up the dead... and the leaves."... --"_Ou fou_" cried Maximilien, bursting into a wild fit of sobbing,--"Stéphane, thou art mad!" And all at once he became afraid of Stéphane,--afraid of all he said,--afraid of his touch,--afraid of his eyes... he was growing like a _zombi!_ But Stéphane's eyes remained closed!--he ceased to speak. ... About them deepened the enormous silence of the sea;--low swung the sun again. The horizon was yellowing: day had begun to fade. Tall Dominica was now half green; but there yet appeared no smoke, no sail, no sign of life. And the tints of the two vast Shapes that shattered the rim of the light shifted as if evanescing,--shifted like tones of West Indian fishes,--of _pisquette_ and _congre_,--of _caringue_ and _gouôs-zié_ and _balaou_. Lower sank the sun;--cloud-fleeces of orange pushed up over the edge of the west;--a thin warm breath caressed the sea,--sent long lilac shudderings over the flanks of the swells. Then colors changed again: violet richened to purple;--greens blackened softlY;--grays smouldered into smoky gold. And the sun went down. VII. And they floated into the fear of the night together. Again the ghostly fires began to wimple about them: naught else was visible but the high stars. Black hours passed. From minute to minute Maximilien cried out:--"_Sucou! sucou!_" Stéphane lay motionless and dumb: his feet, touching Maximilien's naked hips, felt singularly cold. ... Something knocked suddenly against the bottom of the canoe,--knocked heavily--making a hollow loud sound. It was not Stéphane;--Stéphane lay still as a stone: it was from the depth below. Perhaps a great fish passing. It came again,--twice,--shaking the canoe like a great blow. Then Stéphane suddenly moved,--drew up his feet a little,--made as if to speak:--"_Ou..._"; but the speech failed at his lips,--ending in a sound like the moan of one trying to call out in sleep;--and Maximilien's heart almost stopped beating.... Then Stéphane's limbs straightened again; he made no more movement;--Maximilien could not even hear him breathe.... All the sea had begun to whisper. A breeze was rising;--Maximilien felt it blowing upon him. All at once it seemed to him that he had ceased to be afraid,--that he did not care what might happen. He thought about a cricket he had one day watched in the harbor,--drifting out with the tide, on an atom of dead bark.--and he wondered what had become of it Then he understood that he himself was the cricket,--still alive. But some boy had found him and pulled off his legs. There they were,--his own legs, pressing against him: he could still feel the aching where they had been pulled off; and they had been dead so long they were now quite cold.... It was certainly Stéphane who had pulled them off.... The water was talking to him. It was saying the same thing over and over again,--louder each time, as if it thought he could not hear. But he heard it very well:--"_Bon-Dié, li conm vent... li ka touché nou... nou pa save ouè li_." (But why had the Bon-Dié shaken the wind?) "_Li pa ka tini zié_," answered the water.... _Ouille!_--He might all the same care not to upset folks in the sea!... _Mi!_... But even as he thought these things, Maximilien became aware that a white, strange, bearded face was looking at him: the Bon-Dié was there,--bending over him with a lantern,--talking to him in a language he did not understand. And the Bon-Dié certainly had eyes,--great gray eyes that did not look wicked at all. He tried to tell the Bon-Dié how sorry he was for what he had been saying about him;--but found he could not utter a word, He felt great hands lift him up to the stars, and lay him down very near them,--just under them. They burned blue-white, and hurt his eyes like lightning:--he felt afraid of them.... About him he heard voices,--always speaking the same language, which he could not understand.... "_Poor little devils!--poor little devils!_" Then he heard a bell ring; and the Bon-Dié made him swallow something nice and warm;--and everything became black again. The stars went out!... ... Maximilien was lying under an electric-light on board the great steamer _Rio de Janeiro_, and dead Stéphane beside him.... It was four o'clock in the morning. CHAPTER IX. LA FILLE DE COULEUR. I. Nothing else in the picturesque life of the French colonies of the Occident impresses the traveller on his first arrival more than the costumes of the women of color. They surprise the aesthetic sense agreeably;--they are local and special: you will see nothing resembling them among the populations of the British West Indies; they belong to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Désirade, Marie-Galante, and Cayenne,--in each place differing sufficiently to make the difference interesting, especially in regard to the head-dress. That of Martinique is quite Oriental;--more attractive, although less fantastic than the Cayenne coiffure, or the pretty drooping mouchoir of Guadeloupe. These costumes are gradually disappearing, for various reasons,--the chief reason being of course the changes in the social condition of the colonies during the last forty years. Probably the question of health had also something to do with the almost universal abandonment in Martinique of the primitive slave dress,--_chemise_ and _jupe_,--which exposed its wearer to serious risks of pneumonia; for as far as economical reasons are concerned, there was no fault to find with it: six francs could purchase it when money was worth more than it is now. The douillette, a long trailing dress, one piece from neck to feet, has taken its place. [35] [Illustration: THE MARTINIQUE TURBAN, OR MADRAS CALENDE.] But there was a luxurious variety of the jupe costume which is disappearing because of its cost; there is no money in the colonies now for such display:--I refer to the celebrated attire of the pet slaves and _belles affranchies_ of the old colonial days. A full costume,--including violet or crimson "petticoat" of silk or satin; chemise with half-sleeves, and much embroidery and lace; "trembling-pins" of gold (_zépingue tremblant_) to attach the folds of the brilliant Madras turban; the great necklace of three or four strings of gold beads bigger than peas (_collier-choux_); the ear-rings, immense but light as egg-shells (_zanneaux-à-clous_ or _zanneaux-chenilles_); the bracelets (_portes-bonheur_); the studs (_boutons-à-clous_); the brooches, not only for the turban, but for the chemise, below the folds of the showy silken foulard or shoulder-scarf,--would sometimes represent over five thousand francs expenditure. This gorgeous attire is becoming less visible every year: it is now rarely worn except on very solemn occasions,--weddings, baptisms, first communions, confirmations. The _da_ (nurse) or "porteuse-de-baptême" who bears the baby to church holds it at the baptismal font, and afterwards carries it from house to house in order that all the friends of the family may kiss it, is thus attired; but nowadays, unless she be a professional (for there are professional _das_, hired only for such occasions), she usually borrows the jewellery. If tall, young, graceful, with a rich gold tone of skin, the effect of her costume is dazzling as that of a Byzantine Virgin. I saw one young da who, thus garbed, scarcely seemed of the earth and earthly;--there was an Oriental something in her appearance difficult to describe,--something that made you think of the Queen of Sheba going to visit Solomon. She had brought a merchant's baby, just christened, to receive the caresses of the family at whose house I was visiting; and when it came to my turn to kiss it, I confess I could not notice the child: I saw only the beautiful dark face, coiffed with orange and purple, bending over it, in an illumination of antique gold.... What a da!... She represented really the type of that _belle affranchie_ of other days, against whose fascination special sumptuary laws were made; romantically she imaged for me the supernatural god-mothers and Cinderellas of the creole fairy-tales. For these become transformed in the West Indian folklore,--adapted to the environment, and to local idealism:--Cinderella, for example, is changed to a beautiful metisse, wearing a quadruple _collier-choux_, _zépingues tremblants_, and all the ornaments of a da. [36] Recalling the impression of that dazzling _da_, I can even now feel the picturesque justice of the fabulist's description of Cinderella's creole costume: _Ça té ka baille ou mal zie!_--(it would have given you a pain in your eyes to look at her!) [Illustration: THE GUADELOUPE HEAD-DRESS.] ... Even the every-day Martinique costume is slowly changing. Year by year the "calendeuses"--the women who paint and fold the turbans--have less work to do;--the colors of the _douiellette_ are becoming less vivid;--while more and more young colored girls are being _élevées en chapeau_ ("brought up in a hat")--i.e., dressed and educated like the daughters of the whites. These, it must be confessed, look far less attractive in the latest Paris fashion, unless white as the whites themselves: on the other hand, few white girls could look well in _douillette_ and _mouchoir_,--not merely because of color contrast, but because they have not that amplitude of limb and particular cambering of the torso peculiar to the half-breed race, with its large bulk and stature. Attractive as certain coolie women are, I observed that all who have adopted the Martinique costume look badly in it: they are too slender of body to wear it to advantage. Slavery introduced these costumes, even though it probably did not invent them; and they were necessarily doomed to pass away with the peculiar social conditions to which they belonged. If the population clings still to its _douillettes_, _mouchoirs_, and _foulards_, the fact is largely due to the cheapness of such attire. A girl can dress very showily indeed for about twenty francs--shoes excepted;--and thousands never wear shoes. But the fashion will no doubt have become cheaper and uglier within another decade. At the present time, however, the stranger might be sufficiently impressed by the oddity and brilliancy of these dresses to ask about their origin,--in which case it is not likely that he will obtain any satisfactory answer. After long research I found myself obliged to give up all hope of being able to outline the history of Martinique costume,--partly because books and histories are scanty or defective, and partly because such an undertaking would require a knowledge possible only to a specialist. I found good reason, nevertheless, to suppose that these costumes were in the beginning adopted from certain fashions of provincial France,--that the respective fashions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Cayenne were patterned after modes still worn in parts of the mother-country. The old-time garb of the _affranchie_--that still worn by the _da_--somewhat recalls dresses worn by the women of Southern France, more particularly about Montpellier. Perhaps a specialist might also trace back the evolution of the various creole coiffures to old forms of head-dresses which still survive among the French country-fashions of the south and south-west provinces;--but local taste has so much modified the original style as to leave it unrecognizable to those who have never studied the subject. The Martinique fashion of folding and tying the Madras, and of calendering it, are probably local; and I am assured that the designs of the curious semi-barbaric jewellery were all invented in the colony, where the _collier-choux_ is still manufactured by local goldsmiths. Purchasers buy one, two, or three _grains_, or beads, at a time, and string them only on obtaining the requisite number.... This is the sum of all that I was able to learn on the matter; but in the course of searching various West Indian authors and historians for information, I found something far more important than the origin of the _douillette_ or the _collier-choux_: the facts of that strange struggle between nature and interest, between love and law, between prejudice and passion, which forms the evolutional history of the mixed race. II. Considering only the French peasant colonist and the West African slave as the original factors of that physical evolution visible in the modern _fille-de-couleur_, it would seem incredible;--for the intercrossing alone could not adequately explain all the physical results. To understand them fully, it will be necessary to bear in mind that both of the original races became modified in their lineage to a surprising degree by conditions of climate and environment. [Illustration: YOUNG MULATTRESS.] [Illustration: PLANTATION COOLIE WOMAN IN MARTINIQUE COSTUME.] The precise time of the first introduction of slaves into Martinique is not now possible to ascertain,--no record exists on the subject; but it is probable that the establishment of slavery was coincident with the settlement of the island. Most likely the first hundred colonists from St. Christophe, who landed, in 1635, near the bay whereon the city of St. Pierre is now situated, either brought slaves with them, or else were furnished with negroes very soon after their arrival. In the time of Père Dutertre (who visited the colonies in 1640, and printed his history of the French Antilles at Paris in 1667) slavery was already a flourishing institution,--the foundation of the whole social structure. According to the Dominican missionary, the Africans then in the colony were decidedly repulsive; he describes the women as "hideous" (_hideuses_). There is no good reason to charge Dutertre with prejudice in his pictures of them. No writer of the century was more keenly sensitive to natural beauty than the author of that "Voyage aux Antilles" which inspired Chateaubriand, and which still, after two hundred and fifty years, delights even those perfectly familiar with the nature of the places and things spoken of. No other writer and traveller of the period possessed to a more marked degree that sense of generous pity which makes the unfortunate appear to us in an illusive, almost ideal aspect. Nevertheless, he asserts that the negresses were, as a general rule, revoltingly ugly,--and, although he had seen many strange sides of human nature (having been a soldier before becoming a monk), was astonished to find that miscegenation had already begun. Doubtless the first black women thus favored, or afflicted, as the case might be, were of the finer types of negresses; for he notes remarkable differences among the slaves procured from different coasts and various tribes. Still, these were rather differences of ugliness than aught else: they were all repulsive;--only some were more repulsive than others. [37] Granting that the first mothers of mulattoes in the colony were the superior rather than the inferior physical types,--which would be a perfectly natural supposition,--still we find their offspring worthy in his eyes of no higher sentiment than pity. He writes in his chapter entitled "_De la naissance honteuse des mulastres_": --"They have something of their Father and something of their Mother,--in the same wise that Mules partake of the qualities of the creatures that engendered them: for they are neither all white, like the French; nor all black, like the Negroes, but have a livid tint, which comes of both."... To-day, however, the traveller would look in vain for a _livid_ tint among the descendants of those thus described: in less than two centuries and a half the physical characteristics of the race have been totally changed. What most surprises is the rapidity of the transformation. After the time of Père Labat, Europeans never could "have mistaken little negro children for monkeys." Nature had begun to remodel the white, the black, and half-breed according to environment and climate: the descendant of the early colonists ceased to resemble his fathers; the creole negro improved upon his progenitors; [38] the mulatto began to give evidence of those qualities of physical and mental power which were afterwards to render him dangerous to the integrity of the colony itself. In a temperate climate such a change would have been so gradual as to escape observation for a long period;--in the tropics it was effected with a quickness that astounds by its revelation of the natural forces at work. [Illustration: COOLIE HALF-BREED] --"Under the sun of the tropics," writes Dr. Rufz, of Martinique, "the African race, as well as the European, becomes greatly modified in its reproduction. Either race gives birth to a totally new being. The Creole African came into existence as did the Creole white." And just as the offspring of Europeans who emigrated to the tropics from different parts of France displayed characteristics so identical that it was impossible to divine the original race-source,--so likewise the Creole negro--whether brought into being by the heavy thick-set Congo, or the long slender black of Senegambia, or the suppler and more active Mandingo,--appeared so remodelled, homogeneous, and adapted in such wise to his environment that it was utterly impossible to discern in his features anything of his parentage, his original kindred, his original source.... The transformation is absolute. All that In be asserted is: "This is a white Creole; this is a black Creole";--or, "This is a European white; this is an African black";--and furthermore, after a certain number of years passed in the tropics, the enervated and discolored aspect of the European may create uncertainty, as to his origin. But with very few exceptions the primitive African, or, as he is termed here, the "Coast Black" (_le noir de la Cote_), can be recognized at once.... [Illustration: COUNTRY-GIRL--PURE NEGRO RACE.] ... "The Creole negro is gracefully shaped, finely proportioned: his limbs are lithe, his neck long;--his features are more delicate, his lips less thick, his nose less flattened, than those of the African;--he has the Carib's large and melancholy eye, better adapted to express the emotions.... Rarely can you discover in him the sombre fury of the African, rarely a surly and savage mien: he is brave, chatty, boastful. His skin has not the same tint as his father's,--it has become more satiny; his hair remains woolly, but it is a finer wool;... all his outlines are more rounded;--one may perceive that the cellular tissue predominates, as in cultivated plants, of which the ligneous and savage fibre has become transformed."... [39] This new and comelier black race naturally won from its masters a more sympathetic attention than could have been vouchsafed to its progenitors; and the consequences in Martinique and elsewhere seemed to have evoked the curinus Article 9 of the _Code Noir_ of 1665,--enacting, first, that free men who should have one or two children by slave women, as well as the slave-owners permitting the same, should be each condemned to pay two thousand pounds of sugar; secondly, that if the violator of the ordinance should be himself the owner of the mother and father of her children, the mother and the children should be confiscated for the profit of the Hospital, and deprived for their lives of the right to enfranchisement. An exception, however, was made to the effect that if the father were unmarried at the period of his concubinage, he could escape the provisions of the penalty by marrying, "according to the rites of the Church," the female slave, who would thereby be enfranchised, and her children "rendered free and legitimate." Probably the legislators did not imagine that the first portion of the article could prove inefficacious, or that any violator of the ordinance would seek to escape the penalty by those means offered in the provision. The facts, however, proved the reverse. Miscegenation continued; and Labat notices two cases of marriage between whites and blacks,--describing the offspring of one union as "very handsome little mulattoes." These legitimate unions were certainly exceptional,--one of them was dissolved by the ridicule cast upon the father;--but illegitimate unions would seem to have become common within a very brief time after the passage of the law. At a later day they were to become customary. The Article 9 was evidently at fault; and in March, 1724, the Black Code was reinforced by a new ordinance, of which the sixth provision prohibited marriage as well as concubinage between the races. It appears to have had no more effect than the previous law, even in Martinique, where the state of public morals was better than in Santo Domingo. The slave race had begun to exercise an influence never anticipated by legislators. Scarcely a century had elapsed since the colonization of the island; but in that time climate and civilization had transfigured the black woman. "After one or two generations," writes the historian Rufz, "the _Africaine_, reformed, refined, beautified in her descendants, transformed into the creole negress, commenced to exert a fascination irresistible, capable of winning anything (_capable de tout obtenir_)." [40] Travellers of the eighteenth century were confounded by the luxury of dress and of jewellery displayed by swarthy beauties in St. Pierre. It was a public scandal to European eyes. But the creole negress or mulattress, beginning to understand her power, sought for higher favors and privileges than silken robes and necklaces of gold beads: she sought to obtain, not merely liberty for herself, but for her parents, brothers, sisters,--even friends. What successes she achieved in this regard may be imagined from the serious statement of creole historians that if human nature had been left untrammelled to follow its better impulses, slavery would have ceased to exist a century before the actual period of emancipation! By 1738, when the white population had reached its maximum (15,000), [41] and colonial luxury had arrived at its greatest height, the question of voluntary enfranchisement was becoming very grave. So omnipotent the charm of half-breed beauty that masters were becoming the slaves of their slaves. It was not only the creole _negress_ who had appeared to play a part in this strange drama which was the triumph of nature over interest and judgment: her daughters, far more beautiful, had grown up to aid her, and to form a special class. These women, whose tints of skin rivalled the colors of ripe fruit, and whose gracefulness--peculiar, exotic, and irresistible--made them formidable rivals to the daughters of the dominant race, were no doubt physically superior to the modern _filles-de-couleur_. They were results of a natural selection which could have taken place in no community otherwise constituted;--the offspring of the union between the finer types of both races. But that which only slavery could have rendered possible began to endanger the integrity of slavery itself: the institutions upon which the whole social structure rested were being steadily sapped by the influence of half-breed girls. Some new, severe, extreme policy was evidently necessary to avert the already visible peril. Special laws were passed by the Home-Government to check enfranchisement, to limit its reasons or motives; and the power of the slave woman was so well comprehended by the Métropole that an extraordinary enactment was made against it. It was decreed that whosoever should free a woman of color would have to pay to the Government _three times her value as a slave!_ Thus heavily weighted, emancipation advanced much more slowly than before, but it still continued to a considerable extent. The poorer creole planter or merchant might find it impossible to obey the impulse of his conscience or of his affection, but among the richer classes pecuniary considerations could scarcely affect enfranchisement. The country had grown wealthy; and although the acquisition of wealth may not evoke generosity in particular natures, the enrichment of a whole class develops pre-existing tendencies to kindness, and opens new ways for its exercise. Later in the eighteenth century, when hospitality had been cultivated as a gentleman's duty to fantastical extremes,--when liberality was the rule throughout society,--when a notary summoned to draw up a deed, or a priest invited to celebrate a marriage, might receive for fee five thousand francs in gold,--there were certainly many emancipations.... "Even though interest and public opinion in the colonies," says a historian, [42] "were adverse to enfranchisement, the private feeling of each man combated that opinion;--Nature resumed her sway in the secret places of hearts;--and as local custom permitted a sort of polygamy, the rich man naturally felt himself bound in honor to secure the freedom of his own blood.... It was not a rare thing to see legitimate wives taking care of the natural children of their husbands,--becoming their godmothers (_s'en faire les marraines_)."... Nature seemed to laugh all these laws to scorn, and the prejudices of race! In vain did the wisdom of legislators attempt to render the condition of the enfranchised more humble,--enacting extravagant penalties for the blow by which a mulatto might avenge the insult of a white,--prohibiting the freed from wearing the same dress as their former masters or mistresses wore;--"the _belles affranchies_ found, in a costume whereof the negligence seemed a very inspiration of voluptuousness, means of evading that social inferiority which the law sought to impose upon them:--they began to inspire the most violent jealousies." [43] III. What the legislators of 1685 and 1724 endeavored to correct did not greatly improve with the abolition of slavery, nor yet with those political troubles which socially deranged colonial life. The _fille-de-couleur_, inheriting the charm of the belle _affranchie_, continued to exert a similar influence, and to fulfil an almost similar destiny. The latitude of morals persisted,--though with less ostentation: it has latterly contracted under the pressure of necessity rather than through any other influences. Certain ethical principles thought essential to social integrity elsewhere have always been largely relaxed in the tropics; and--excepting, perhaps, Santo Domingo--the moral standard in Martinique was not higher than in the other French coloniei. Outward decorum might be to some degree maintained; but there was no great restraint of any sort upon private lives: it was not uncommon for a rich man to have many "natural" families; and almost every individual of means had children of color. The superficial character of race prejudices was everywhere manifested by unions, which although never mentioned in polite converse, were none the less universally known; and the "irresistible fascination" of the half-breed gave the open lie to pretended hate. Nature, in the guise of the _belle affranchie_, had mocked at slave codes;--in the _fille-de-couleur_ she still laughed at race pretensions, and ridiculed the fable of physical degradation. To-day, the situation has not greatly changed; and with such examples on the part of the cultivated race, what could be expected from the other? Marriages are rare;--it has been officially stated that the illegitimate births are sixty per cent; but seventy-five to eighty per cent would probably be nearer the truth. It is very common to see in the local papers such announcements as: _Enfants légitimes_, 1 (one birth announced); _enfants naturels_, 25. In speaking of the _fille-de-couleur_ it is necessary also to speak of the extraordinary social stratification of the community to which she belongs. The official statement of 20,000 "colored" to the total population of between 173,000 and 174,000 (in which the number of pure whites is said to have fallen as low as 5,000) does not at all indicate the real proportion of mixed blood. Only a small element of unmixed African descent really exists; yet when a white creole speaks of the _gens-de-couleur_ he certainly means nothing darker than a mulatto skin. Race classifications have been locally made by sentiments of political origin: at least four or five shades of visible color are classed as negro. There is, however, some natural truth at the bottom of this classification: where African blood predominates, the sympathies are likely to be African; and the turning-point is reached only in the true mulatto, where, allowing the proportions of mixed blood to be nearly equal, the white would have the dominant influence in situations more natural than existing politics. And in speaking of the _filles-de-couleur_, the local reference is always to women in whom the predominant element is white: a white creole, as a general rule, deigns only thus to distinguish those who are nearly white,--more usually he refers to the whole class as mulattresses. Those women whom wealth and education have placed in a social position parallel with that of the daughters of creole whites are in some cases allowed to pass for white,--or at the very worst, are only referred to in a whisper as being _de couleur_. (Needless to say, these are totally beyond the range of the present considerations: there is nothing to be further said of them except that they can be classed with the most attractive and refined women of the entire tropical world.) As there is an almost infinite gradation from the true black up to the brightest _sang-mêlé_, it is impossible to establish any color-classification recognizable by the eye alone; and whatever lines of demarcation can be drawn between castes must be social rather than ethnical. In this sense we may accept the local Creole definition of _fille-de-couleur_ as signifying, not so much a daughter of the race of visible color, as the half-breed girl destined from her birth to a career like that of the _belle affranchie_ of the old regime;--for the moral cruelties of slavery have survived emancipation. Physically, the typical _fille-de-couleur_ may certainly be classed, as white creole writers have not hesitated to class her, with the "most beautiful women of the human race." [44] She has inherited not only the finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and physical conditions,--a grace, a suppleness of form, a delicacy of extremities (so that all the lines described by the bending of limbs or fingers are parts of clean curves), a satiny smoothness and fruit-tint of skin,--solely West Indian.... Morally, of course, it is much more difficult to describe her; and whatever may safely be said refers rather to the fille-de-couleur of the past than of the present half-century. The race is now in a period of transition: public education and political changes are modifying the type, and it is impossible to guess the ultimate consequence, because it is impossible to safely predict what new influences may yet be brought to affect its social development. Befare the present era of colonial decadence, the character of the fille-de-couleur was not what it is now. Even when totally uneducated, she had a peculiar charm,--that charm of childishness which has power to win sympathy from the rudest natures. One could not but feel attracted towards this naïf being, docile as an infant, and as easily pleased or as easily pained,--artless in her goodnesses as in her faults, to all outward appearance;--willing to give her youth, her beauty, her caresses to some one in exchange for the promise to love her,--perhaps also to care for a mother, or a younger brother. Her astonishing capacity for being delighted with trifles, her pretty vanities and pretty follies, her sudden veerings of mood from laughter to tears,--like the sudden rainbursts and sunbursts of her own passionate climate: these touched, drew, won, and tyrannized. Yet such easily created joys and pains did not really indicate any deep reserve of feeling: rather a superficial sensitiveness only,--like the _zhèbe-m'amisé_, or _zhèbe-manmzelle_, whose leaves close at the touch of a hair. Such human manifestations, nevertheless, are apt to attract more in proportion as they are more visible,--in proportion as the soul-current, being less profound, flows more audibly. But no hasty observation could have revealed the whole character of the fille-de-couleur to the stranger, equally charmed and surprised: the creole comprehended her better, and probably treated her with even more real kindness. The truth was that centuries of deprivation of natural rights and hopes had given to her race--itself fathered by passion unrestrained and mothered by subjection unlimited--an inherent scepticism in the duration of love, and a marvellous capacity for accepting the destiny of abandonment as one accepts the natural and the inevitable. And that desire to please--which in the fille-de-couleur seemed to prevail above all other motives of action (maternal affection excepted)--could have appeared absolutely natural only to those who never reflected that even sentiment had been artificially cultivated by slavery. She asked for so little,--accepted a gift with such childish pleasure,--submitted so unresistingly to the will of the man who promised to love her. She bore him children--such beautiful children!--whom he rarely acknowledged, and was never asked to legitimatize;--and she did not ask perpetual affection notwithstanding,--regarded the relation as a necessarily temporary one, to be sooner or later dissolved by the marriage of her children's father. If deceived in all things,--if absolutely ill-treated and left destitute, she did not lose faith in human nature: she seemed a born optimist, believing most men good;--she would make a home for another and serve him better than any slave.... "_Née de l'amour_," says a creole writer, "_la fille-de-couleur vit d'amour, de rires, et d'oublis_."... [45] [Illustration: CAPRESSE.] Then came the general colonial crash!... You cannot see its results without feeling touched by them. Everywhere the weird beauty, the immense melancholy of tropic ruin. Magnificent terraces, once golden with cane, now abandoned to weeds and serpents;--deserted plantation-homes, with trees rooted in the apartments and pushing up through the place of the roofs;--grass-grown alleys ravined by rains;--fruit-trees strangled by lianas;--here and there the stem of some splendid palmiste, brutally decapitated, naked as a mast;--petty frail growths of banana-trees or of bamboo slowly taking the place of century-old forest giants destroyed to make charcoal. But beauty enough remains to tell what the sensual paradise of the old days must have been, when sugar was selling at 52. And the fille-de-couleur has also changed. She is much less humble and submissive,--somewhat more exacting: she comprehends better the moral injustice of her position. The almost extreme physical refinement and delicacy, bequeathed to her by the freedwomen of the old regime, are passing away: like a conservatory plant deprived of its shelter, she is returning to a more primitive condition,--hardening and growing perhaps less comely as well as less helpless. She perceives also in a vague way the peril of her race: the creole white, her lover and protector, is emigrating;--the domination of the black becomes more and more probable. Furthermore, with the continual increase of the difficulty of living, and the growing pressure of population, social cruelties and hatreds have been developed such as her ancestors never knew. She is still loved; but it is alleged that she rarely loves the white, no matter how large the sacrifices made for her sake, and she no longer enjoys that reputation of fidelity accorded to her class in other years. Probably the truth is that the fille-de-couleur never had at any time capacity to bestow that quality of affection imagined or exacted as a right. Her moral side is still half savage: her feelings are still those of a child. If she does not love the white man according to his unreasonable desire, it is certain at least that she loves him as well as he deserves. Her alleged demoralization is more apparent than real;--she is changing from an artificial to a very natural being, and revealing more and more in her sufferings the true character of the luxurious social condition that brought her into existence. As a general rule, even while questioning her fidelity, the creole freely confesses her kindness of heart, and grants her capable of extreme generosity and devotedness to strangers or to children whom she has an opportunity to care for. Indeed, her natural kindness is so strikingly in contrast with the harder and subtler character of the men of color that one might almost feel tempted to doubt if she belong to the same race. Said a creole once, in my hearing:--"The gens-de-couleur are just like the _tourtouroux_: [46] one must pick out the females and leave the males alone." Although perhaps capable of a double meaning, his words were not lightly uttered;--he referred to the curious but indubitable fact that the character of the colored woman appears in many respects far superior to that of the colored man. In order to understand this, one must bear in mind the difference in the colonial history of both sexes; and a citation from General Romanet, [47] who visited Martinique at the end of the last century, offers a clue to the mystery. Speaking of the tax upon enfranchisement, he writes:-- --"The governor appointed by the sovereign delivers the certificates of liberty,--on payment by the master of a sum usually equivalent to the value of the subject. Public interest frequently justifies him in making the price of the slave proportionate to the desire or the interest manifested by the master. It can be readily understood that the tax upon the liberty of the women ought to be higher than that of the men: the latter unfortunates having no greater advantage than that of being useful;--the former know how to please: they have those rights and privileges which the whole world allows to their sex; they know how to make even the fetters of slavery serve them for adornments. They may be seen placing upon their proud tyrants the same chains worn by themselves, and making them kiss the marks left thereby: the master becomes the slave, and purchases another's liberty only to lose his own." Long before the time of General Romanet, the colored male slave might win liberty as the guerdon of bravery in fighting against foreign invasion, or might purchase it by extraordinary economy, while working as a mechanic on extra time for his own account (he always refused to labor with negroes); but in either case his success depended upon the possession and exercise of qualities the reverse of amiable. On the other hand, the bondwoman won manumission chiefly through her power to excite affection. In the survival and perpetuation of the fittest of both sexes these widely different characteristics would obtain more and more definition with successive generations. I find in the "Bulletin des Actes Administratifs de la Martinique" for 1831 (No. 41) a list of slaves to whom liberty was accorded _pour services rendus à leurs maîtres_. Out of the sixty-nine enfranchisements recorded under this head, there are only two names of male adults to be found,--one an old man of sixty;--the other, called Laurencin, the betrayer of a conspiracy. The rest are young girls, or young mothers and children;--plenty of those singular and pretty names in vogue among the creole population,--Acélie, Avrillette, Mélie, Robertine, Célianne, Francillette, Adée, Catharinette, Sidollie, Céline, Coraline;--and the ages given are from sixteen to twenty-one, with few exceptions. Yet these liberties were asked for and granted at a time when Louis Philippe had abolished the tax on manumissions.... The same "Bulletin" contains a list of liberties granted to colored men, _pour service accompli dans la milice_, only! Most of the French West Indian writers whose works I was able to obtain and examine speak severely of the _hommes-de-couleur_ as a class,--in some instances the historian writes with a very violence of hatred. As far back as the commencement of the eighteenth century, Labat, who, with all his personal oddities, was undoubtedly a fine judge of men, declared:--"The mulattoes are as a general rule well made, of good stature, vigorous, strong, adroit, industrious, and daring (_hardis_) beyond all conception. They have much vivacity, but are given to their pleasures, fickle, proud, deceitful (_cachés_), wicked, and capable of the greatest crimes." A San Domingo historian, far more prejudiced than Père Labat, speaks of them "as physically superior, though morally inferior to the whites": he wrote at a time when the race had given to the world the two best swordsmen it has yet perhaps seen,--Saint-Georges and Jean-Louis. Commenting on the judgment of Père Labat, the historian Borde observes:--"The wickedness spoken of by Père Labat doubtless relates to their political passions only; for the women of color are, beyond any question, the best and sweetest persons in the world--_à coup sûr, les meilleures et les plus douces personnes qu'il y ait au monde_."--("Histoire de l'Ile de la Trinidad," par M. Pierre Gustave Louis Borde, vol. i., p. 222.) The same author, speaking of their goodness of heart, generosity to strangers and the sick says "they are born Sisters of Charity";--and he is not the only historian who has expressed such admiration of their moral qualities. What I myself saw during the epidemic of 1887-88 at Martinique convinced me that these eulogies of the women of color are not extravagant. On the other hand, the existing creole opinion of the men of color is much less favorable than even that expressed by Père Labat. Political events and passions have, perhaps, rendered a just estimate of their qualities difficult. The history of the _hommes-de-couleur_ in all the French colonies has been the same;--distrusted by the whites, who feared their aspirations to social equality, distrusted even more by the blacks (who still hate them secretly, although ruled by them), the mulattoes became an Ishmaelitish clan, inimical to both races, and dreaded of both. In Martinique it was attempted, with some success, to manage them by according freedom to all who would serve in the militia for a certain period with credit. At no time was it found possible to compel them to work with blacks; and they formed the whole class of skilled city workmen and mechanics for a century prior to emancipation. ... To-day it cannot be truly said of the _fille-de-couleur_ that her existence is made up of "love, laughter, and forgettings." She has aims in life,--the bettering of her condition, the higher education of her children, whom she hopes to free from the curse of prejudice. She still clings to the white, because through him she may hope to improve her position. Under other conditions she might even hope to effect some sort of reconciliation between the races. But the gulf has become so much widened within the last forty years, that no rapprochement now appears possible; and it is perhaps too late even to restore the lost prosperity of the colony by any legislative or commercial reforms. The universal creole belief is summed up in the daily-repeated cry: "_C'est un pays perdu!_" Yearly the number of failures increase; and more whites emigrate;--and with every bankruptcy or departure some fille-de-couleur is left almost destitute, to begin life over again. Many a one has been rich and poor several times in succession;--one day her property is seized for debt;--perhaps on the morrow she finds some one able and willing to give her a home again,... Whatever comes, she does not die for grief, this daughter of the sun: she pours out her pain in song, like a bird, Here is one of her little improvisations,--a song very popular in both Martinique and Guadeloupe, though originally composed in the latter colony:-- --"Good-bye Madras! Good-bye foulard! Good-bye pretty calicoes! Good-bye collier-choux! That ship Which is there on the buoy, It is taking My doudoux away. --"Adiéu Madras! Adiéu foulard! Adiéu dézinde! Adiéu collier-choux! Batiment-là Qui sou labouè-là, Li ka mennein Doudoux-à-moin allé. --"Very good-day,-- Monsieur the Consignee. I come To make one little petition. My doudoux Is going away. Alas! I pray you Delay his going" --"Bien le-bonjou', Missié le Consignataire. Moin ka vini Fai yon ti pétition; Doudoux-à-moin Y ka pati,--T'enprie, hélas! Rétàdé li." [He answers kindly in French: the _békés_ are always kind to these gentle children.] --"My dear child, It is too late. The bills of lading Are already signed; The ship Is already on the buoy. In an hour from now They will be getting her under way." --"Ma chère enfant Il est trop tard, Les connaissements Sont déjà signés, Est déjà sur la bouée; Dans une heure d'ici, Ils vont appareiller." --"When the foulards came.... I always had some; When the Madras-kerchiefs came, I always had some; When the printed calicoes came, I always had some. ... That second officer--Is such a kind man! --"Foulard rivé, Moin té toujou tini; Madras rivé, Moin té toujou tini; Dézindes rivé, Moin té toujou tini.--Capitaine sougonde C'est yon bon gàçon! "Everybody has" Somebody to love; Everybody has Somebody to pet; Every body has A sweetheart of her own. I am the only one Who cannot have that,--I!" "Toutt moune tini Yon moune yo aimé; Toutt moune tini Yon moune yo chéri; Toutt moune tini Yon doudoux à yo. Jusse moin tou sèle Pa tini ça--moin!" ... On the eve of the _Fête Dieu_, or Corpus Christi festival, in all these Catholic countries, the city streets are hung with banners and decorated with festoons and with palm branches; and great altars are erected at various points along the route of the procession, to serve as resting-places for the Host. These are called _reposoirs_; in creole patois, "_reposouè Bon-Dié_." Each wealthy man lends something to help to make them attractive,--rich plate, dainty crystal, bronzes, paintings, beautiful models of ships or steamers, curiosities from remote parts of the world.... The procession over, the altar is stripped, the valuables are returned to their owners: all the splendor disappears.... And the spectacle of that evanescent magnificence, repeated year by year, suggested to this proverb-loving people a similitude for the unstable fortune of the fille-de-couleur:--_Fortune milatresse c'est reposouè Bon-Dié_. (The luck of the mulattress is the resting-place of the Good-God). CHAPTER X. BÊTE-NI-PIÉ. I. St. Pierre is in one respect fortunate beyond many tropical cities;--she has scarcely any mosquitoes, although there are plenty of mosquitoes in other parts of Martinique, even in the higher mountain villages. The flood of bright water that pours perpetually through all her streets, renders her comparatively free from the pest;--nobody sleeps under a mosquito bar. Nevertheless, St. Pierre is not exempt from other peculiar plagues of tropical life; and you cannot be too careful about examining your bed before venturing to lie down, and your clothing before you dress;--for various disagreeable things might be hiding in them: a spider large as a big crab, or a scorpion or a _mabouya_ or a centipede,--or certain large ants whose bite burns like the pricking of a red-hot needle. No one who has lived in St. Pierre is likely to forget the ants.... There are three or four kinds in every house;--the _fourmi fou_ (mad ant), a little speckled yellowish creature whose movements are so rapid as to delude the vision; the great black ant which allows itself to be killed before it lets go what it has bitten; the venomous little red ant, which is almost too small to see; and the small black ant which does not bite at all,--are usually omnipresent, and appear to dwell together in harmony. They are pests in kitchens, cupboards, and safes; but they are scavengers. It is marvellous to see them carrying away the body of a great dead roach or centipede,--pulling and pushing together like trained laborers, and guiding the corpse over obstacles or around them with extraordinary skill.... There was a time when ants almost destroyed the colony,--in 1751. The plantations, devastated by them are described by historians as having looked as if desolated by fire. Underneath the ground in certain places, layers of their eggs two inches deep were found extending over acres. Infants left unwatched in the cradle for a few hours were devoured alive by them. Immense balls of living ants were washed ashore at the same time on various parts of the coast (a phenomenon repeated within the memory of creoles now living in the north-east parishes). The Government vainly offered rewards for the best means of destroying the insects; but the plague gradually disappeared as it came. None of these creatures can be prevented from entering a dwelling;--you may as well resign yourself to the certainty of meeting with them from time to time. The great spiders (with the exception of those which are hairy) need excite no alarm or disgust;--indeed they are suffered to live unmolested in many houses, partly owing to a belief that they bring good-luck, and partly because they destroy multitudes of those enormous and noisome roaches which spoil whatever they cannot eat. The scorpion is less common; but it has a detestable habit of lurking under beds; and its bite communicates a burning fever. With far less reason, the mabouya is almost equally feared. It is a little lizard about six inches long, and ashen-colored;--it haunts only the interior of houses, while the bright-green lizards dwell only upon the roofs. Like other reptiles of the same order, the mabouya can run over or cling to polished surfaces; and there is a popular belief that if frightened, it will leap at one's face or hands and there fasten itself so tightly that it cannot be dislodged except by cutting it to pieces. Moreover, it's feet are supposed to have the power of leaving certain livid and ineffaceable marks upon the skin of the person to whom it attaches itself:--_ça ka ba ou lota_, say the colored people. Nevertheless, there is no creature more timid and harmless than the mabouya. But the most dreaded and the most insolent invader of domestic peace is the centipede. The water system of the city banished the mosquito; but it introduced the centipede into almost every dwelling. St. Pierre has a plague of centipedes. All the covered drains, the gutters, the crevices of fountain-basins and bathing-basins, the spaces between floor and ground, shelter centipedes. And the _bête à-mille-pattes_ is the terror of the barefooted population:--scarcely a day passes that some child or bonne or workman is not bitten by the creature. The sight of a full-grown centipede is enough to affect a strong set of nerves. Ten to eleven inches is the average length of adults; but extraordinary individuals much exceeding this dimension may be sometimes observed in the neighborhood of distilleries (_rhommeries_) and sugar-refineries. According to age, the color of the creature varies from yellowish to black;--the younger ones often have several different tints; the old ones are uniformly jet-black, and have a carapace of surprising toughness,--difficult to break. If you tread, by accident or design, upon the tail, the poisonous head will instantly curl back and bite the foot through any ordinary thickness of upper-leather. As a general rule the centipede lurks about the court-yards, foundations, and drains by preference; but in the season of heavy rains he does not hesitate to move upstairs, and make himself at home in parlors and bed-rooms. He has a provoking habit of nestling in your _moresques_ or your _chinoises_,--those wide light garments you put on before taking your siesta or retiring for the night. He also likes to get into your umbrella,--an article indispensable in the tropics; and you had better never open it carelessly. He may even take a notion to curl himself up in your hat, suspended on the wall. (I have known a trigonocephalus to do the same thing in a country-house). He has also a singular custom of mounting upon the long trailing dresses (douillettes) worn by Martinique women,--and climbing up very swiftly and lightly to the wearer's neck, where the prickling of his feet first betrays his presence. Sometimes he will get into bed with you and bite you, because you have not resolution enough to lie perfectly still while he is tickling you.... It is well to remember before dressing that merely shaking a garment may not dislodge him;--you must examine every part very patiently,--particularly the sleeves of a coat and the legs of pantaloons. The vitality of the creature is amazing. I kept one in a bottle without food or water for thirteen weeks, at the end of which time it remained active and dangerous as ever. Then I fed it with living insects, which it devoured ravenously;--beetles, roaches, earthworms, several _lepismaoe_, even one of the dangerous-looking millepedes, which have a great resemblance in outward structure to the centipede, but a thinner body, and more numerous limbs,--all seemed equally palatable to the prisoner.... I knew an instance of one, nearly a foot long, remaining in a silk parasol for more than four months, and emerging unexpectedly one day, with aggressiveness undiminished, to bite the hand that had involuntarily given it deliverance. In the city the centipede has but one natural enemy able to cope with him,--the hen! The hen attacks him with delight, and often swallows him, head first, without taking the trouble to kill him. The cat hunts him, but she is careful never to put her head near him;--she has a trick of whirling him round and round upon the floor so quickly as to stupefy him: then, when she sees a good chance, she strikes him dead with her claws. But if you are fond of your cat you will let her run no risks, as the bite of a large centipede might have very bad results for your pet. Its quickness of movement demands all the quickness of even the cat for self-defence.... I know of men who have proved themselves able to seize a fer-de-lance by the tail, whirl it round and round, and then flip it as you would crack a whip,--whereupon the terrible head flies off; but I never heard of anyone in Martinique daring to handle a living centipede. There are superstitions concerning the creature which have a good effect in diminishing his tribe. If you kill a centipede, you are sure to receive money soon; and even if you dream of killing one it is good-luck. Consequently, people are glad of any chance to kill centipedes,--usually taking a heavy stone or some iron utensil for the work;--a wooden stick is not a good weapon. There is always a little excitement when a _bête-ni-pié_ (as the centipede is termed in the patois) exposes itself to death; and you may often hear those who kill it uttering a sort of litany of abuse with every blow, as if addressing a human enemy:--"_Quitté moin tchoué ou, maudi!--quitté moin tchoué ou, scelerat!--quitté moin tchoué ou, Satan!--quitté moin tchoué ou, abonocio!_" etc. (Let me kill you, accursed! scoundrel! Satan! abomination!) The patois term for the centipede is not a mere corruption of the French _bête-à-mille-pattes_. Among a population of slaves, unable to read or write, [48] there were only the vaguest conceptions of numerical values; and the French term bête-à-mille-pattes was not one which could appeal to negro imagination. The slaves themselves invented an equally vivid name, _bête-anni-pié_ (the Beast-which-is-all-feet); _anni_ in creole signifying "only," and in such a sense "all." Abbreviated by subsequent usage to _bête-'ni-pié_, the appellation has amphibology;--for there are two words _ni_ in the patois, one signifying "to have," and the other "naked." So that the creole for a centipede might be translated in three ways,--"the Beast-which-is-all-feet"; or, "the Naked-footed Beast"; or, with fine irony of affirmation, "the Beast-which-has-feet." II. What is the secret of that horror inspired by the centipede?... It is but very faintly related to our knowledge that the creature is venomous;--the results of the bite are only temporary swelling and a brief fever;--it is less to be feared than the bite of other tropical insects and reptiles which never inspire the same loathing by their aspect. And the shapes of venomous creatures are not always shapes of ugliness. The serpent has elegance of form as well as attractions of metallic tinting;--the tarantula, or the _matoutou-falaise_, have geometrical beauty. Lapidaries have in all ages expended rare skill upon imitations of serpent grace in gold and gems;--a princess would not scorn to wear a diamond spider. But what art could utilize successfully the form of the centipede? It is a form of absolute repulsiveness,--a skeleton-shape half defined:--the suggestion of some old reptile-spine astir, crawling with its fragments of ribs. No other living thing excites exactly the same feeling produced by the sight of the centipede,--the intense loathing and peculiar fear. The instant you see a centipede you feel it is absolutely necessary to kill it; you cannot find peace in your house while you know that such a life exists in it: perhaps the intrusion of a serpent would annoy and disgust you less. And it is not easy to explain the whole reason of this loathing. The form alone has, of course, something to do with it,--a form that seems almost a departure from natural laws. But the form alone does not produce the full effect, which is only experienced when you see the creature in motion. The true horror of the centipede, perhaps, must be due to the monstrosity of its movement,--multiple and complex, as of a chain of pursuing and inter-devouring lives: there is something about it that makes you recoil, as from a sudden corrupt swarming-out. It is confusing,--a series of contractings and lengthenings and, undulations so rapid as to allow of being only half seen: it alarms also, because the thing seems perpetually about to disappear, and because you know that to lose sight of it for one moment involves the very unpleasant chance of finding it upon you the next,--perhaps between skin and clothing. But this is not all:--the sensation produced by the centipede is still more complex--complex, in fact, as the visible organization of the creature. For, during pursuit,--whether retreating or attacking, in hiding or fleeing,--it displays a something which seems more than instinct: calculation and cunning,--a sort of malevolent intelligence. It knows how to delude, how to terrify;--it has marvellous skill in feinting;--it is an abominable juggler.... III. I am about to leave my room after breakfast, when little Victoire who carries the meals up-stairs in a wooden tray, screams out:--"_Gadé, Missié! ni bête-ni-pié assous dos ou!_" There is a thousand-footed beast upon my back!. Off goes my coat, which I throw upon the floor;--the little servant, who has a nervous horror of centipedes, climbs upon a chair. I cannot see anything under the coat, nevertheless;--I lift it by the collar, turn it about very cautiously--nothing! Suddenly the child screams again; and I perceive the head close to my hand;--the execrable thing had been hiding in a perpendicular fold of the coat, which I drop only just in time to escape getting bitten. Immediately the centipede becomes invisible. Then I take the coat by one flap, and turn it over very quickly: just as quickly does the centipede pass over it in the inverse direction, and disappear under it again. I have had my first good look at him: he seems nearly a foot long,--has a greenish-yellow hue against the black cloth,--and pink legs, and a violet head;--he is evidently young.... I turn the coat a second time: same disgusting manreuvre. Undulations of livid color flow over him as he lengthens and shortens;--while running his shape is but half apparent; it is only as he makes a half pause in doubling round and under the coat that the panic of his legs becomes discernible. When he is fully exposed they move with invisible rapidity,--like a vibration;--you can see only a sort of pink haze extending about him,--something to which you would no more dare advance your finger than to the vapory halo edging a circular saw in motion. Twice more I turn and re-turn the coat with the same result;--I observe that the centipede always runs towards my hand, until I withdraw it: he feints! With a stick I uplift one portion of the coat after another; and suddenly perceive him curved under a sleeve,--looking quite small!--how could he have seemed so large a moment ago?... But before I can strike him he has flickered over the cloth again, and vanished; and I discover that he has the power of _magnifying himself_,--dilating the disgust of his shape at will: he invariably amplifies himself to face attack.... It seems very difficult to dislodge him; he displays astonishing activity and cunning at finding wrinkles and folds to hide in. Even at the risk of damaging various things in the pockets, I stamp upon the coat;--then lift it up with the expectation of finding the creature dead. But it suddenly rushes out from some part or other, looking larger and more wicked than ever,--drops to the floor, and charges at my feet: a sortie! I strike at him unsuccessfully with the stick: he retreats to the angle between wainscoting and floor, and runs along it fast as a railroad train,--dodges two or three pokes,--gains the door-frame,--glides behind a hinge, and commences to run over the wall of the stair-way. There the hand of a black servant slaps him dead. --"Always strike at the head," the servant tells me; "never tread on the tail.... This is a small one: the big fellows can make you afraid if you do not know how to kill them." ... I pick up the carcass with a pair of scissors. It does not look formidable now that it is all contracted;--it is scarcely eight inches long,--thin as card-board, and even less heavy. It has no substantiality, no weight;--it is a mere appearance, a mask, a delusion.... But remembering the spectral, cunning, juggling something which magnified and moved it but a moment ago,--I feel almost tempted to believe, with certain savages, that there are animal shapes inhabited by goblins.... IV. --"Is there anything still living and lurking in old black drains of Thought,--any bigotry, any prejudice, anything in the moral world whereunto the centipede may be likened?" --"Really, I do not know," replied the friend to whom I had put the question; "but you need only go as far as the vegetable world for a likeness. Did you ever see anything like this?" he added, opening a drawer and taking therefrom something revolting, which, as he pressed it in his hand, looked like a long thick bundle of dried centipedes. --"Touch them," he said, holding out to me the mass of articulated flat bodies and bristling legs. --"Not for anything!" I replied, in astonished disgust. He laughed, and opened his hand. As he did so, the mass expanded. --"Now look," he exclaimed! Then I saw that all the bodies were united at the tails--grew together upon one thick flat annulated stalk... a plant!--"But here is the fruit," he continued, taking from the same drawer a beautifully embossed ovoid nut, large as a duck's egg, ruddy-colored, and so exquisitely varnished by nature as to resemble a rosewood carving fresh from the hands of the cabinet-maker. In its proper place among the leaves and branches, it had the appearance of something delicious being devoured by a multitude of centipedes. Inside was a kernel, hard and heavy as iron-wood; but this in time, I was told, falls into dust: though the beautiful shell remains always perfect. Negroes call it the _coco-macaque_. CHAPTER XI. MA BONNE. I. I cannot teach Cyrillia the clock;--I have tried until both of us had our patience strained to the breaking-point. Cyrillia still believes she will learn how to tell the time some day or other;--I am certain that she never will. "_Missié_," she says, "_lézhè pa aïen pou moin: c'est minitt ka fouté moin yon travail!_"--the hours do not give her any trouble; but the minutes are a frightful bore! And nevertheless, Cyrillia is punctual as the sun;--she always brings my coffee and a slice of corossol at five in the morning precisely. Her clock is the _cabritt-bois_. The great cricket stops singing, she says, at half-past four: the cessation of its chant awakens her. --"_Bonjou', Missié. Coument ou passé lanuitt?_"--"Thanks, my daughter, I slept well."--"The weather is beautiful: if Missié would like to go to the beach, his bathing-towels are ready."--"Good! Cyrillia; I will go."... Such is our regular morning conversation. Nobody breakfasts before eleven o'clock or thereabout; but after an early sea-bath, one is apt to feel a little hollow during the morning, unless one take some sort of refreshment. Cyrillia always prepares something for me on my return from the beach,--either a little pot of fresh cocoa-water, or a _cocoyage_, or a _mabiyage_, or a _bavaroise_. The _cocoyage_ I like the best of all. Cyrillia takes a green cocoa-nut, slices off one side of it so as to open a hole, then pours the opalescent water into a bowl, adds to it a fresh egg, a little Holland gin, and some grated nutmeg and plenty of sugar. Then she whips up the mixture into effervescence with her _baton-lélé_. The _baton-lélé_ is an indispensaple article in every creole home: it is a thin stick which is cut from a young tree so as to leave at one end a whorl of branch-stumps sticking out at right angles like spokes;--by twirling the stem between the hands, the stumps whip up the drink in a moment. The _mabiyage_ is less agreeable, but is a popular morning drink among the poorer classes. It is made with a little white rum and a bottle of the bitter native root-beer called _mabi_. The taste of _mabi_ I can only describe as that of molasses and water flavored with a little cinchona bark. The _bavaroise_ is fresh milk, sugar, and a little Holland gin or rum,--mixed with the baton-lélé until a fine thick foam is formed. After the _cocoyage_, I think it is the best drink one can take in the morning; but very little spirit must be used for any of these mixtures. It is not until just before the mid-day meal that one can venture to take a serious stimulant,--_yon ti ponch_,--rum and water, sweetened with plenty of sugar or sugar syrup. The word _sucre_ is rarely used in Martinique,--considering that sugar is still the chief product;--the word _doux_, "sweet," is commonly substituted for it. _Doux_ has, however, a larger range of meaning: it may signify syrup, or any sort of sweets,--duplicated into _doudoux_, it means the corossole fruit as well as a sweetheart. _Ça qui lè doudoux?_ is the cry of the corossole-seller. If a negro asks at a grocery store (_graisserie_) for _sique_ instead of for _doux_, it is only because he does not want it to be supposed that he means syrup;--as a general rule, he will only use the word _sique_ when referring to quality of sugar wanted, or to sugar in hogsheads. _Doux_ enters into domestic consumption in quite remarkable ways. People put sugar into fresh milk, English porter, beer, and cheap wine;--they cook various vegetables with sugar, such as peas; they seem to be particularly fond of sugar-and-water and of _d'leau-pain_,--bread-and-water boiled, strained, mixed with sugar, and flavored with cinnamon. The stranger gets accustomed to all this sweetness without evil results. In a northern climate the consequence would probably be at least a bilious attack; but in the tropics, where salt fish and fruits are popularly preferred to meat, the prodigal use of sugar or sugar-syrups appears to be decidedly beneficial. ... After Cyrillia has prepared my _cocoyage_, and rinsed the bathing-towels in fresh-water, she is ready to go to market, and wants to know what I would like to eat for breakfast. "Anything creole, Cyrillia;--I want to know what people eat in this country." She always does her best to please me in this respect,--almost daily introduces me to some unfamiliar dishes, something odd in the way of fruit or fish. II. Cyrillia has given me a good idea of the range and character of _mangé-Créole_, and I can venture to write something about it after a year's observation. By _mangé-Créole_ I refer only to the food of the people proper, the colored population; for the _cuisine_ of the small class of wealthy whites is chiefly European, and devoid of local interest:--I might observe, however, that the fashion of cooking is rather Provençal than Parisian;--rather of southern than of northern France. Meat, whether fresh or salt, enters little into the nourishment of the poorer classes. This is partly, no doubt, because of the cost of all meats; but it is also due to natural preference for fruits and fish. When fresh meat is purchased, it is usually to make a stew or _daube_;--probably salt meats are more popular; and native vegetables and manioc flour are preferred to bread. There are only two popular soups which are peculiar to the creole cuisine,--_calalou_, a gombo soup, almost precisely similar to that of Louisiana; and the _soupe-d'habitant_, or "country soup." It is made of yams, carrots, bananas, turnips, _choux-caraïbes_, pumpkins, salt pork, and pimento, all boiled together;--the salt meat being left out of the composition on Fridays. The great staple, the true meat of the population, is salt codfish, which is prepared in a great number of ways. The most popular and the rudest preparation of it is called "Ferocious" (_férocé_); and it is not at all unpalatable. The codfish is simply fried, and served with vinegar, oil, pimento;--manioc flour and avocados being considered indispensable adjuncts. As manioc flour forms a part of almost every creole meal, a word of information regarding it will not be out of place here. Everybody who has heard the name probably knows that the manioc root is naturally poisonous, and that the toxic elements must be removed by pressure and desiccation before the flour can be made. Good manioc flour has an appearance like very coarse oatmeal; and is probably quite as nourishing. Even when dear as bread, it is preferred, and forms the flour of the population, by whom the word _farine_ is only used to signify manioc flour: if wheat-flour be referred to it is always qualified as "French flour" (_farine-Fouance_). Although certain flours are regularly advertised as American in the local papers, they are still _farine-Fouance_ for the population, who call everything foreign French. American beer is _biè-Fouance_; American canned peas, _ti-pois-Fouance_; any white foreigner who can talk French is _yon béké-Fouance_. Usually the manioc flour is eaten uncooked: [49] merely poured into a plate, with a little water and stirred with a spoon into a thick paste or mush,--the thicker the better;--_dleau passé farine_ (more water than manioc flour) is a saying which describes the condition of a very destitute person. When not served with fish, the flour is occasionally mixed with water and refined molasses (_sirop-battrie_): this preparation, which is very nice, is called _cousscaye_. There is also a way of boiling it with molasses and milk into a kind of pudding. This is called _matêté_; children are very fond of it. Both of these names, _cousscaye_ and _matêté_, are alleged to be of Carib origin: the art of preparing the flour itself from manioc root is certainly an inheritance from the Caribs, who bequeathed many singular words to the creole patois of the French West Indies. Of all the preparations of codfish with which manioc flour is eaten, I preferred the _lamori-bouilli_,--the fish boiled plain, after having been steeped long enough to remove the excess of salt; and then served with plenty of olive-oil and pimento. The people who have no home of their own, or at least no place to cook, can buy their food already prepared from the _màchannes lapacotte_, who seem to make a specialty of _macadam_ (codfish stewed with rice) and the other two dishes already referred to. But in every colored family there are occasional feasts of _lamori-au-laitt_, codfish stewed with milk and potatoes; _lamori-au-grattin_, codfish boned, pounded with toast crumbs, and boiled with butter, onions, and pepper into a mush;--_coubouyon-lamori_, codfish stewed with butter and oil;--_bachamelle_, codfish boned and stewed with potatoes, pimentos, oil, garlic, and butter. _Pimento_ is an essential accompaniment to all these dishes, whether it be cooked or raw: everything is served with plenty of pimento,-_en pile_, _en pile piment._ Among the various kinds I can mention only the _piment-café_, or "coffee-pepper," larger but about the same shape as a grain of Liberian coffee, violet-red at one end; the _piment-zouèseau_, or bird-pepper, small and long and scarlet;--and the _piment-capresse_, very large, pointed at one end, and bag-shaped at the other. It takes a very deep red color when ripe, and is so strong that if you only break the pod in a room, the sharp perfume instantly fills the apartment. Unless you are as well-trained as any Mexican to eat pimento, you will probably regret your first encounter with the _capresse_. Cyrillia told me a story about this infernal vegetable. II ZHISTOUÈ PIMENT. Té ni yon manman qui té ni en pile, en pile yche; et yon jou y pa té ni aïen pou y té baill yche-là mangé. Y té ka lévé bon matin-là sans yon sou: y pa sa ça y té douè fai,--là y té ké baill latête. Y allé lacaïe macoumè-y, raconté lapeine-y. Macoumè baill y toua chopine farine-manioc. Y allé lacaill liautt macoumè, qui baill y yon grand trai piment. Macoumè-là di y venne trai-piment-à, épi y té pè acheté lamori,--pisse y ja té ni farine. Madame-là di: "Mèçi, macoumè;"--y di y bonjou'; épi y allé lacaïe-y. Lhè y rivé àcaïe y limé difè: y metté canari épi dleau assous difé-a; épi y cassé toutt piment-là et metté yo adans canari-à assous diré. Lhè y oue canari-à ka bouï, y pouend _baton-lélé_, epi y lélé piment-à: aloss y ka fai yonne calalou-piment. Lhè calalou-piment-là té tchouitt, y pouend chaque zassiett yche-li; y metté calalou yo fouète dans zassiett-là; y metté ta-mari fouète, assou, épi ta-y. Épi lhè calalou-là té bien fouète, y metté farine nans chaque zassiett-là. Épi y crié toutt moune vini mangé. Toutt moune vini metté yo à-tabe. Pouèmiè bouchée mari-à pouend, y rété,--y crié: "Aïe! ouaill! mafenm!" Fenm-là réponne mari y: "Ouaill! monmari!" Cés ti manmaille-la crie: "Ouaill! manman!" Manman-à. réponne:--"Ouaill! yches-moin!"... Yo toutt pouend couri, quitté caïe-là sèle,--épi yo toutt tombé larviè à touempé bouche yo. Cés ti manmaille-là bouè dleau sitellement jusse temps yo toutt néyé: té ka rété anni manman-là épi papa-là. Yo té là bò lariviè, qui té ka pleiré. Moin té ka passé à lhè-à;--moin ka mandé yo: "Ça zautt ni?" Nhomme-là lévé: y baill moin yon sèle coup d'piè, y voyé moin lautt bo lariviè-ou ouè moin vini pou conté ça ba ou. II. PIMENTO STORY. There was once a mamma who had ever so many children; and one day she had nothing to give those children to eat. She had got up very early that morning, without a sou in the world: she did not know what to do: she was so worried that her head was upset. She went to the house of a woman-friend, and told her about her trouble. The friend gave her three _chopines_ [three pints] of manioc flour. Then she went to the house of another female friend, who gave her a big trayful of pimentos. The friend told her to sell that tray of pimentos: then she could buy some codfish,--since she already had some manioc flour. The good-wife said: "Thank you, _macoumè_,"--she bid her good-day, and then went to her own house. The moment she got home, she made a fire, and put her _canari_ [earthen pot] full of water on the fire to boil: then she broke up all the pimentos and put them into the canari on the fire. As soon as she saw the canari boiling, she took her _baton-lélé_, and beat up all those pimentos: then she made a _pimento-calalou_. When the pimento-calalou was well cooked, she took each one of the children's plates, and poured their calalou into the plates to cool it; she also put her husband's out to cool, and her own. And when the calalou was quite cool, she put some manioc flour into each of the plates. Then she called to everybody to come and eat. They all came, and sat down to table. The first mouthful that husband took he stopped and screamed:--"_Aïe! ouaill!_ my wife!" The woman answered her husband: "_Ouaill_! my husband!" The little children all screamed: "_Ouaill!_ mamma!" Their mamma answered: "_Ouaill!_ my children!"... They all ran out, left the house empty; and they tumbled into the river to steep their mouths. Those little children just drank water and drank water till they were all drowned: there was nobody left except the mamma and the papa, They stayed there on the river-bank, and cried. I was passing that way just at that time;--I asked them: "What ails you people?" That man got up and gave me just one kick that sent me right across the river; I came here at once, as you see, to tell you all about it.... IV. ... It is no use for me to attempt anything like a detailed description of the fish Cyrillia brings me day after day from the Place du Fort: the variety seems to be infinite. I have learned, however, one curious fact which is worth noting: that, as a general rule, the more beautifully colored fish are the least palatable, and are sought after only by the poor. The _perroquet_, black, with bright bands of red and yellow; the _cirurgien_, blue and black; the _patate_, yellow and black; the _moringue_, which looks like polished granite; the _souri_, pink and yellow; the vermilion _Gouôs-zie_; the rosy _sade_; the red _Bon-Dié-manié-moin_ ("the-Good-God-handled-me")--it has two queer marks as of great fingers; and the various kinds of all-blue fish, _balaou_, _conliou_, etc. varying from steel-color to violet,--these are seldom seen at the tables of the rich. There are exceptions, of course, to this and all general rules: notably the _couronné_, pink spotted beautifully with black,--a sort of Redfish, which never sells less than fourteen cents a pound; and the _zorphie_, which has exquisite changing lights of nacreous green and purple. It is said, however, that the zorphi is sometimes poisonous, like the _bécunne_; and there are many fish which, although not venomous by nature, have always been considered dangerous. In the time of Père Dutertre it was believed these fish ate the apples of the manchineel-tree, washed into the sea by rains;--to-day it is popularly supposed that they are rendered occasionally poisonous by eating the barnacles attached to copper-plating of ships. The _tazard_, the _lune_, the _capitaine_, the _dorade_, the _perroquet_, the _couliou_, the _congre_, various crabs, and even the _tonne_,--all are dangerous unless perfectly fresh: the least decomposition seems to develop a mysterious poison. A singular phenomenon regarding the poisoning occasionally produced by the bécunne and dorade is that the skin peels from the hands and feet of those lucky enough to survive the terrible colics, burnings, itchings, and delirium, which are early symptoms, Happily these accidents are very rare, since the markets have been properly inspected: in the time of Dr. Rufz, they would seem to have been very common,--so common that he tells us he would not eat fresh fish without being perfectly certain where it was caught and how long it had been out of the water. The poor buy the brightly colored fish only when the finer qualities are not obtainable at low rates; but often and often the catch is so enormous that half of it has to be thrown back into the sea. In the hot moist air, fish decomposes very rapidly; it is impossible to transport it to any distance into the interior; and only the inhabitants of the coast can indulge in fresh fish,--at least sea-fish. Naturally, among the laboring class the question of quality is less important than that of quantity and substance, unless the fish-market be extraordinarily well stocked. Of all fresh fish, the most popular is the _tonne_, a great blue-gray creature whose flesh is solid as beef; next come in order of preferment the flying-fish (_volants_), which often sell as low as four for a cent;--then the _lambi_, or sea-snail, which has a very dense and nutritious flesh;--then the small whitish fish classed as _sàdines_;--then the blue-colored fishes according to price, _couliou_, _balaou_, etc.;--lastly, the shark, which sells commonly at two cents a pound. Large sharks are not edible; the flesh is too hard; but a young shark is very good eating indeed. Cyrillia cooked me a slice one morning: it was quite delicate, tasted almost like veal. [Illustration: OLD MARKET-PLACE OF THE FORT, ST. PIERRE.--(REMOVED IN 1888).] The quantity of very small fish sold is surprising. With ten sous the family of a laborer can have a good fish-dinner: a pound of _sàdines_ is never dearer than two sous;--a pint of manioc flour can be had for the same price; and a big avocado sells for a sou. This is more than enough food for any one person; and by doubling the expense one obtains a proportionately greater quantity--enough for four or five individuals. The _sàdines_ are roasted over a charcoal fire, and flavored with a sauce of lemon, pimento, and garlic. When there are no _sàdines_, there are sure to be _coulious_ in plenty,--small _coulious_ about as long as your little finger: these are more delicate, and fetch double the price. With four sous' worth of _coulious_ a family can have a superb _blaffe_. To make a _blaffe_ the fish are cooked in water, and served with pimento, lemon, spices, onions, and garlic; but without oil or butter. Experience has demonstrated that _coulious_ make the best _blaffe_; and a _blaffe_ is seldom prepared with other fish. V. There are four dishes which are the holiday luxuries of the poor:--_manicou_, _ver-palmiste_, _zandouille_, and _poule-épi-diri_. [50] The _manitou_ is a brave little marsupial, which might be called the opossum of Martinique: it fights, although overmatched, with the serpent, and is a great enemy to the field-rat. In the market a manicou sells for two francs and a half at cheapest: it is generally salted before being cooked. The great worm, or caterpillar, called _ver-palmiste_ is found in the heads of cabbage-palms,--especially after the cabbage has been cut out, and the tree has begun to perish. It is the grub of a curious beetle, which has a proboscis of such form as suggested the creole appellation, _léfant_: the "elephant." These worms are sold in the Place du Fort at two sous each: they are spitted and roasted alive, and are said to taste like almonds. I have never tried to find out whether this be fact or fancy; and I am glad to say that few white creoles confess a liking for this barbarous food. The _zandouilles_ are delicious sausages made with pig-buff,--and only seen in the market on Sundays. They cost a franc and a half each; and there are several women who have an established reputation throughout \Martinique for their skill in making them. I have tasted some not less palatable than the famous London "pork-pies." Those of Lamentin are reputed the best in the island. But _poule-épi-diri_ is certainly the most popular dish of all: it is the dearest, as well, and poor people can rarely afford it. In Louisiana an almost similar dish is called _jimbalaya_: chicken cooked with rice. The Martiniquais think it such a delicacy that an over-exacting person, or one difficult to satisfy, is reproved with the simple question:--"_Ça ou lè 'nco-poule, épi-diri?_" (What more do you want, great heavens!--chicken-and-rice?) Naughty children are bribed into absolute goodness by the promise of poule-épi-diri:-- --"_Aïe! chè, bò doudoux! Doudoux ba ou poule-épi-diri; Aïe! chè, bò doudoux!_"... (Aïe, dear! kiss _doudoux!--doudoux_ has rice-and-chicken for you!--_aïe_, dear! kiss _doudoux!_) How far rice enters into the success of the dish above mentioned I cannot say; but rice ranks in favor generally above all cereals; it is at least six times more in demand than maize. _Diri-doux_, rice boiled with sugar, is sold in prodigious quantities daily,--especially at the markets, where little heaps of it, rolled in pieces of banana or _cachibou_ leaves, are retailed at a cent each. _Diri-aulaitt_, a veritable rice-pudding, is also very popular; but it would weary the reader to mention one-tenth of the creole preparations into which rice enters. VI. Everybody eats _akras_;--they sell at a cent apiece. The akra is a small fritter or pancake, which may be made of fifty different things,--among others codfish, titiri, beans, brains, _choux-caraïbes_, little black peas (_poix-zié-nouè_, "black-eyed peas"), or of crawfish (_akra-cribîche_). When made of carrots, bananas, chicken, palm-cabbage, etc. and sweetened, they are called _marinades_. On first acquaintance they seem rather greasy for so hot a climate; but one learns, on becoming accustomed to tropical conditions, that a certain amount of oily or greasy food is both healthy and needful. First among popular vegetables are beans. Red beans are preferred; but boiled white beans, served cold with vinegar and plenty of oil, form a favorite salad. Next in order of preferment come the _choux-caraïbes_, _patates_, _zignames_, _camanioc_, and _cousscouche_: all immense roots,--the true potatoes of the tropics. The camanioc is finer than the choux-caraïbe, boils whiter and softer: in appearance it resembles the manioc root very closely, but has no toxic element. The cousscouche is the best of all: the finest Irish potato boiled into sparkling flour is not so good. Most of these roots can be cooked into a sort of mush, called _migan_: such as _migan-choux_, made with the choux-caraïbe; _migan-zignames_, made with yams; _migan-cousscouche_, etc.,--in which case crabs or shrimps are usually served with the _migan_. There is a particular fondness for the little rosy crab called _tourlouroux_, in patois _touloulou_. _Migan_ is also made with bread-fruit. Very large bananas or plantains are boiled with codfish, with _daubes_, or meat stews, and with eggs. The bread-fruit is a fair substitute for vegetables. It must be cooked very thoroughly, and has a dry potato taste. What is called the _fleu-fouitt-à-pain_, or "bread-fruit flower"--a long pod-shaped solid growth, covered exteriorly with tiny seeds closely set as pin-heads could be, and having an interior pith very elastic and resistant,--is candied into a delicious sweetmeat. VII. The consumption of bananas is enormous: more bananas are eaten than vegetables; and more banana-trees are yearly being cultivated. The negro seems to recognize instinctively that economical value of the banana to which attention was long since called by Humboldt, who estimated that while an acre planted in wheat would barely support three persons, an acre planted in banana-trees would nourish fifty. Bananas and plantains hold the first place among fruits in popular esteem;--they are cooked in every way, and served with almost every sort of meat or fish. What we call bananas in the United States, however, are not called bananas in Martinique, but figs (_figues_). Plantains seem to be called _bananes_. One is often surprised at popular nomenclature: _choux_ may mean either a sort of root (_choux-caraïbe_), or the top of the cabbage-palm; _Jacquot_ may mean a fish; _cabane_ never means a cabin, but a bed; _crickett_ means not a cricket, but a frog; and at least fifty other words have equally deceptive uses. If one desires to speak of real figs--dried figs--he must say _figues-Fouanc_ (French figs); otherwise nobody will understand him. There are many kinds of bananas here called _figues_,--the four most popular are the _figues-bananes_, which are plantains, I think; the _figues-makouenga_, which grow wild, and have a red skin; the _figues-pommes_ (apple-bananas), which are large and yellow; and the _ti-figues-desse_ (little-dessert-bananas), which are to be seen on all tables in St. Pierre. They are small, sweet, and always agreeable, even when one has no appetite for other fruits. It requires some little time to become accustomed to many tropical fruits, or at least to find patience as well as inclination to eat them. A large number, in spite of delicious flavor, are provokingly stony: such as the ripe guavas, the cherries, the barbadines; even the corrossole and _pomme-cannelle_ are little more than huge masses of very hard seeds buried in pulp of exquisite taste. The _sapota_, or _sapodtilla_, is less characterized by stoniness, and one soon learns to like it. It has large flat seeds, which can be split into two with the finger-nail; and a fine white skin lies between these two halves. It requires some skill to remove entire this little skin, or pellicle, without breaking it: to do so is said to be a test of affection. Perhaps this bit of folk-lore was suggested by the shape of the pellicle, which is that of a heart. The pretty fille-de-couleur asks her doudoux:--"_Ess ou ainmein moin?--pouloss tiré ti lapeau-là sans cassé-y_." Woe to him if he breaks it!... The most disagreeable fruit is, I think, the _pomme-d'Haiti_, or Haytian apple: it is very attractive exteriorly; but has a strong musky odor and taste which nauseates. Few white creoles ever eat it. Of the oranges, nothing except praise can be said; but there are fruits that look like oranges, and are not oranges, that are far more noteworthy. There is the _chadèque_, which grows here to fully three feet in circumference, and has a sweet pink pulp; and there is the "forbidden-fruit" (_fouitt-défendu_), a sort of cross between the orange and the chadèque, and superior to both. The colored people declare that this monster fruit is the same which grew in Eden upon the fatal tree: _c'est ça mênm qui fai moune ka fai yche conm ça atouelement!_ The fouitt-défendu is wonderful, indeed, in its way; but the fruit which most surprised me on my first acquaintance with it was the _zabricôt_. --"_Ou lè yon zabricôt?_" (Would you like an apricot?) Cyrillia asked me one day. I replied that I liked apricots very much,--wanted more than one. Cyrillia looked astonished, but said nothing until she returned from market, and put on the table _two_ apricots, with the observation:--"_Ça ke fai ou malade mangé toutt ça!_" (You will get sick if you eat all that.) I could not eat even half of one of them. Imagine a plum larger than the largest turnip, with a skin like a russet apple, solid sweet flesh of a carrot-red color, and a nut in the middle bigger than a duck's egg and hard as a rock. These fruits are aromatic as well as sweet to the taste: the price varies from one to four cents each, according to size. The tree is indigenous to the West Indies; the aborigines of Hayti had a strange belief regarding it. They alleged that its fruits formed the nourishment of the dead; and however pressed by hunger, an Indian in the woods would rather remain without food than strip one of these trees, lest he should deprive the ghosts of their sustenance.... No trace of this belief seems to exist among the colored people of Martinique. [Illustration: BREAD-FRUIT TREE.] Among the poor such fruits are luxuries: they eat more mangoes than any other fruits excepting bananas. It is rather slobbery work eating a common mango, in which every particle of pulp is threaded fast to the kernel: one prefers to gnaw it when alone. But there are cultivated mangoes with finer and thicker flesh which can be sliced off, so that the greater part of the fruit may be eaten without smearing and sucking. Among grafted varieties the _mangue_ is quite as delicious as the orange. Perhaps there are nearly as many varieties of mangoes in Martinique as there are varieties of peaches with us: I am acquainted, however, with only a few,--such as the _mango-Bassignac_;--_mango-pêche_ (or peach-mango);--_mango-vert_ (green mango), very large and oblong;--_mango-grêffé_;--_mangotine_, quite round and small;--_mango-quinette_, very small also, almost egg-shaped;--_mango-Zézé_, very sweet, rather small, and of flattened form;--_mango-d'or_ (golden mango), worth half a franc each;--_mango-Lamentin_, a highly cultivated variety--and the superb _Reine-Amélie_ (or Queen Amelia), a great yellow fruit which retails even in Martinique at five cents apiece. VIII. ... "_Ou c'est bonhomme caton?-ou c'est zimage, non?_" (Am I a pasteboard man, or an image, that I do not eat?) Cyrillia wants to know. The fact is that I am a little overfed; but the stranger in the tropics cannot eat like a native, and my abstemiousness is a surprise. In the North we eat a good deal for the sake of caloric; in the tropics, unless one be in the habit of taking much physical exercise, which is a very difficult thing to do, a generous appetite is out of the question. Cyrillia will not suffer me to live upon _mangé-Creole_ altogether; she insists upon occasional beefsteaks and roasts, and tries to tempt me with all kinds of queer delicious, desserts as well,--particularly those cakes made of grated cocoanut and sugar-syrup (_tablett-coco-rapé_) of which a stranger becomes very fond. But, nevertheless, I cannot eat enough to quiet Cyrillia's fears. Not eating enough is not her only complaint against me. I am perpetually doing something or other which shocks her. The Creoles are the most cautious livers in the world, perhaps;--the stranger who walks in the sun without an umbrella, or stands in currents of air, is for them an object of wonder and compassion. Cyrillia's complaints about my recklessness in the matter of hygiene always terminate with the refrain: "_Yo pa fai ça içi_"--(People never do such things in Martinique.) Among such rash acts are washing one's face or hands while perspiring, taking off one's hat on coming in from a walk, going out immediately after a bath, and washing my face with soap. "Oh, Cyrillia! what foolishness!--why should I not wash my face with soap?" "Because it will blind you," Cyrillia answers: "_ça ké tchoué limiè zié ou_" (it will kill the light in your eyes). There is no cleaner person than Cyrillia; and, indeed among the city people, the daily bath is the rule in all weathers; but soap is never used on the face by thousands, who, like Cyrillia, believe it will "kill the light of the eyes." One day I had been taking a long walk in the sun, and returned so thirsty that all the old stories about travellers suffering in waterless deserts returned to memory with new significance;--visions of simooms arose before me. What a delight to see and to grasp the heavy, red, thick-lipped _dobanne_, the water-jar, dewy and cool with the exudation of the _Eau-de-Gouyave_ which filled it to the brim,--_toutt vivant_, as Cyrillia says, "all alive"! There was a sudden scream,--the water-pitcher was snatched from my hands by Cyrillia with the question: "_Ess ou lè tchoué cò-ou?--Saint Joseph!_" (Did I want to kill my body?)... The Creoles use the word "body" in speaking of anything that can happen to one,--"hurt one's body," "tire one's body," "marry one's body," "bury one's body," etc.;--I wonder whether the expression originated in zealous desire to prove a profound faith in the soul.... Then Cyrillia made me a little punch with sugar and rum, and told me I must never drink fresh-water after a walk unless I wanted to kill my body. In this matter her advice was good. The immediate result of a cold drink while heated is a profuse and icy perspiration, during which currents of air are really dangerous. A cold is not dreaded here, and colds are rare; but pleurisy is common, and may be the consequence of any imprudent exposure. I do not often have the opportunity at home of committing even an unconscious imprudence; for Cyrillia is ubiquitous, and always on the watch lest something dreadful should happen to me. She is wonderful as a house-keeper as well as a cook: there is certainly much to do, and she has only a child to help her, but she always seems to have time. Her kitchen apparatus is of the simplest kind: a charcoal furnace constructed of bricks, a few earthenware pots (_canar_), and some grid-irons;--yet with these she can certainly prepare as many dishes as there are days in the year. I have never known her to be busy with her _canari_ for more than an hour; yet everything is kept in perfect order. When she is not working, she is quite happy in sitting at a window, and amusing herself by watching the life of the street,--or playing with a kitten, which she has trained so well that it seems to understand everything she says. IX. With darkness all the population of the island retire to their homes;--the streets become silent, and the life of the day is done. By eight o'clock nearly all the windows are closed, and the lights put out;--by nine the people are asleep. There are no evening parties, no night amusements, except during rare theatrical seasons and times of Carnival; there are no evening visits: active existence is almost timed by the rising and setting of the sun.... The only pleasure left for the stranger of evenings is a quiet smoke on his balcony or before his door: reading is out of the question, partly because books are rare, partly because lights are bad, partly because insects throng about every lamp or candle. I am lucky enough to have a balcony, broad enough for a rocking-chair; and sometimes Cyrillia and the kitten come to keep me company before bedtime. The kitten climbs on my knees; Cyrillia sits right down upon the balcony. One bright evening, Cyrillia was amusing herself very much by watching the clouds: they were floating high; the moonlight made them brilliant as frost. As they changed shape under the pressure of the trade-wind, Cyrillia seemed to discover wonderful things in them: sheep, ships with sails, cows, faces, perhaps even _zombis_. --"_Travaill Bon-Dié joli,--anh?_" (Is not the work of the Good-God pretty?) she said at last.... "There was Madame Remy, who used to sell the finest _foulards_ and Madrases in St. Pierre;--she used to study the clouds. She drew the patterns of the clouds for her _foulards_: whenever she saw a beautiful cloud or a beautiful rainbow, she would make a drawing of it in color at once; and then she would send that to France to have _foulards_ made just like it.... Since she is dead, you do not see any more pretty _foulards_ such as there used to be."... --"Would you like to look at the moon with my telescope, Cyrillia?" I asked. "Let me get it for you." --"Oh no, no!" she answered, as if shocked. --"Why?" --"_Ah! faut pa gàdé baggaïe Bon-Dié conm ça!_" (It is not right to look at the things of the Good-God that way.) I did not insist. After a little silence, Cyrillia resumed:-- --"But I saw the Sun and the Moon once fighting together: that was what people call an _eclipse_,--is not that the word?... They fought together a long time: I was looking at them. We put a _terrine_ full of water on the ground, and looked into the water to see them. And the Moon is stronger than the Sun!--yes, the Sun was obliged to give way to the Moon.... Why do they fight like that?" --"They don't, Cyrillia." --"Oh yes, they do. I saw them!... And the Moon is much stronger than the Sun!" I did not attempt to contradict this testimony of the eyes. Cyrillia continued to watch the pretty clouds. Then she said:--"Would you not like to have a ladder long enough to let you climb up to those clouds, and see what they are made of?" --"Why, Cyrillia, they are only vapor,--brume: I have been in clouds." She looked at me in surprise, and, after a moment's silence, asked, with an irony of which I had not supposed her capable:-- --"Then you are the Good-God?" --"Why, Cyrillia, it is not difficult to reach clouds. You see clouds always upon the top of the Montagne Pelée;--people go there. I have been there--in the clouds." --"Ah! those are not the same clouds: those are not the clouds of the Good-God. You cannot touch the sky when you are on the Morne de la Croix." --"My dear Cyrillia, there is no sky to touch. The sky is only an appearance." --"_Anh, anh, anh!_ No sky!--you say there is no sky?... Then, what is that up there?" --"That is air, Cyrillia, beautiful blue air." --"And what are the stars fastened to?" --"To nothing. They are suns, but so much further away than our sun that they look small." --"No, they are not suns! They have not the same form as the sun... You must not say there is no sky: it is wicked! But you are not a Catholic!" --"My dear Cyrillia, I don't see what that has to do with the sky." --"Where does the Good-God stay, if there be no sky? And where is heaven?--and where is hell?" --"Hell in the sky, Cyrillia?" --"The Good-God made heaven in one part of the sky, and hell in another part, for bad people.... Ah! you are a Protestant;--you do not know the things of the Good-God! That is why you talk like that." --"What is a Protestant, Cyrillia?" --"You are one. The Protestants do not believe in religion,--do not love the Good-God." --"Well, I am neither a Protestant nor a Catholic, Cyrillia." --"Oh! you do not mean that; you cannot be a _maudi_, an accursed. There are only the Protestants, the Catholics, and the accursed. You are not a _maudi_, I am sure, But you must not say there is no sky"... --"But, Cyrillia"-- --"No: I will not listen to you:--you are a Protestant. Where does the rain come from, if there is no sky,"... --"Why, Cyrillia,... the clouds"... --"No, you are a Protestant.... How can you say such things? There are the Three Kings and the Three Valets,--the beautiful stars that come at Christmas-time,--there, over there--all beautiful, and big, big, big!... And you say there is no sky!" --"Cyrillia, perhaps I am a _maudi_." --"No, no! You are only a Protestant. But do not tell me there is no sky: it is wicked to say that!" --"I won't say it any more, Cyrillia--there! But I will say there are no _zombis_." --"I know you are not a _maudi_;--you have been baptized." --"How do you know I have been baptized?" --"Because, if you had not been baptized you would see _zombis_ all the time, even in broad day. All children who are not baptized see _zombis_."... X. Cyrilla's solicitude for me extends beyond the commonplaces of hygiene and diet into the uncertain domain of matters ghostly. She fears much that something might happen to me through the agency of wizards, witches (_sociès_), or _zombis_. Especially zombis. Cyrillia's belief in zombis has a solidity that renders argument out of the question. This belief is part of her inner nature,--something hereditary, racial, ancient as Africa, as characteristic of her people as the love of rhythms and melodies totally different from our own musical conceptions, but possessing, even for the civilized, an inexplicable emotional charm. _Zombi!_--the word is perhaps full of mystery even for those who made it. The explanations of those who utter it most often are never quite lucid: it seems to convey ideas darkly impossible to define,--fancies belonging to the mind of another race and another era,--unspeakably old. Perhaps the word in our own language which offers the best analogy is "goblin": yet the one is not fully translated by the other. Both have, however, one common ground on which they become indistinguishable,--that region of the supernatural which is most primitive and most vague; and the closest relation between the savage and the civilized fancy may be found in the fears which we call childish,--of darkness, shadows, and things dreamed. One form of the _zombi_-belief--akin to certain ghostly superstitions held by various primitive races--would seem to have been suggested by nightmare,--that form of nightmare in which familiar persons become slowly and hideously transformed into malevolent beings. The _zombi_ deludes under the appearance of a travelling companion, an old comrade--like the desert spirits of the Arabs--or even under the form of an animal. Consequently the creole negro fears everything living which he meets after dark upon a lonely road,--a stray horse, a cow, even a dog; and mothers quell the naughtiness of their children by the threat of summoning a zombi-cat or a zombi-creature of some kind. "_Zombi ké nana ou_" (the zombi will gobble thee up) is generally an effectual menace in the country parts, where it is believed zombis may be met with any time after sunset. In the city it is thought that their regular hours are between two and four o'clock in the morning. At least so Cyrillia says:-- --"Dèezhè, toua-zhè-matin: c'est lhè zombi. Yo ka sòti dèzhè, toua zhè: c'est lhè yo. A quattrhè yo ka rentré;--angelus ka sonné." (At four o'clock they go back where they came from, before the _Angelus_ rings.) Why? --"_C'est pou moune pas joinne yo dans larue_." (So that people may not meet with them in the street), Cyrillia answers. --"Are they afraid of the people, Cyrillia?" I asked. --"No, they are not afraid; but they do not want people to know their business" (_pa lè moune ouè zaffai yo_). Cyrillia also says one must not look out of the window when a dog howls at night. Such a dog may be a _mauvais vivant_ (evil being): "If he sees me looking at him he will say, '_Ou tropp quirièse quittée cabane ou pou gàdé zaffai lezautt_.'" (You are too curious to leave your bed like that to look at other folks' business.) --"And what then, Cyrillia?" --"Then he will put out your eyes,--_y ké coqui zié ou_,--make you blind." --"But, Cyrillia," I asked one day, "did you ever see any zombis?" --"How? I often see them!... They walk about the room at night;--they walk like people. They sit in the rocking-chairs and rock themselves very softly, and look at me. I say to them:--'What do you want here?--I never did any harm to anybody. Go away!' Then they go away." --"What do they look like?" --"Like people,--sometimes like beautiful people (_bel moune_). I am afraid of them. I only see them when there is no light burning. While the lamp bums before the Virgin they do not come. But sometimes the oil fails, and the light dies." In my own room there are dried palm leaves and some withered flowers fastened to the wall. Cyrillia put them there. They were taken from the _reposoirs_ (temporary altars) erected for the last Corpus Christi procession: consequently they are blessed, and ought to keep the zombis away. That is why they are fastened to the wall, over my bed. Nobody could be kinder to animals than Cyrillia usually shows herself to be: all the domestic animals in the neighborhood impose upon her;--various dogs and cats steal from her impudently, without the least fear of being beaten. I was therefore very much surprised to see her one evening catch a flying beetle that approached the light, and deliberately put its head in the candle-flame. When I asked her how she could be so cruel, she replied:-- --"_Ah ou pa connaitt choïe pays-ci_." (You do not know Things in this country.) The Things thus referred to I found to be supernatural Things. It is popularly believed that certain winged creatures which circle about candles at night may be _engagés_ or _envoyés_--wicked people having the power of transformation, or even zombis "sent" by witches or wizards to do harm. "There was a woman at Tricolore," Cyrillia says, "who used to sew a great deal at night; and a big beetle used to come into her room and fly about the candle, and and bother her very much. One night she managed to get hold of it, and she singed its head in the candle. Next day, a woman who was her neighbor came to the house with her head all tied up. '_Ah! macoumè_,' asked the sewing-woman, '_ça ou ni dans guiôle-ou?_' And the other answered, very angrily, '_Ou ni toupet mandé moin ça moin ni dans guiôle moin!--et cété ou qui té brilé guiôle moin nans chandelle-ou hiè-souè_.'" (You have the impudence to ask what is the matter with my mouth! and you yourself burned my mouth in your candle last night.) Early one morning, about five o'clock, Cyrillia, opening the front door, saw a huge crab walking down the street. Probably it had escaped from some barrel; for it is customary here to keep live crabs in barrels and fatten them,--feeding them with maize, mangoes, and, above all, green peppers: nobody likes to cook crabs as soon as caught; for they may have been eating manchineel apples at the river-mouths. Cyrillia uttered a cry of dismay on seeing that crab; then I heard her talking to herself:--"_I_ touch it?--never! it can go about its business. How do I know it is not _an arranged crab_ (_yon crabe rangé_), or an _envoyé_?--since everybody knows I like crabs. For two sous I can buy a fine crab and know where it comes from." The crab went on down the street: everywhere the sight of it created consternation; nobody dared to touch it; women cried out at it, "_Miserabe!--envoyé Satan!--allez, maudi!_"--some threw holy water on the crab. Doubtless it reached the sea in safety. In the evening Cyrillia said: "I think that crab was a little zombi;--I am going to burn a light all night to keep it from coming back." Another day, while I was out, a negro to whom I had lent two francs came to the house, and paid his debt Cyrillia told me when I came back, and showed me the money carefully enveloped in a piece of brown paper; but said I must not touch it,--she would get rid of it for me at the market. I laughed at her fears; and she observed: "You do not know negroes, Missié!--negroes are wicked, negroes are jealous! I do not want you to touch that money, because I have not a good opinion about this affair." After I began to learn more of the underside of Martinique life, I could understand the source and justification of many similar superstitions in simple and uneducated minds. The negro sorcerer is, at worst, only a poisoner; but he possesses a very curious art which long defied serious investigation, and in the beginning of the last century was attributed, even by whites, to diabolical influence. In 1721, 1723, and 1725, several negroes were burned alive at the stake as wizards in league with the devil. It was an era of comparative ignorance; but even now things are done which would astonish the most sceptical and practical physician. For example, a laborer discharged from a plantation vows vengeance; and the next morning the whole force of hands--the entire atelier--are totally disabled from work. Every man and woman on the place is unable to walk; everybody has one or both legs frightfully swollen. _Yo te ka pilé malifice_: they have trodden on a "malifice." What is the "malifice"? All that can be ascertained is that certain little prickly seeds have been scattered all over the ground, where the barefooted workers are in the habit of passing. Ordinarily, treading on these seeds is of no consequence; but it is evident in such a case that they must have been prepared in a special way,--soaked in some poison, perhaps snake-venom. At all events, the physician deems it safest to treat the inflammations after the manner of snake wounds; and after many days the hands are perhaps able to resume duty. XI. While Cyrillia is busy with her _canari_, she talks to herself or sings. She has a low rich voice,--sings strange things, things that have been forgotten by this generation,--creole songs of the old days, having a weird rhythm and fractions of tones that are surely African. But more generally she talks to herself, as all the Martiniquaises do: it is a continual murmur as of a stream. At first I used to think she was talking to somebody else, and would call out:-- --"_Épi quiless moune ça ou ka pàlé-à?_" But she would always answer:--"_Moin ka pàlé anni cò moin_" (I am only talking to my own body), which is the creole expression for talking to oneself. --"And what are you talking so much to your own body about, Cyrillia?" --"I am talking about my own little affairs" (_ti zaffai-moin_).... That is all that I could ever draw from her. But when not working, she will sit for hours looking out of the window. In this she resembles the kitten: both seem to find the same silent pleasure in watching the street, or the green heights that rise above its roofs,--the Morne d'Orange. Occasionally at such times she will break the silence in the strangest way, if she thinks I am not too busy with my papers to answer a question:-- --"_Missié?_"--timidly. --"Eh?" --"_Di moin, chè, ti manmaille dans pays ou, toutt piti, piti,--ess ça pàlé Anglais?_" (Do the little children in my country--the very, very little children--talk English?) --"Why, certainly, Cyrillia." --"_Toutt piti, piti?_"--with growing surprise. --"Why, of course!" --"_C'est drôle, ça_" (It is queer, that!) She cannot understand it. --"And the little _manmaille_ in Martinique, Cyrillia--_toutt piti, piti_,--don't they talk creole?" --"'_Oui; mais toutt moune ka pâlé nègue: ça facile_." (Yes; but anybody can talk negro--that is easy to learn.) XII. Cyrillia's room has no furniture in it: the Martinique bonne lives as simply and as rudely as a domestic animal. One thin mattress covered with a sheet, and elevated from the floor only by a léfant, forms her bed. The _léfant_, or "elephant," is composed of two thick square pieces of coarse hard mattress stuffed with shavings, and placed end to end. Cyrillia has a good pillow, however,--_bourré épi flêches-canne_,--filled with the plumes of the sugar-cane. A cheap trunk with broken hinges contains her modest little wardrobe: a few _mouchoirs_, or kerchiefs, used for head-dresses, a spare _douillette_, or long robe, and some tattered linen. Still she is always clean, neat, fresh-looking. I see a pair of sandals in the corner,--such as the women of the country sometimes wear--wooden soles with a leather band for the instep, and two little straps; but she never puts them on. Fastened to the wall are two French prints--lithographs: one representing Victor Hugo's _Esmeralda_ in prison with her pet goat; the other, Lamartine's _Laurence_ with her fawn. Both are very old and stained and bitten by the _bête-à-ciseau_, a species of _lepisma_, which destroys books and papers, and everything it can find exposed. On a shelf are two bottles,--one filled with holy water; another with _tafia camphrée_ (camphor dissolved in tafia), which is Cyrillia's sole remedy for colds, fevers, headaches--all maladies not of a very fatal description. There are also a little woollen monkey, about three inches high--the dusty plaything of a long-dead child;--an image of the Virgin, even smaller;--and a broken cup with fresh bright blossoms in it, the Virgin's flower-offering;--and the Virgin's invariable lamp--a night-light, a little wick floating on olive-oil in a tiny glass. I know that Cyrillia must have bought these flowers--they are garden flowers--at the Marchè du Fort. There are always old women sitting there who sell nothing else but bouquets for the Virgin,--and who cry out to passers-by:--"_Gagné ti bouquet pou Viège-ou, chè!_... Buy a nosegay, dear, for your Virgin;--she is asking you for one;--give her a little one, _chè cocott_."... Cyrillia says you must not smell the flowers you give the Virgin: it would be stealing from her.... The little lamp is always lighted at six o'clock. At six o'clock the Virgin is supposed to pass through all the streets of St. Pierre, and wherever a lamp burns before her image, she enters there and blesses that house. "_Faut limé lampe ou pou fai la-Viège passé dans caïe-ou_," says Cyrillia. (You must light the lamp to make the Virgin come into your house.)... Cyrillia often talks to her little image, exactly as if it were a baby,--calls it pet names,--asks if it is content with the flowers. This image of the Virgin is broken: it is only half a Virgin,--the upper half. Cyrillia has arranged it so, nevertheless, that had I not been very inquisitive I should never have divined its mishap. She found a small broken powder-box without a lid,--probably thrown negligently out of a boudoir window by some wealthy beauty: she filled this little box with straw, and fixed the mutilated image upright within it, so that you could never suspect the loss of its feet. The Virgin looks very funny, thus peeping over the edge of her little box,--looks like a broken toy, which a child has been trying to mend. But this Virgin has offerings too: Cyrillia buys flowers for her, and sticks them all round her, between the edge of the powder-box and the straw. After all, Cyrillia's Virgin is quite as serious a fact as any image of silver or of ivory in the homes of the rich: probably the prayers said to her are more simply beautiful, and more direct from the heart, than many daily murmured before the _chapelles_ of luxurious homes. And the more one looks at it, the more one feels that it were almost wicked to smile at this little broken toy of faith. --"Cyrillia, _mafi_," I asked her one day, after my discovery of the little Virgin,--"would you not like me to buy a _chapelle_ for you?" The _chapelle_ is the little bracket-altar, together with images and ornaments, to be found in every creole bedroom. --"_Mais non, Missié_," she answered, smiling, "_moin aimein ti Viège moin, pa lè gagnin dautt_. I love my little Virgin: do not want any other. I have seen much trouble: she was with me in my trouble;--she heard my prayers. It would be wicked for me to throw her away. When I have a sou to spare, I buy flowers for her;--when I have no money, I climb the mornes, and pick pretty buds for her.... But why should Missié want to buy me a _chapelle?_--Missié is a Protestant?" --"I thought it might give you pleasure, Cyrillia." --"No, Missié, I thank you; it would not give me pleasure. But Missié could give me something else which would make me very happy--I often thought of asking Missié...but--" --"Tell me what it is, Cyrillia." She remained silent a moment, then said:-- --"Missié makes photographs...." --"You want a photograph of yourself, Cyrillia?" --"Oh! no, Missié, I am too ugly and too old. But I have a daughter. She is beautiful--_yon bel bois_,--like a beautiful tree, as we say here. I would like so much to have her picture taken." A photographic instrument belonging to a clumsy amateur suggested this request to Cyrillia. I could not attempt such work successfully; but I gave her a note to a photographer of much skill; and a few days later the portrait was sent to the house. Cyrillia's daughter was certainly a comely girl,--tall and almost gold-colored, with pleasing features; and the photograph looked very nice, though less nice than the original. Half the beauty of these people is a beauty of tint,--a tint so exquisite sometimes that I have even heard white creoles declare no white complexion compares with it: the greater part of the charm remaining is grace,--the grace of movement; and neither of these can be rendered by photography. I had the portrait framed for Cyrillia, to hang up beside her little pictures. When it came, she was not in; I put it in her room, and waited to see the effect. On returning, she entered there; and I did not see her for so long a time that I stole to the door of the chamber to observe her. She was standing before the portrait,--looking at it, talking to it as if it were alive. "_Yche moin, yche moin!... Oui! ou toutt bel!--yche moin bel_." (My child, my child!... Yes, thou art all beautiful: my child is beautiful.) All at once she turned--perhaps she noticed my shadow, or felt my presence in some way: her eyes were wet;--she started, flushed, then laughed. --"Ah! Missié, you watch me;--_ou guette moin_.... But she is my child. Why should I not love her?... She looks so beautiful there." --"She is beautiful, Cyrillia;--I love to see you love her." She gazed at the picture a little longer in silence;--then turned to me again, and asked earnestly:-- --"_Pouki yo ja ka fai pòtrai palé--anh?... pisse yo ka tiré y toutt samm ou: c'est ou-menm!... Yo douè fai y palé 'tou_." (Why do they not make a portrait talk,--tell me? For they draw it just all like you!--it is yourself: they ought to make it talk.) --"Perhaps they will be able to do something like that one of these days, Cyrillia." --"Ah! that would be so nice. Then I could talk to her. _C'est yon bel moune moin fai--y bel, joli moune!... Moin sé causé épi y_."... ... And I, watching her beautiful childish emotion, thought:--Cursed be the cruelty that would persuade itself that one soul may be like another,--that one affection may be replaced by another,--that individual goodness is not a thing apart, original, untwinned on earth, but only the general characteristic of a class or type, to be sought and found and utilized at will!... Self-curséd he who denies the divinity of love! Each heart, each brain in the billions of humanity,--even so surely as sorrow lives,--feels and thinks in some special way unlike any other; and goodness in each has its unlikeness to all other goodness,--and thus its own infinite preciousness; for however humble, however small, it is something all alone, and God never repeats his work. No heart-beat is cheap, no gentleness is despicable, no kindness is common; and Death, in removing a life--the simplest life ignored,--removes what never will reappear through the eternity of eternities,--since every being is the sum of a chain of experiences infinitely varied from all others.... To some Cyrillia's happy tears might bring a smile: to me that smile would seem the unforgivable sin against the Giver of Life!... CHAPTER XII. "PA COMBINÉ, CHÈ!" I. ... More finely than any term in our tongue does the French word _frisson_ express that faint shiver--as of a ghostly touch thrilling from hair to feet--which intense pleasure sometimes gives, and which is felt most often and most strongly in childhood, when the imagination is still so sensitive and so powerful that one's whole being trembles to the vibration of a fancy. And this electric word best expresses, I think, that long thrill of amazed delight inspired by the first knowledge of the tropic world,--a sensation of weirdness in beauty, like the effect, in child-days, of fairy tales and stories of phantom isles. For all unreal seems the vision of it. The transfiguration of all things by the stupendous light and the strange vapors of the West Indian sea,--the interorbing of flood and sky in blinding azure,--the sudden spirings of gem-tinted coast from the ocean,--the iris-colors and astounding shapes of the hills,--the unimaginable magnificence of palms,--the high woods veiled and swathed in vines that blaze like emerald: all remind you in some queer way of things half forgotten,--the fables of enchantment. Enchantment it is indeed--but only the enchantment of that Great Wizard, the Sun, whose power you are scarcely beginning to know. And into the life of the tropical city you enter as in dreams one enters into the life of a dead century. In all the quaint streets--over whose luminous yellow façades the beautiful burning violet of the sky appears as if but a few feet away--you see youth good to look upon as ripe fruit; and the speech of the people is soft as a coo; and eyes of brown girls caress you with a passing look.... Love's world, you may have heard, has few restraints here, where Nature ever seems to cry out, like the swart seller of corossoles:--"_ça qui le doudoux?_"... How often in some passing figure does one discern an ideal almost realized, and forbear to follow it with untired gaze only when another, another, and yet another, come to provoke the same aesthetic fancy,--to win the same unspoken praise! How often does one long for artist's power to fix the fleeting lines, to catch the color, to seize the whole exotic charm of some special type!... One finds a strange charm even in the timbre of these voices,--these half-breed voices, always with a tendency to contralto, and vibrant as ringing silver. What is that mysterious quality in a voice which has power to make the pulse beat faster, even when the singer is unseen?... do only the birds know? ... It seems to you that you could never weary of watching this picturesque life,--of studying the costumes, brilliant with butterfly colors,--and the statuesque semi-nudity of laboring hundreds,--and the untaught grace of attitudes,--and the simplicity of manners. Each day brings some new pleasure of surprise;--even from the window of your lodging you are ever noting something novel, something to delight the sense of oddity or beauty.... Even in your room everything interests you, because of its queerness or quaintness: you become fond of the objects about you,--the great noiseless rocking-chairs that lull to sleep;--the immense bed (_lit-à-bateau_) of heavy polished wood, with its richly carven sides reaching down to the very floor;--and its invariable companion, the little couch or _sopha_, similarly shaped but much narrower, used only for the siesta;--and the thick red earthen vessels (_dobannes_) which keep your drinking-water cool on the hottest days, but which are always filled thrice between sunrise and sunset with clear water from the mountain,--_dleau toutt vivant_, "all alive";--and the _verrines_, tall glass vases with stems of bronze in which your candle will burn steadily despite a draught;--and even those funny little angels and Virgins which look at you from their bracket in the corner, over the oil lamp you are presumed to kindle nightly in their honor, however great a heretic you may be.... You adopt at once, and without reservation, those creole home habits which are the result of centuries of experience with climate,--abstention from solid food before the middle of the day, repose after the noon meal;--and you find each repast an experience as curious as it is agreeable. It is not at all difficult to accustom oneself to green pease stewed with sugar, eggs mixed with tomatoes, salt fish stewed in milk, palmiste pith made into salad, grated cocoa formed into rich cakes, and dishes of titiri cooked in oil,--the minuscule fish, of which a thousand will scarcely fill a saucer. Above all, you are astonished by the endless variety of vegetables and fruits, of all conceivable shapes and inconceivable flavors. And it does not seem possible that even the simplest little recurrences of this antiquated, gentle home-life could ever prove wearisome by daily repetition through the months and years. The musical greeting of the colored child, tapping at your door before sunrise,--"_Bonjou', Missié_,"--as she brings your cup of black hot coffee and slice of corossole;--the smile of the silent brown girl who carries your meals up-stairs in a tray poised upon her brightly coiffed head, and who stands by while you dine, watching every chance to serve, treading quite silently with her pretty bare feet;--the pleasant manners of the _màchanne_ who brings your fruit, the _porteuse_ who delivers your bread, the _blanchisseuse_ who washes your linen at the river,--and all the kindly folk who circle about your existence, with their trays and turbans, their _foulards_ and _douillettes_, their primitive grace and creole chatter: these can never cease to have a charm for you. You cannot fail to be touched also by the amusing solicitude of these good people for your health, because you are a stranger: their advice about hours to go out and hours to stay at home,--about roads to follow and paths to avoid on account of snakes,--about removing your hat and coat, or drinking while warm.... Should you fall ill, this solicitude intensifies to devotion; you are tirelessly tended;--the good people will exhaust their wonderful knowledge of herbs to get you well,--will climb the mornes even at midnight, in spite of the risk of snakes and fear of zombis, to gather strange plants by the light of a lantern. Natural joyousness, natural kindliness, heart-felt desire to please, childish capacity of being delighted with trifles,--seem characteristic of all this colored population. It is turning its best side towards you, no doubt; but the side of the nature made visible appears none the less agreeable because you suspect there is another which you have not seen. What kindly inventiveness is displayed in contriving surprises for you, or in finding some queer thing to show you,--some fantastic plant, or grotesque fish, or singular bird! What apparent pleasure in taking trouble to gratify,--what innocent frankness of sympathy!... Childishly beautiful seems the readiness of this tinted race to compassionate: you do not reflect that it is also a savage trait, while the charm of its novelty is yet upon you. No one is ashamed to shed tears for the death of a pet animal; any mishap to a child creates excitement, and evokes an immediate volunteering of services. And this compassionate sentiment is often extended, in a semi-poetical way, even to inanimate objects. One June morning, I remember, a three-masted schooner lying in the bay took fire, and had to be set adrift. An immense crowd gathered on the wharves; and I saw many curious manifestations of grief,--such grief, perhaps, as an infant feels for the misfortune of a toy it imagines to possess feeling, but not the less sincere because unreasoning. As the flames climbed the rigging, and the masts fell, the crowd moaned as though looking upon some human tragedy; and everywhere one could hear such strange cries of pity as, "_Pauv' malhérè!_" (poor unfortunate), "_pauv' diabe!_"... "_Toutt baggaïe-y pou allé, casse!_" (All its things-to-go-with are broken!) sobbed a girl, with tears streaming down her cheeks.... She seemed to believe it was alive.... ... And day by day the artlessness of this exotic humanity touches you more;--day by day this savage, somnolent, splendid Nature--delighting in furious color--bewitches you more. Already the anticipated necessity of having to leave it all some day--the far-seen pain of bidding it farewell--weighs upon you, even in dreams. II. Reader, if you be of those who have longed in vain for a glimpse of that tropic world,--tales of whose beauty charmed your childhood, and made stronger upon you that weird mesmerism of the sea which pulls at the heart of a boy,--one who had longed like you, and who, chance-led, beheld at last the fulfilment of the wish, can swear to you that the magnificence of the reality far excels the imagining. Those who know only the lands in which all processes for the satisfaction of human wants have been perfected under the terrible stimulus of necessity, can little guess the witchery of that Nature ruling the zones of color and of light. Within their primeval circles, the earth remains radiant and young as in that preglacial time whereof some transmitted memory may have created the hundred traditions of an Age of Gold. And the prediction of a paradise to come,--a phantom realm of rest and perpetual light: may this not have been but a sum of the remembrances and the yearnings of man first exiled from his heritage,--a dream born of the great nostalgia of races migrating to people the pallid North?... ... But with the realization of the hope to know this magical Nature you learn that the actuality varies from the preconceived ideal otherwise than in surpassing it. Unless you enter the torrid world equipped with scientific knowledge extraordinary, your anticipations are likely to be at fault. Perhaps you had pictured to yourself the effect of perpetual summer as a physical delight,--something like an indefinite prolongation of the fairest summer weather ever enjoyed at home. Probably you had heard of fevers, risks of acclimatization, intense heat, and a swarming of venomous creatures; but you may nevertheless believe you know what precautions to take; and published statistics of climatic temperature may have persuaded you that the heat is not difficult to bear. By that enervation to which all white dwellers in the tropics are subject you may have understood a pleasant languor,--a painless disinclination to effort in a country where physical effort is less needed than elsewhere,--a soft temptation to idle away the hours in a hammock, under the shade of giant trees. Perhaps you have read, with eyes of faith, that torpor of the body is favorable to activity of the mind, and therefore believe that the intellectual powers can be stimulated and strengthened by tropical influences:--you suppose that enervation will reveal itself only as a beatific indolence which will leave the brain free to think with lucidity, or to revel in romantic dreams. III. You are not at first undeceived;--the disillusion is long delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic personages among the beautiful humanity about you,--for idyllic scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval forest, and the valleys threaded by a hundred brooks. I know not whether the faces and forms that you seek will be revealed to you;--but you will not be able to complain for the lack of idyllic loveliness in the commonest landscape. Whatever artistic knowledge you possess will merely teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant purple of the sea, the violet opulence of the sky, the violent beauty of foliage greens, the lilac tints of evening, and the color-enchantments distance gives in an atmosphere full of iridescent power,--the amethysts and agates, the pearls and ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine, never could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,--of climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from which the city seems but a few inches long, and the moored ships tinier than gnats that cling to a mirror,--or of swimming in that blue bay whose clear flood stays warm through all the year. [51] Or, standing alone, in some aisle of colossal palms, where humming-birds are flashing and shooting like a showering of jewel-fires, you feel how weak the skill of poet or painter to fix the sensation of that white-pillared imperial splendor;--and you think you know why creoles exiled by necessity to colder lands may sicken for love of their own,--die of home-yearning, as did many a one in far Louisiana, after the political tragedies of 1848.... ... But you are not a creole, and must pay tribute of suffering to the climate of the tropics. You will have to learn that a temperature of 90° Fahr. in the tropics is by no means the same thing as 90° Fahr. in Europe or the United States;--that the mornes cannot be climbed with safety during the hotter hours of the afternoon;--that by taking a long walk you incur serious danger of catching a fever;--that to enter the high woods, a path must be hewn with the cutlass through the creepers and vines and undergrowth,--among snakes, venomous insects, venomous plants, and malarial exhalations;--that the finest blown dust is full of irritant and invisible enemies;--that it is folly to seek repose on a sward, or in the shade of trees,--particularly under tamarinds. Only after you have by experience become well convinced of these facts can you begin to comprehend something general in regard to West Indian conditions of life. IV. ... Slowly the knowledge comes.... For months the vitality of a strong European (the American constitution bears the test even better) may resist the debilitating climate: perhaps the stranger will flatter himself that, like men habituated to heavy labor in stifling warmth,--those toiling in mines, in founderies in engine-rooms of ships, at iron-furnaces,--so he too may become accustomed, without losing his strength to the continuous draining of the pores, to the exhausting force of this strange motionless heat which compels change of clothing many times a day. But gradually he finds that it is not heat alone which is debilitating him, but the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere charged with vapor, with electricity, with unknown agents not less inimical to human existence than propitious to vegetal luxuriance. If he has learned those rules of careful living which served him well in a temperate climate, he will not be likely to abandon them among his new surroundings; and they will help him; no doubt,--particularly if he be prudent enough to avoid the sea-coast at night, and all exposure to dews or early morning mists, and all severe physical strain. Nevertheless, he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within him,--in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily growing, and compelling frequent repose;--also a curious heightening of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into the food-consumption of northern races. He becomes abstemious, eats sparingly, and discovers his palate to have become oddly exacting--finds that certain fruits and drinks are indeed, as the creoles assert, appropriate only to particular physical conditions corresponding with particular hours of the day. Corossole is only to be eaten in the morning, after black coffee;--vermouth is good to drink only between the hours of nine and half-past ten;--rum or other strong liquor only before meals or after fatigue;--claret or wine only during a repast, and then very sparingly,--for, strangely enough, wine is found to be injurious in a country where stronger liquors are considered among the prime necessaries of existence. And he expected, at the worst, to feel lazy, to lose some physical energy! But this is no mere languor which now begins to oppress him;--it is a sense of vital exhaustion painful as the misery of convalescence: the least effort provokes a perspiration profuse enough to saturate clothing, and the limbs ache as from muscular overstrain;--the lightest attire feels almost insupportable;--the idea of sleeping even under a sheet is torture, for the weight of a silken handkerchief is discomfort. One wishes one could live as a savage,--naked in the heat. One burns with a thirst impossible to assuage--feels a desire for stimulants, a sense of difficulty in breathing, occasional quickenings of the heart's action so violent as to alarm. Then comes at last the absolute dread of physical exertion. Some slight relief might be obtained, no doubt, by resigning oneself forthwith to adopt the gentle indolent manners of the white creoles, who do not walk when it is possible to ride, and never ride if it is equally convenient to drive;--but the northern nature generally refuses to accept this ultimate necessity without a protracted and painful struggle. ... Not even then has the stranger fully divined the evil power of this tropical climate, which remodels the characters of races within a couple of generations,--changing the shape of the skeleton,--deepening the cavities of the orbits to protect the eye from the flood of light,--transforming the blood,--darkening the skin. Following upon the nervous modifications of the first few months come modifications and changes of a yet graver kind;--with the loss of bodily energy ensues a more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole range of thought diminishes, contracts,--shrinks to that narrowest of circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;--the mind operates faintly, slowly, incoherently,--almost as in dreams. Serious reading, vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important project;--you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books. Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of the brain; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing heavier: then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma, will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and slumber comes,--a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,--all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the night.... V. It might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,--a tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed time,--but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After a certain number of months, your first enthusiasm with your new surroundings dies out;--even Nature ceases to affect the senses in the same way: the _frisson_ ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have striven to become as much as possible a part of the exotic life into which you have entered,--may have adopted its customs, learned its language. But you cannot mix with it mentally;--You circulate only as an oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone. The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six minutes;--perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of snakes;--club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;--there is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,--at least some interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began. Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness, the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,--reading, study,--he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter, means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment, which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,--the delight of being alone with tropical Nature,--becomes more difficult to indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber, or at best from a carriage window,--then, indeed, the want of all literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,--from climate as well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;--the same journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what flesh and blood can these people be made,--what wonderful vitality lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race habits in accordance with environment. ... Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood, soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be persisted in only at risk of life;--that in this part of the world there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, and make rum, and cultivate tobacco,--or open a magazine for the sale of Madras handkerchiefs and _foulards_,--and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You will understand why the tropics settled by European races produce no sciences, arts, or literature,--why the habits and the thoughts of other centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though enfeebled by the heat. And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,--the first weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever less lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at last. The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their violence;--the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will reveal dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself how much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the furnace heat of blinding blue days, and the void misery of sleepless nights, and the curse of insects, and the sound of the mandibles of enormous roaches devouring the few books in your possession. You will grow weary of the grace of the palms, of the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of the sight of the high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and serpents. You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air is still chill and heavy with miasma;--you will weary, above all, of tropic fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred francs for the momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy Northern apple. VI. --But if you believe this disillusion perpetual,--if you fancy the old bewitchment has spent all its force upon you,--you do not know this Nature. She is not done with you yet: she has only torpefied your energies a little. Of your willingness to obey her, she takes no cognizance;--she ignores human purposes, knows only molecules and their combinations; and the blind blood in your veins,--thick with Northern heat and habit,--is still in dumb desperate rebellion against her. Perhaps she will quell this revolt forever,--thus:-- One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never known before: a sudden weird fear of the light. It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your brain,--that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is piercing somehow into your life,--creating an unfamiliar mental confusion,--blurring out thought.... Is the whole world taking fire?... The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a crucible-glow;--the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some amazing way.... Then dizziness inexpressible: you grope with eyes shut fast--afraid to open them again in that stupefying torrefaction,--moving automatically,--vaguely knowing you must get out of the flaring and flashing,--somewhere, anywhere away from the white wrath of the sun, and the green fire of the hills, and the monstrous color of the sea.... Then, remembering nothing, you find yourself in bed,--with an insupportable sense of weight at the back of the head,--a pulse beating furiously,--and a strange sharp pain at intervals stinging through your eyes.... And the pain grows, expands,--fills all the skull,--forces you to cry out, replaces all other sensations except a weak consciousness, vanishing and recurring, that you are very sick, more sick than ever before in all your life. ... And with the tedious ebbing of the long fierce fever, all the heat seems to pass from your veins. You can no longer imagine, as before, that it would be delicious to die of cold;--you shiver even with all the windows closed;--you feel currents of air,--imperceptible to nerves in a natural condition,--which shock like a dash of cold water, whenever doors are opened and closed; the very moisture upon your forehead is icy. What you now wish for are stimulants and warmth. Your blood has been changed;--tropic Nature has been good to you: she is preparing you to dwell with her. ... Gradually, under the kind nursing of those colored people,--among whom, as a stranger, your lot will probably be cast,--you recover strength; and perhaps it will seem to you that the pain of lying a while in the Shadow of Death is more than compensated by this rare and touching experience of human goodness. How tirelessly watchful,--how naïvely sympathetic,--how utterly self-sacrificing these women-natures are! Patiently, through weeks of stifling days and sleepless nights,--cruelly unnatural to them, for their life is in the open air,--they struggle to save without one murmur of fatigue, without heed of their most ordinary physical wants, without a thought of recompense;--trusting to their own skill when the physician abandons hope,--climbing to the woods for herbs when medicines prove, without avail. The dream of angels holds nothing sweeter than this reality of woman's tenderness. And simultaneously with the return of force, you may wonder whether this sickness has not sharpened your senses in some extraordinary way,--especially hearing, sight, and smell. Once well enough to be removed without danger, you will be taken up into the mountains somewhere,--for change of air; and there it will seem to you, perhaps, that never before did you feel so acutely the pleasure of perfumes,--of color-tones,--of the timbre of voices. You have simply been acclimated.... And suddenly the old fascination of tropic Nature seizes you again,--more strongly than in the first days;--the _frisson_ of delight returns; the joy of it thrills through all your blood,--making a great fulness at your heart as of unutterable desire to give thanks.... VII. ... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks pink as a French country-girl's;--he had never seemed to me physically adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed, on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated in a _berceuse_ on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his smile of welcome,--as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone! ... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation, and becomes a luminous part of it forever,--steeping all after-dreams of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,--transfiguring all fancies of the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks. And the sun was yellowing,--as only over the tropics he yellows to his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the west;--mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,--a tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;--far peaks took tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,--iridescent violets and purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the _carangue_, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple. Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the veranda of the little cottage,--saw the peaked land slowly steep itself in the aureate glow,--the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below, the murmur of the city rose to us,--a stormy hum. So motionless we remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,--as if wondering whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again. _Papillon-lanmò_,--Death's butterflies,--these were called in the speech of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;--as they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,--when I little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,--there slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings.... ... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned. The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our senses,--slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty. Then, as the sun's disk--enormous,--blinding gold--touched the lilac flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we found ourselyes awed at last into silence. The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,--filling the valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always deepening,--made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the _cabritt-bois_, and the chirruping of tree-frogs, and the _k-i-i-i-i-i-i_ of crickets. Immense trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,--twinkling out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies awakening. Then about the branches of the _bois-canon_ black shapes began to hover, which were not birds--shapes flitting processionally without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble something at the end of a bough;--then yielding place to another, and circling away, to return again from the other side...the _guimbos_, the great bats. But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,--the sum of ancestral experiences innumerable,--the mingled joy and pain of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the stillness,--pleading:-- --"_Pa combiné, chè!--pa combiné conm ça!_" (Do not think, dear!--do not think like that!) ... Only less beautiful than the sunset she seemed, this slender half-breed, who had come all unperceived behind us, treading soundlessly with her slim bare feet.... "And you, Missié", she said to me, in a tone of gentle reproach;--"you are his friend! why do you let him think? It is thinking that will prevent him getting well." _Combiné_ in creole signifies to think intently, and therefore to be unhappy,--because, with this artless race, as with children, to think intensely about anything is possible only under great stress of suffering. --"_Pa combiné,--non, chè_," she repeated, plaintively, stroking Felicien's hair. "It is thinking that makes us old.... And it is time to bid your friend good-night."... --"She is so good," said Felicien, smiling to make her pleased;--"I could never tell you how good. But she does not understand. She believes I suffer if I am silent. She is contented only when she sees me laugh; and so she will tell me creole stories by the hour to keep me amused, as if I were a child."... As he spoke she slipped an arm about his neck. --"_Doudoux_," she persisted;--and her voice was a dove's coo,--"_Si ou ainmein moin, pa combiné-non!_" And in her strange exotic beauty, her savage grace, her supple caress, the velvet witchery of her eyes,--it seemed to me that I beheld a something imaged, not of herself, nor of the moment only,--a something weirdly sensuous: the Spirit of tropic Nature made golden flesh, and murmuring to each lured wanderer:--"_If thou wouldst love me, do not think_"... CHAPTER XIII. YÉ. I. Almost every night, just before bedtime, I hear some group of children in the street telling stories to each other. Stories, enigmas or _tim-tim_, and songs, and round games, are the joy of child-life here,--whether rich or poor. I am particularly fond of listening to the stories,--which seem to me the oddest stories I ever heard. I succeeded in getting several dictated to me, so that I could write them;--others were written for me by creole friends, with better success. To obtain them in all their original simplicity and naive humor of detail, one should be able to write them down in short-hand as fast as they are related: they lose greatly in the slow process of dictation. The simple mind of the native story-teller, child or adult, is seriously tried by the inevitable interruptions and restraints of the dictation method;--the reciter loses spirit, becomes soon weary, and purposely shortens the narrative to finish the task as soon as possible. It seems painful to such a one to repeat a phrase more than once,--at least in the same way; while frequent questioning may irritate the most good-natured in a degree that shows how painful to the untrained brain may be the exercise of memory and steady control of imagination required for continuous dictation. By patience, however, I succeeded in obtaining many curiosities of oral literature,--representing a group of stories which, whatever their primal origin, have been so changed by local thought and coloring as to form a distinctively Martinique folk-tale circle. Among them are several especially popular with the children of my neighborhood; and I notice that almost every narrator embellishes the original plot with details of his own, which he varies at pleasure. I submit a free rendering of one of these tales,--the history of Yé and the Devil. The whole story of Yé would form a large book,--so numerous the list of his adventures; and this adventure seems to me the most characteristic of all. Yé is the most curious figure in Martinique folk-lore. Yé is the typical Bitaco,--or mountain negro of the lazy kind,--the country black whom city blacks love to poke fun at. As for the Devil of Martinique folk-lore, he resembles the _travailleur_ at a distance; but when you get dangerously near him, you find that he has red eyes and red hair, and two little horns under his _chapeau-Bacouè_, and feet like an ape, and fire in his throat. _Y ka sam yon gouôs, gouôs macaque_.... II. _Ça qui pa té connaitt Yé?_... Who is there in all Martinique who never heard of Yé? Everybody used to know the old rascal. He had every fault under the sun;--he was the laziest negro in the whole island; he was the biggest glutton in the whole world. He had an amazing number [52] of children; and they were most of the time all half dead for hunger. Well, one day Yé went out to the woods to look for something to eat. And he walked through the woods nearly all day, till he became ever so tired; but he could not find anything to eat. He was just going to give up the search, when he heard a queer crackling noise,--at no great distance. He went to see what it was,--hiding himself behind the big trees as he got nearer to it. All at once he came to a little hollow in the woods, and saw a great fire burning there,--and he saw a Devil sitting beside the fire. The Devil was roasting a great heap of snails; and the sound Yé had heard was the crackling of the snail-shells. The Devil seemed to be very old;--he was sitting on the trunk of a bread-fruit tree; and Yé took a good long look at him. After Yé had watched him for a while, Yé found out that the old Devil was quite blind. --The Devil had a big calabash in his hand full of _feroce_,--that is to say, boiled salt codfish and manioc flour, with ever so many pimentos (_épi en pile piment_),--just what negroes like Yé are most fond of. And the Devil seemed to be very hungry; and the food was going so fast down his throat that it made Yé unhappy to see it disappearing. It made him so unhappy that he felt at last he could not resist the temptation to steal from the old blind Devil. He crept quite close up to the Devil without making any noise, and began to rob him. Every time the Devil would lift his hand to his mouth, Yé would slip his own fingers into the calabash, and snatch a piece. The old Devil did not even look puzzled;--he did not seem to know anything; and Yé thought to himself that the old Devil was a great fool. He began to get more and more courage;--he took bigger and bigger handfuls out of the calabash;--he ate even faster than the Devil could eat. At last there was only one little bit left in the calabash. Yé put out his hand to take it,--and all of a sudden the Devil made a grab at Yé's hand and caught it! Yé was so frightened he could not even cry out, _Aïe-yaïe_. The Devil finished the last morsel, threw down the calabash, and said to Yé in a terrible voice:--"_Atò, saff!--ou c'est ta moin!_" (I've got you now, you glutton;--you belong to me!) Then he jumped on Yé's back, like a great ape, and twisted his legs round Yé's neck, and cried out:---"Carry me to your cabin,--and walk fast!" ... When Yé's poor children saw him coming, they wondered what their papa was carrying on his back. They thought it might be a sack of bread or vegetables or perhaps a _régime_ of bananas,--for it was getting dark, and they could not see well. They laughed and showed their teeth and danced and screamed: "Here's papa coming with something to eat!--papa's coming with something to eat!" But when Yé had got near enough for them to see what he was carrying, they yelled and ran away to hide themselves. As for the poor mother, she could only hold up her two hands for horror. When they got into the cabin the Devil pointed to a corner, and said to Yé:--"Put me down there!" Yé put him down. The Devil sat there in the corner and never moved or spoke all that evening and all that night. He seemed to be a very quiet Devil indeed. The children began to look at him. But at breakfast-time, when the poor mother had managed to procure something for the children to eat,--just some bread-fruit and yams,--the old Devil suddenly rose up from his corner and muttered:-- --"_Manman mò!--papa mò!--touttt yche mò!_" (Mamma dead!--papa dead!--all the children dead!) And he blew his breath on them, and they all fell down stiff as if they were dead--_raidi-cadave!_. Then the Devil ate up everything there was on the table. When he was done, he filled the pots and dishes with dirt, and blew his breath again on Yé and all the family, and muttered:-- --"_Toutt moune lévé!_" (Everybody get up!) Then they all got up. Then he pointed to all the plates and dishes full of dirt, and said to them:--* [* In the original:--"Y té ka monté assous tabe-là, épi y té ka fai caca adans toutt plats-à, adans toutt zassiett-là."] --"_Gobe-moin ça!_" And they had to gobble it all up, as he told them. After that it was no use trying to eat anything. Every time anything was cooked, the Devil would do the same thing. It was thus the next day, and the next, and the day after, and so every day for a long, long time. Yé did not know what to do; but his wife said she did. If she was only a man, she would soon get rid of that Devil. "Yé," she insisted, "go and see the Bon-Dié [the Good-God], and ask him what to do. I would go myself if I could; but women are not strong enough to climb the great morne." So Yé started off very, very early one morning, before the peep of day, and began to climb the Montagne Pelée. He climbed and walked, and walked and climbed, until he got at last to the top of the Morne de la Croix.* [*A peaklet rising above the verge of the ancient crater now filled with water.] Then he knocked at the sky as loud as he could till the Good-God put his head out of a cloud and asked him what he wanted:-- --"_Eh bien!--ça ou ni, Yé fa ou lè?_" When Yé had recounted his troubles, the Good-God said:-- --"_Pauv ma pauv!_ I knew it all before you came, Yé. I can tell you what to do; but I am afraid it will be no use--you will never be able to do it! Your gluttony is going to be the ruin of you, poor Yé! Still, you can try. Now listen well to what I am going to tell you. First of all, you must not eat anything before you get home. Then when your wife has the children's dinner ready, and you see the Devil getting up, you must cry out:--'_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!_' Then the Devil will drop down dead. Don't forget not to eat anything--_ou tanne?_"... Yé promised to remember all he was told, and not to eat anything on his way down;--then he said good-bye to the Bon-Dié (_bien conm y faut_), and started. All the way he kept repeating the words the Good-God had told him: "_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!"--"tam ni pou tam ni bé!_"--over and over again. --But before reaching home he had to cross a little stream; and on both banks he saw wild guava-bushes growing, with plenty of sour guavas upon them;--for it was not yet time for guavas to be ripe. Poor Yé was hungry! He did all he could to resist the temptation, but it proved too much for him. He broke all his promises to the Bon-Dié: he ate and ate and ate till there were no more guavas left,--and then he began to eat _zicaques_ and green plums, and all sorts of nasty sour things, till he could not eat any more. --By the time he got to the cabin his teeth were so on edge that he could scarcely speak distinctly enough to tell his wife to get the supper ready. And so while everybody was happy, thinking that they were going to be freed from their trouble, Yé was really in no condition to do anything. The moment the supper was ready, the Devil got up from his corner as usual, and approached the table. Then Yé tried to speak; but his teeth were so on edge that instead of saying,--"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé_," he could only stammer out:---"_Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan_." This had no effect on the Devil at all: he seemed to be used to it! He blew his breath on them all, sent them to sleep, ate up all the supper, filled the empty dishes with filth, awoke Yé and his family, and ordered them as usual;-- --"_Gobe-moin ça!_" And they had to gobble it up,--every bit of it. The family nearly died of hunger and disgust. Twice more Yé climbed the Montagne Pelée; twice more he climbed the Morne de la Croix; twice more he disturbed the poor Bon-Dié, all for nothing!--since each time on his way down he would fill his paunch with all sorts of nasty sour things, so that he could not speak right. The Devil remained in the house night and day;--the poor mother threw herself down on the ground, and pulled out her hair,--so unhappy she was! But luckily for the poor woman, she had one child as cunning as a rat,--* [* The great field-rat of Martinique is, in Martinique folk- lore, the symbol of all cunning, and probably merits its reputation.] a boy called Ti Fonté (little Impudent), who bore his name well. When he saw his mother crying so much, he said to her:-- --"Mamma, send papa just once more to see the Good-God: I know something to do!" The mother knew how cunning her boy was: she felt sure he meant something by his words;--she sent old Yé for the last time to see the Bon-Dié. Yé used always to wear one of those big long coats they call _lavalasses_;--whether it was hot or cool, wet or dry, he never went out without it. There were two very big pockets in it--one on each side. When Ti Fonté saw his father getting ready to go, he jumped _floup!_ into one of the pockets and hid himself there. Yé climbed all the way to the top of the Morne de la Croix without suspecting anything. When he got there the little boy put one of his ears out of Yé's pocket,--so as to hear everything the Good-God would say. This time he was very angry,--the Bon-Dié: he spoke very crossly; he scolded Yé a great deal. But he was so kind for all that,--he was so generous to good-for-nothing Yé, that he took the pains to repeat the words over and over again for him:--"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé_."... And this time the Bon-Dié was not talking to no purpose: there was somebody there well able to remember what he said. Ti Fonté made the most of his chance;--he sharpened that little tongue of his; he thought of his mamma and all his little brothers and sisters dying of hunger down below. As for his father, Yé did as he had done before--stuffed himself with all the green fruit he could find. The moment Yé got home and took off his coat, Ti Fonté jumped out, _plapp!_--and ran to his mamma, and whispered:-- --"Mamma, get ready a nice, big dinner!--we are going to have it all to ourselves to-day: the Good-God didn't talk for nothing,--I heard every word he said!" Then the mother got ready a nice _calalou-crabe_, a _tonton-banane_, a _matété-cirique_,--several calabashes of _couss-caye_, two _régimes-figues_ (bunches of small bananas),--in short, a very fine dinner indeed, with a _chopine_ of tafia to wash it all well down. The Devil felt as sure of himself that day as he had always felt, and got up the moment everything was ready. But Ti Fonté got up too, and yelled out just as loud as he could:---"_Tam ni pou tam ni bé!_" At once the Devil gave a scream so loud that it could be heard right down to the bottom of hell,--and he fell dead. Meanwhile, Yé, like the old fool he was, kept trying to say what the Bon-Dié had told him, and could only mumble:-- --"_Anni toqué Diabe-là cagnan!_" He would never have been able to do anything;--and his wife had a great mind just to send him to bed at once, instead of letting him sit down to eat all those nice things. But she was a kind-hearted soul; and so she let Yé stay and eat with the children, though he did not deserve it. And they all ate and ate, and kept on eating and filling themselves until daybreak--_pauv piti!_ But during this time the Devil had begun to smell badly and he had become swollen so big that Yé found he could not move him. Still, they knew they must get him out of the way somehow. The children had eaten so much that they were all full of strength--_yo tè plein lafòce_; and Yé got a rope and tied one end round the Devil's foot; and then he and the children--all pulling together--managed to drag the Devil out of the cabin and into the bushes, where they left him just like a dead dog. They all felt themselves very happy to be rid of that old Devil. But some days after old good-for-nothing Yé went off to hunt for birds. He had a whole lot of arrows with him. He suddenly remembered the Devil, and thought he would like to take one more look at him. And he did. _Fouinq!_ what a sight! The Devil's belly had swelled up like a morne: it was yellow and blue and green,--looked as if it was going to burst. And Yé, like the old fool he always was, shot an arrow up in the air, so that it fell down and stuck into the Devil's belly. Then he wanted to get the arrow, and he climbed up on the Devil, and pulled and pulled till he got the arrow out. Then he put the point of the arrow to his nose,--just to see what sort of a smell dead Devils had. The moment he did that, his nose swelled up as big as the refinery-pot of a sugar-plantation. Yé could scarcely walk for the weight of his nose; but he had to go and see the Bon-Dié again. The Bon-Dié said to him:-- --"Ah! Yé, my poor Yé, you will live and die a fool!--you are certainly the biggest fool in the whole world!... Still, I must try to do something for you;--I'll help you anyhow to get rid of that nose!... I'll tell you how to do it. To-morrow morning, very early, get up and take a big _taya_ [whip], and beat all the bushes well, and drive all the birds to the Roche de la Caravelle. Then you must tell them that I, the Bon-Dié, want them to take off their bills and feathers, and take a good bath in the sea. While they are bathing, you can choose a nose for yourself out of the heap of bills there." Poor Yé did just as the Good-God told him; and while the birds were bathing, he picked out a nose for himself from the heap of beaks,--and left his own refinery-pot in its place. The nose he took was the nose of the _coulivicou_.* And that is why the _coulivicou_ always looks so much ashamed of himself even to this day. [* The _coulivicou_, or "Colin Vicou," is a Martinique bird with a long meagre body, and an enormous bill. It has a very tristful and taciturn expression.... _Maig conm yon coulivicou_, "thin as a coulivicou," is a popular comparison for the appearance of anybody much reduced by sickness.] III. ... Poor Yé!--you still live for me only too vividly outside of those strange folk-tales of eating and of drinking which so cruelly reveal the long slave-hunger of your race. For I have seen you cutting cane on peak slopes above the clouds;--I have seen you climbing from plantation to plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master, though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;--I have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles to market, rather than labor in the fields;--I have seen you ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find a cabbage-palm,--and always hungry,--and always shiftless! And you are still a great fool, poor Yé!--and you have still your swarm of children,--your _rafale yche_,--and they are famished; for you have taken into your _ajoupa_ a Devil who devours even more than you can earn,--even your heart, and your splendid muscles, and your poor artless brain,--the Devil Tafia!... And there is no Bon-Dié to help you rid yourself of him now: for the only Bon-Dié you ever really had, your old creole master, cannot care for you any more, and you cannot care for yourself. Mercilessly moral, the will of this enlightened century has abolished forever that patriarchal power which brought you up strong and healthy on scanty fare, and scourged you into its own idea of righteousness, yet kept you innocent as a child of the law of the struggle for life. But you feel that law now;--you are a citizen of the Republic! you are free to vote, and free to work, and free to starve if you prefer it, and free to do evil and suffer for it;--and this new knowledge stupefies you so that you have almost forgotten how to laugh! CHAPTER XIV LYS I. It is only half-past four o'clock: there is the faintest blue light of beginning day,--and little Victoire already stands at the bedside with my wakening cup of hot black fragrant coffee. What! so early?... Then with a sudden heart-start I remember this is my last West Indian morning. And the child--her large timid eyes all gently luminous--is pressing something into my hand. Two vanilla beans wrapped in a morsel of banana-leaf,--her poor little farewell gift!... Other trifling souvenirs are already packed away. Almost everybody that knows me has given me something. Manm-Robert brought me a tiny packet of orange-seeds,--seeds of a "gift-orange": so long as I can keep these in my vest-pocket I will never be without money. Cyrillia brought me a package of _bouts_, and a pretty box of French matches, warranted inextinguishable by wind. Azaline, the blanchisseuse, sent me a little pocket looking-glass. Cerbonnie, the _màchanne_, left a little cup of guava jelly for me last night. Mimi--dear child!--brought me a little paper dog! It is her best toy; but those gentle black eyes would stream with tears if I dared to refuse it.... Oh, Mimi! what am I to do with a little paper dog? And what am I to do with the chocolate-sticks and the cocoanuts and all the sugar-cane and all the cinnamon-apples?... II. ... Twenty minutes past five by the clock of the Bourse. The hill shadows are shrinking back from the shore;--the long wharves reach out yellow into the sun;--the tamarinds of the Place Bertin, and the pharos for half its height, and the red-tiled roofs along the bay are catching the glow. Then, over the light-house--on the outermost line depending from the southern yard-arm of the semaphore--a big black ball suddenly runs up like a spider climbing its own thread.... _Steamer from the South!_ The packet has been sighted. And I have not yet been able to pack away into a specially purchased wooden box all the fruits and vegetable curiosities and odd little presents sent to me. If Radice the boatman had not come to help me, I should never be able to get ready; for the work of packing is being continually interrupted by friends and acquaintances coming to say good-bye. Manm-Robert brings to see me a pretty young girl--very fair, with a violet foulard twisted about her blonde head. It is little Basilique, who is going to make her _pouémiè communion_. So I kiss her, according to the old colonial custom, once on each downy cheek;--and she is to pray to _Notre Dame du Bon Port_ that the ship shall bear me safely to far-away New York. And even then the steamer's cannon-call shakes over the town and into the hills behind us, which answer with all the thunder of their phantom artillery. III. ... There is a young white lady, accompanied by an aged negress, already waiting on the south wharf for the boat;--evidently she is to be one of my fellow-passengers. Quite a pleasing presence: slight graceful figure,--a face not precisely pretty, but delicate and sensitive, with the odd charm of violet eyes under black eye-brows.... A friend who comes to see me off tells me all about her. Mademoiselle Lys is going to New York to be a governess,--to leave her native island forever. A story sad enough, though not more so than that of many a gentle creole girl. And she is going all alone, for I see her bidding good-bye to old Titine,--kissing her. "_Adié encò, chè;--Bon-Dié ké béni ou!_" sobs the poor servant, with tears streaming down her kind black face. She takes off her blue shoulder-kerchief, and waves it as the boat recedes from the wooden steps. ... Fifteen minutes later, Mademoiselle and I find ourselves under the awnings shading the saloon-deck of the _Guadeloupe_. There are at least fifty passengers,--many resting in chairs, lazy-looking Demerara chairs with arm-supports immensely lengthened so as to form rests for the lower limbs. Overhead, suspended from the awning-frames, are two tin cages containing parrots;--and I see two little greenish monkeys, no bigger than squirrels, tied to the wheel-hatch,--two _sakiwinkis_. These are from the forests of British Guiana. They keep up a continual thin sharp twittering, like birds,--all the while circling, ascending, descending, retreating or advancing to the limit of the little ropes attaching them to the hatch. The _Guadeloupe_ has seven hundred packages to deliver at St. Pierre: we have ample time,--Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes and I,--to take one last look at the "Pays des Revenants." I wonder what her thoughts are, feeling a singular sympathy for her,--for I am in that sympathetic mood which the natural emotion of leaving places and persons one has become fond of, is apt to inspire. And now at the moment of my going,--when I seem to understand as never before the beauty of that tropic Nature, and the simple charm of the life to which I am bidding farewell,--the question comes to me: "Does she not love it all as I do,--nay, even much more, because of that in her own existence which belongs to it?" But as a child of the land, she has seen no other skies,--fancies, perhaps, there may be brighter ones.... ... Nowhere on this earth, Violet-Eyes!--nowhere beneath this sun!... Oh! the dawnless glory of tropic morning!--the single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of the mornes! And the early breezes from the hills,--all cool out of the sleep of the forests, and heavy with vegetal odors thick, sappy, savage-sweet!--and the wild high winds that run ruffling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound!-- And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green-drenched with silent pouring of creepers,--dashed with the lilac and yellow and rosy foam of liana flowers!-- And the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea,--that as you mount the heights ever appears to rise perpendicularly behind you,--that seems, as you descend, to sink and flatten before you!-- And the violet velvet distances of eyening;--and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning,--when all the heaven seems filled with vapors of a molten sun!... IV. How beautiful the mornes and azure-shadowed hollows in the jewel clearness of this perfect morning! Even Pelée wears only her very lightest head-dress of gauze; and all the wrinklings of her green robe take unfamiliar tenderness of tint from the early sun. All the quaint peaking of the colored town--sprinkling the sweep of blue bay with red and yellow and white-of-cream--takes a sharpness in this limpid light as if seen through a diamond lens; and there above the living green of the familiar hills I can see even the faces of the statues--the black Christ on his white cross, and the White Lady of the Morne d'Orange--among curving palms.... It is all as though the island were donning its utmost possible loveliness, exerting all its witchery,--seeking by supremest charm to win back and hold its wandering child,--Violet-Eyes over there!... She is looking too. I wonder if she sees the great palms of the Voie du Parnasse,--curving far away as to bid us adieu, like beautiful bending women. I wonder if they are not trying to say something to her; and I try myself to fancy what that something is:-- --"Child, wilt thou indeed abandon all who love thee!... Listen!--'tis a dim grey land thou goest unto,--a land of bitter winds,--a land of strange gods,--a land of hardness and barrenness, where even Nature may not live through half the cycling of the year! Thou wilt never see us there.... And there, when thou shalt sleep thy long sleep, child--that land will have no power to lift thee up;--vast weight of stone will press thee down forever;--until the heavens be no more thou shalt not awake!... But here, darling, our loving roots would seek for thee, would find thee: thou shouldst live again!--we lift, like Aztec priests, the blood of hearts to the Sun."... IV. ... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan with a design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green bamboo, with a single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a pale blue murky double streak that means the horizon above a sea. That is all. Trivial to my Northern friends this design might seem; but to me it causes a pleasure bordering on pain.... I know so well what the artist means; and they could not know, unless they had seen bamboos,--and bamboos peculiarly situated. As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy heights behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the blended azure of sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across it at the level of my eyes. Nor is this all;--I have the every sensation of the very moment,--the vegetal odors, the mighty tropic light, the wamrth, the intensity of irreproducible color.... Beyond a doubt, the artist who dashed the design on this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a nearly similar experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in me, but which I cannot communicate to others. ... And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write about the _Pays des Revenants_ can only be for others, who have never beheld it,--vague like the design upon this fan. VI. _Brrrrrrrrrrr!_... The steam-winch is lifting the anchor; and the _Guadeloupe_ trembles through every plank as the iron torrent of her chain-cable rumbles through the hawse-holes.... At last the quivering ceases;--there is a moment's silence; and Violet-Eyes seems trying to catch a last glimpse of her faithful _bonne_ among the ever-thickening crowd upon the quay.... Ah! there she is--waving her foulard. Mademoiselle Lys is waving a handkerchief in reply.... Suddenly the shock of the farewell gun shakes heavily through our hearts, and over the bay,--where the tall mornes catch the flapping thunder, and buffet it through all their circle in tremendous mockery. Then there is a great whirling and whispering of whitened water behind the steamer--another,--another; and the whirl becomes a foaming stream: the mighty propeller is playing!.... All the blue harbor swings slowly round;--and the green limbs of the land are pushed out further on the left, shrink back upon the right;--and the mountains are moving their shoulders. And then the many-tinted façades,--and the tamarinds of the Place Bertin,--and the light-house,--and the long wharves with their throng of turbaned women,--and the cathedral towers,--and the fair palms,--and the statues of the hills,--all veer, change place, and begin to float away... steadily, very swiftly. [Illustration: BASSE-TERRE ST. KITTS.] Farewell, fair city,--sun-kissed city,--many-fountained city!--dear yellow-glimmering streets,--white pavements learned by heart,--and faces ever looked for,--and voices ever loved! Farewell, white towers with your golden-throated bells!--farewell, green steeps, bathed in the light of summer everlasting!--craters with your coronets of forest!--bright mountain paths upwinding 'neath pomp of fern and angelin and feathery bamboo!--and gracious palms that drowse above the dead! Farewell, soft-shadowing majesty of valleys unfolding to the sun,--green golden cane-fields ripening to the sea!... ... The town vanishes. The island slowly becomes a green silhouette. So might Columbus first have seen it from the deck of his caravel,--nearly four hundred years ago. At this distance there are no more signs of life upon it than when it first became visible to his eyes: yet there are cities there,--and toiling,--and suffering,--and gentle hearts that knew me.... Now it is turning blue,--the beautiful shape!--becoming a dream.... VII. And Dominica draws nearer,--sharply massing her hills against the vast light in purple nodes and gibbosities and denticulations. Closer and closer it comes, until the green of its heights breaks through the purple here and there,--in flashings and ribbings of color. Then it remains as if motionless a while;--then the green lights go out again,--and all the shape begins to recede sideward towards the south. ... And what had appeared a pearl-grey cloud in the north slowly reveals itself as another island of mountains,--hunched and horned and mammiform: Guadeloupe begins to show her double profile. But Martinique is still visible;--Pelée still peers high over the rim of the south.... Day wanes;--the shadow of the ship lengthens over the flower-blue water. Pelée changes aspect at last,--turns pale as a ghost,--but will not fade away.... ... The sun begins to sink as he always sinks to his death in the tropics,--swiftly,--too swiftly!--and the glory of him makes golden all the hollow west,--and bronzes all the flickering wave-backs. But still the gracious phantom of the island will not go,--softly haunting us through the splendid haze. And always the tropic wind blows soft and warm;--there is an indescribable caress in it! Perhaps some such breeze, blowing from Indian waters, might have inspired that prophecy of Islam concerning the Wind of the Last Day,--that "Yellow Wind, softer than silk, balmier than musk,"--which is to sweep the spirits of the just to God in the great Winnowing of Souls.... Then into the indigo night vanishes forever from my eyes the ghost of Pelée; and the moon swings up,--a young and lazy moon, drowsing upon her back, as in a hammock.... Yet a few nights more, and we shall see this slim young moon erect,--gliding upright on her way,--coldly beautiful like a fair Northern girl. VIII. And ever through tepid nights and azure days the _Guadeloupe_ rushes on,--her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent of fire beneath the stars,--steaming straight for the North. Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,--beautiful Montserrat, all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet fallen from the waist!--breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth town behind its screen of palms... young palms, slender and full of grace as creole children are;-- And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling through ocean-haze;--by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;--past ghostly St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold, like some dream of the Saint's own Second Summer;-- Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,--shark-haunted, bounded about by huddling of little hills, blue and green. Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"--all radiant with verdure though well nigh woodless,--nakedly beautiful in the tropic light as a perfect statue;-- Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the left, and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,--old St. Thomas, watching the going and the coming of the commerce that long since abandoned her port,--watching the ships once humbly solicitous for patronage now turning away to the Spanish rival, like ingrates forsaking a ruined patrician;-- And the vapory Vision of, St. John;--and the grey ghost of Tortola,--and further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the aureate phantom of Virgin Gorda. IX. Then only the enormous double-vision of sky and sea. The sky: a cupola of blinding blue, shading down and paling into spectral green at the rim of the world,--and all fleckless, save at evening. Then, with sunset, comes a light gold-drift of little feathery cloudlets into the West,--stippling it as with a snow of fire. The sea: no flower-tint may now make my comparison for the splendor of its lucent color. It has shifted its hue;--for we have entered into the Azure Stream: it has more than the magnificence of burning cyanogen.... But, at night, the Cross of the South appears no more. And other changes come, as day succeeds to day,--a lengthening of the hours of light, a longer lingering of the after-glow,--a cooling of the wind. Each morning the air seems a little cooler, a little rarer;--each noon the sky looks a little paler, a little further away--always heightening, yet also more shadowy, as if its color, receding, were dimmed by distance,--were coming more faintly down from vaster altitudes. ... Mademoiselle is petted like a child by the lady passengers. And every man seems anxious to aid in making her voyage a pleasant one. For much of which, I think, she may thank her eyes! X. A dim morning and chill;--blank sky and sunless waters: the sombre heaven of the North with colorless horizon rounding in a blind grey sea.... What a sudden weight comes to the heart with the touch of the cold mist, with the spectral melancholy of the dawn;--and then what foolish though irrepressible yearning for the vanished azure left behind! ... The little monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their perches with eyes closed. ... A vagueness begins to shape itself along the verge of the sea, far to port: that long heavy clouding which indicates the approach of land. And from it now floats to us something ghostly and frigid which makes the light filmy and the sea shadowy as a flood of dreams,--the fog of the Jersey coast. At once the engines slacken their respiration. The _Guadeloupe_ begins to utter her steam-cry of warning,--regularly at intervals of two minutes,--for she is now in the track of all the ocean vessels. And from far away we can hear a heavy knelling,--the booming of some great fog-bell. ... All in a white twilight. The place of the horizon has vanished;--we seem ringed in by a wall of smoke.... Out of this vapory emptiness--very suddenly--an enormous steamer rushes, towering like a hill--passes so close that we can see faces, and disappears again, leaving the sea heaving and frothing behind her. ... As I lean over the rail to watch the swirling of the wake, I feel something pulling at my sleeve: a hand,--a tiny black hand,--the hand of a _sakiwinki_. One of the little monkeys, straining to the full length of his string, is making this dumb appeal for human sympathy;--the bird-black eyes of both are fixed upon me with the oddest look of pleading. Poor little tropical exiles! I stoop to caress them; but regret the impulse a moment later: they utter such beseeching cries when I find myself obliged to leave them again alone!... ... Hour after hour the _Guadeloupe_ glides on through the white gloom,--cautiously, as if feeling her way; always sounding her whistle, ringing her bells, until at last some brown-winged bark comes flitting to us out of the mist, bearing a pilot.... How strange it must all seem to Mademoiselle who stands so silent there at the rail!--how weird this veiled world must appear to her, after the sapphire light of her own West Indian sky, and the great lazulite splendor of her own tropic sea! But a wind comes;--it strengthens,--begins to blow very cold. The mists thin before its blowing; and the wan blank sky is all revealed again with livid horizon around the heaving of the iron-grey sea. ... Thou dim and lofty heaven of the North,--grey sky of Odin,--bitter thy winds and spectral all thy colors!--they that dwell beneath thee know not the glory of Eternal Summer's green,--the azure splendor of southern day!--but thine are the lightnings of Thought illuminating for human eyes the interspaces between sun and sun. Thine the generations of might,--the strivers, the battlers,--the men who make Nature tame!--thine the domain of inspiration and achievement,--the larger heroisms, the vaster labors that endure, the higher knowledge, and all the witchcrafts of science!... But in each one of us there lives a mysterious Something which is Self, yet also infinitely more than Self,--incomprehensibly multiple,--the complex total of sensations, impulses, timidities belonging to the unknown past. And the lips of the little stranger from the tropics have become all white, because that Something within her,--ghostly bequest from generations who loved the light and rest and wondrous color of a more radiant world,--now shrinks all back about her girl's heart with fear of this pale grim North.... And lo!--opening mile-wide in dream-grey majesty before us,--reaching away, through measureless mazes of masting, into remotenesses all vapor-veiled,--the mighty perspective of New York harbor!... Thou knowest it not, this gloom about us, little maiden;--'tis only a magical dusk we are entering,--only that mystic dimness in which miracles must be wrought!... See the marvellous shapes uprising,--the immensities, the astonishments! And other greater wonders thou wilt behold in a little while, when we shall have become lost to each other forever in the surging of the City's million-hearted life!... 'Tis all shadow here, thou sayest?--Ay, 'tis twilight, verily, by contrast with that glory out of which thou camest, Lys--twilight only,--but the Twilight of the Gods!... _Adié, chè!--Bon-Dié ké bént ou!_... ENDNOTES [Footnote 1: Since this was written the market has been removed to the Savane,--to allow of the erection of a large new market-building on the old site; and the beautiful trees have been cut down.] [Footnote 2: I subsequently learned the mystery of this very strange and beautiful mixed race,--many fine specimens of which may also be seen in Trinidad. Three widely diverse elements have combined to form it: European, negro, and Indian,--but, strange to say, it is the most savage of these three bloods which creates the peculiar charm.... I cannot speak of this comely and extraordinary type without translating a passage from Dr. J. J. J. Cornilliac, an eminent Martinique physician, who recently published a most valuable series of studies upon the ethnology, climatology, and history of the Antilles. In these he writes:...] "When, among the populations of the Antilles, we first notice those remarkable _métis_ whose olive skins, elegant and slender figures, fine straight profiles, and regular features remind us of the inhabitants of Madras or Pondicherry,--we ask ourselves in wonder, while looking at their long eyes, full of a strange and gentle melancholy (especially among the women), and at the black, rich, silky-gleaming hair curling in abundance over the temples and falling in profusion over the neck,--to what human race can belong this singular variety,--in which there is a dominant characteristic that seems indelible, and always shows more and more strongly in proportion as the type is further removed from the African element. It is the Carib blood--blended with blood of Europeans and of blacks,--which in spite of all subsequent crossings, and in spite of the fact that it has not been renewed for more than two hundred years, still conserves as markedly as at the time of the first interblending, the race-characteristic that invariably reveals its presence in the blood of every being through whose veins it flows."--"Recherches chronologiques et historiques sur l'Origine et la Propagation de la Fièvre Jaune aux Antilles." Par J. J. J. Cornilliac. Fort-de-France: Imprimerie du Gouvernement. 1886. But I do not think the term "olive" always indicates the color of these skins, which seemed to me exactly the tint of gold; and the hair flashes with bluish lights, Like the plumage of certain black birds.] [Footnote 3: _Extract from the "Story of Marie," as written from dictation:_ ... Manman-à té ni yon gouôs jà à caïe-li. Jà-la té touôp lou'de pou Marie. Cé té li menm manman là qui té kallé pouend dileau. Yon jou y pouend jà-la pou y té allé pouend dileau. Lhè manman-à rivé bò la fontaine, y pa trouvé pésonne pou châgé y. Y rété; y ka crié, "Toutt bon Chritien, vini châgé moin!" ... Lhè manman rété y ouè pa té ni piess bon Chritien pou chage y. Y rété; y crié: "Pouloss, si pa ni bon Chritien, ni mauvais Chritien! toutt mauvais Chritien vini châgé moin!" ... Lhè y fini di ça, y ouè yon diabe qui ka vini, ka di conm çaa, "Pou moin châgé ou, ça ou ké baill moin?" Manman-là di,--y réponne, "Moin pa ni arien!" Diabe-la réponne y, "Y fau ba moin Marie pou moin pé châgé ou." This mamma had a great jar in her house. The jar was too heavy for Marie. It was this mamma herself who used to go for water. One day she took that jar to go for water. When this mamma had got to the fountain, she could not find anyone to load her. She stood there, crying out, "Any good Christian, come load me!" As the mamma stood there she saw there was not a single good Christian to help her load. She stood there, and cried out: "Well, then, if there are no good Christians, there are bad Christians. Any bad Christian, come and load me!" The moment she said that, she saw a devil coming, who said to her, "If I load you, what will you give me?" This mamma answered, and said, "I have nothing!" The devil answered her, "Must give me Marie if you want me to load you."] [Footnote 4: _Y batt li conm lambi_--"he beat him like a lambi"--is an expression that may often be heard in a creole court from witnesses testifying in a case of assault and battery. One must have seen a lambi pounded to appreciate the terrible picturesqueness of the phase.] [Footnote 5: Moreau de Saint-Méry writes, describing the drums of the negroes of Saint Domingue: "Le plus court de ces tambours est nommé _Bamboula_, attendu qu'il est formé quelquefois d'un très-gros bambou."--"Description de la partie française de Saint Domingue", vol. i., p. 44.] [Footnote 6: What is known in the West Indies as a hurricane is happily rare; it blows with the force of a cyclone, but not always circularly; it may come from one direction, and strengthen gradually for days until its highest velocity and destructive force are reached. One in the time of Père Labat blew away the walls of a fort;--that of 1780 destroyed the lives of twenty-two thousand people in four islands: Martinique, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent, and Barbadoes. Before the approach of such a visitation animals manifest the same signs of terror they display prior to an earthquake. Cattle assemble together, stamp, and roar; sea-birds fly to the interior; fowl seek the nearest crevice they can hide in. Then, while the sky is yet clear, begins the breaking of the sea; then darkness comes, and after it the wind.] [Footnote 7: "Histoire Générale des Antilles... habités par les Français." Par le R. P. Du Tertre, de l'Ordre des Frères Prescheurs. Paris: 1661-71. 4 vols. (with illustrations) in 4to.] [Footnote 8: One of the lights seen on the Caravelle was certainly carried by a cattle-thief,--a colossal negro who had the reputation of being a sorcerer,--a _quimboiseur_. The greater part of the mountainous land forming La Caravelle promontory was at that time the property of a Monsieur Eustache, who used it merely for cattle-raising purposes. He allowed his animals to run wild in the hills; they multiplied exceedingly, and became very savage. Notwithstanding their ferocity, however, large numbers of them were driven away at night, and secretly slaughtered or sold, by somebody who used to practise the art of cattle-stealing with a lantern, and evidently without aid. A watch was set, and the thief arrested. Before the magistrate he displayed extraordinary assurance, asserting that he had never stolen from a poor man--he had stolen only from M. Eustache who could not count his own cattle--_yon richard, man chè!_ "How many cows did you steal from him?" asked the magistrate. "_Ess moin pè save?--moin té pouend yon savane toutt pleine_," replied the prisoner. (How can I tell?--I took a whole savanna-full.)... Condemned on the strength of his own confession, he was taken to jail. "_Moin pa ké rété geole_," he observed. (I shall not remain in prison.) They put him in irons, but on the following morning the irons were found lying on the floor of the cell, and the prisoner was gone. He was never seen in Martinique again.] [Footnote 9: Y sucoué souyé assous quai-là;--y ka di: "Moin ka maudi ou, Lanmatinique!--moin ka maudi ou!...Ké ni mangé pou engnien: ou pa ké pè menm acheté y! Ké ni touèle pou engnien: ou pa ké pè menm acheté yon robe! Epi yche ké batt manman.... Ou banni moin!--moin ké vini encò"] [Footnote 10: Vol. iii., p. 382-3. Edition of 1722.] [Footnote 11: The parrots of Martinique he describes as having been green, with slate-colored plumage on the top of the head, mixed with a little red, and as having a few red feathers in the wings, throat, and tail.] [Footnote 12: The creole word _moudongue_ is said to be a corruption of _Mondongue_, the name of an African coast tribe who had the reputation of being cannibals. A Mondongue slave on the plantations was generally feared by his fellow-blacks of other tribes; and the name of the cannibal race became transformed into an adjective to denote anything formidable or terrible. A blow with a stick made of the wood described being greatly dreaded, the term was applied first to the stick, and afterward to the wood itself.] [Footnote 13: Accounting for the origin of the trade-winds, he writes: "I say that the Trade-Winds do not exist in the Torrid Zone merely by chance; forasmuch as the cause which produces them is very necessary, very sure, and very continuous, since they result _either from the movement of the Earth around the Sun, or from the movement of the Sun around the Earth. Whether it be the one or the other, of these two great bodies which moves..._" etc.] [Footnote 14: In creole, _cabritt-bois_,--("the Wood-Kid")--a colossal cricket. Precisely at half-past four in the morning it becomes silent; and for thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the signal to get up.] [Footnote 15: --"Where dost stay, dear?"--"Affairs of the goat are not affairs of the rabbit."--"But why art thou dressed all in black thus?"--"I wear mourning for my dead soul."--"_Aïe ya yaïe!_...No, true!...where art thou going now?"--"Love is gone: I go after love."--"Ho! thou hast a Wasp [lover]--eh?"--"The zanoli gives a ball; the _maboya_ enters unasked."--"Tell me where thou art going, sweetheart?"--"As far as the River of the Lizard."--"_Fouinq!_--there are more than thirty kilometres!"--"What of that?--dost thou want to come with me?"] [Footnote 16: "Kiss me now!"] [Footnote 17: Petits amoureux aux plumes, Enfants d'un brillant séjour, Vous ignorez l'amertume, Vous parlez souvent d'amour;... Vous méprisez la dorure, Les salons, et les bijoux; Vous chérissez la Nature, Petits oiseaux, becquetez-vous! "Voyez làbas, dans cette église, Auprès d'un confessional, Le prêtre, qui veut faire croire à Lise, Qu'un baiser est un grand mal;--Pour prouver à la mignonne Qu'un baiser bien fait, bien doux, N'a jamais damné personne Petits oiseaux, becquetez-vous!" Translation: Little feathered lovers, cooing, Children of the radiant air, Sweet your speech,--the speech of wooing; Ye have ne'er a grief to bear! Gilded ease and jewelled fashion Never own a charm for you; Ye love Nature's truth with passion, Pretty birdlings, bill and coo! See that priest who, Lise confessing, Wants to make the girl believe That a kiss without a blessing Is a fault for which to grieve! Now to prove, to his vexation, That no tender kiss and true Ever caused a soul's damnation, Pretty birdlings, bill and coo!] [Footnote 18: "Cette danse est opposée à la pudeur. Avec tout cela, elle ne lesse pas d'être tellement du goût des Espagnols Créolles de l'Amérique, & si fort en usage parmi eux, qu'elle fait la meilleure partie de leurs divertissements, & qu'elle entre même dans leurs devotions. Ils la dansent même dans leurs Églises & à leurs processions; et les Religieuses ne manquent guère de la danser la Nuit de Noël, sur un théatre élévé dans leur Choeur, vis-à-vis de leur grille, qui est ouverte, afin que le Peuple aît sa part dans la joye que ces bonnes âmes témoignent pour la naissance du Sauveur."] [Footnote 19: During a hurricane, several years ago, a West Indian steamer was disabled at a dangerously brief distance from the coast of the island by having her propeller fouled. Sorely broken and drifting rigging had become wrapped around it. One of the crew, a Martinique mulatto, tied a rope about his waist, took his knife between his teeth, dived overboard, and in that tremendous sea performed the difficult feat of disengaging the propeller, and thus saving the steamer from otherwise certain destruction.... This brave fellow received the Cross of the Legion of Honor.] [Footnote 20: "_Bel laline, moin ka montré ti pièce moin!--ba moin làgent toutt temps ou ka clairé!_"... This little invocation is supposed to have most power when uttered on the first appearance of the new moon.] [Footnote 21: "Guardian-angel, watch over me;--have pity upon my weakness; lie down on my little bed with me: follow me whithersoever I go."...The prayers are always said in French. Metaphysical and theological terms cannot be rendered in the patois; and the authors of creole catechisms have always been obliged to borrow and explain French religious phrases in order to make their texts comprehensible.] [Footnote 22: --"Moin té ouè yon bal;--moin rêvé: moin té ka ouè toutt moune ka dansé masqué; moin té ka gàdé. Et toutt-à-coup moin ka ouè c'est bonhomme-càton ka danse. Et main ka ouè yon Commandè: y ka mandé moin ça moin ka fai là. Moin reponne y conm ça:--'Moin ouè yon bal, moin gàdé-coument!' 'Y ka réponne moin:--'Pisse ou si quirièse pou vini gàdé baggaïe moune, faut rété là pou dansé 'tou.' Moin réponne y:--'Non! main pa dansé épi bonhomme-càton!--moin pè!'... Et moin ka couri, moin ka couri, main ka couri à fòce moin te ni pè. Et moin rentré adans grand jàdin; et moin ouè gouôs pié-cirise qui té chàgé anni feuill; et moin ka ouè yon nhomme assise enba cirise-à. Y mandé moin:--'Ça ou ka fai là?' Moin di y:--'Moin ka châché chimin pou moin allé.' Y di moin:--'Faut rété içitt.' Et moin di y:--'Non!'--et pou chappé cò moin, moin di y:--'Allé enhaut-là: ou ké ouè yon bel bal,--toutt bonhomme-càton ka dansé, épi yon Commande-en-càton ka coumandé yo.'... Epi moin levé, à fòce moin té pè."...] [Footnote 23: Lit.,--"brought-up-in-a-hat." To wear the madras is to acknowledge oneself of color;--to follow the European style of dressing the hair, and adopt the costume of the white creoles indicates a desire to affiliate with the white class.] [Footnote 24: Red earthen-ware jars for keeping drinking-water cool. The origin of the word is probably to be sought in the name of the town, near Marseilles, where they are made,--Aubagne.] [Footnote 25: I may cite in this relation one stanza of a creole song--very popular in St. Pierre--celebrating the charms of a little capresse:-- "...Moin toutt jeine, Gouôs, gouâs, vaillant, Peau,di chapoti Ka fai plaisi;--Lapeau moin Li bien poli; Et moin ka plai Mênm toutt nhomme grave!" --Which might be freely rendered thus:-- "...I am dimpled, young, Round-limbed, and strong, With sapota-skin That is good to see: All glossy-smooth Is this skin of mine; And the gravest men Like to look at me!"] [Footnote 26: It was I who washed and ironed and mended;--at nine o'clock at night thou didst put me out-of-doors, with my child in my arms,--the rain was falling,--with my poor straw mattress upon my head!... Doudoux! thou dost abandon me!... I have none to care for me.] [Footnote 27: Also called _La Barre de 'Isle_,--a long high mountain-wall interlinking the northern and southern system of ranges,--and only two metres broad at the summit. The "Roches-Carrées", display a geological formation unlike anything discovered in the rest of the Antillesian system, excepting in Grenada,--columnar or prismatic basalts.... In the plains of Marin curious petrifactions exist;--I saw a honey-comb so perfect that the eye alone could scarcely divine the transformation.] [Footnote 28: Thibault de Chanvallon, writing of Martinique in 1751, declared:--"All possible hinderances to study are encountered here (_tout s'oppose à l'etude_): if the Americans [creoles] do not devote themselves to research, the fact must not be attributed solely to indifference or indolence. On the one hand, the overpowering and continual heat,--the perpetual succession of mornes and acclivities,--the difficulty of entering forests rendered almost inaccessible by the lianas interwoven across all openings, and the prickly plants which oppose a barrier to the naturalist,--the continual anxiety and fear inspired by serpents also;--on the othelr hand, the disheartening necessity of having to work alone, and the discouragement of being unable to communicate one's ideas or discoveries to persons having similar tastes. And finally, it must be remembered that these discouragements and dangers are never mitigated by the least hope of personal consideration, or by the pleasure of emulation,--since such study is necessarily unaccompanied either by the one or the other in a country where nobody undertakes it."--(_Voyage à la Martinique_.)...The conditions have scarcely changed since De Chanvallon's day, despite the creation of Government roads, and the thinning of the high woods.] [Footnote 29: Humboldt believed the height to be not less than 800 _toises_ (1 toise=6 ft. 4.73 inches), or about 5115 feet.] [Footnote 30: There used to be a strange popular belief that however heavily veiled by clouds the mountain might be prior to an earthquake, these would always vanish with the first shock. But Thibault de Chanvallon took pains to examine into the truth of this alleged phenomenon; and found that during a number of earthquake shocks the clouds remained over the crater precisely as usual.... There was more foundation, however, for another popular belief, which still exists,--that the absolute purity of the atmosphere about Pelée, and the perfect exposure of its summit for any considerable time, might be regarded as an omen of hurricane.] [Footnote 31: "De la piqure du serpent de la Martinique," par Auguste Charriez, Medecin de la Marine. Paris: Moquet, 1875] [Footnote 32: M. Francard Bayardelle, overseer of the Prèsbourg plantation at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment of snake bite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these can be obtained), and the administration of alkali as an internal medicine. He has saved several lives by these methods. The negro panseur method is much more elaborate and, to some extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small _couï_, or half-calabash, in lieu of a grass; and then applies cataplasms of herbs,--orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, _chardon-béni_, _charpentier_, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled together;--this poulticing being continued every day for a month. Meantime the patient is given all sorts of absurd things to drink, in tafia and sour-orange juice--such as old clay pipes ground to powder, or _the head of the fer-de-lance itself_, roasted dry and pounded.... The plantation negro has no faith in any other system of cure but that of the panseur;--he refuses to let the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit to be treated even by an experienced white over-seer.] [Footnote 33: The sheet-lightnings which play during the nights of July and August are termed in creole _Zéclai-titiri_, or "titiri-lightnings";--it is believed these give notice that the titiri have begun to swarn in the rivers. Among the colored population there exists an idea of some queer relation between the lightning and the birth of the little fish,--it is commonly said, "_Zéclai-a ka fai yo écloré_" (the lightning hatches them).] [Footnote 34: Dr. E. Rufz: "Études historiques," vol. i., p. 189.] [Footnote 35: The brightly colored douillettes are classified by the people according to the designs of the printed calico:--_robe-à-bambou_,--_robe-à-bouquet_,--_robe-arc-en-ciel_, --_robe-à-carreau_,--etc., according as the pattern is in stripes, flower-designs, "rainbow" bands of different tints, or plaidings. _Ronde-en-ronde_ means a stuff printed with disk-patterns, or link-patterns of different colors,--each joined with the other. A robe of one color only is called a _robe-uni_. The general laws of contrasts observed in the costume require the silk foulard, or shoulder-kerchief, to make a sharp relief with the color of the robe, thus:-- Robe. Foulard. Yellow Blue. Dark blue Yellow. Pink Green. Violet Bright red. Red Violet. Chocolate (cacoa) Pale blue. Sky blue Pale rose. These refer, of course, to dominant or ground colors, as there are usually several tints in the foulard as well as the robe. The painted Madras should always be bright yellow. According to popular ideas of good dressing, the different tints of skin should be relieved by special choice of color in the robe, as follows:-- _Capresse_ (a clear red skin) should wear.... Pale yellow. _Mulatresse_ (according to shade).... Rose. Blue. Green. _Negresse_.... White. Scarlet, or any violet color.] [Footnote 36: "Vouèla Cendrillon evec yon bel ròbe velou grande lakhè.... Ça té ka bail ou mal ziè. Li té tini bel zanneau dans zòreill li, quate-tou-chou, bouoche, bracelet, tremblant,--toutt sòte bel baggaïe conm ça."...--(_Conte Cendrillon_,--d'après Turiault.) --"There was Cendrillon with a beautiful long trailing robe of velvet on her!... It was enough to hurt one's eyes to look at her! She had beautiful rings in her ears, and a collier-choux of four rows, brooches, _tremblants_, bracelets,--everything fine of that sort."--(Story of Cinderella in Turinault's Creole Grammar).] [Footnote 37: It is quite possible, however, that the slaves of Dutertre's time belonged for the most part to the uglier African tribes; and that later supplies may have been procured from other parts of the slave coast. Writing half a century later, Père Labat declares having seen freshly disembarked blacks handsome enough to inspire an artist:--"_J'en ai vu des deux sexes faits à peindre, et beaux par merveille_" (vol. iv. chap, vii,). He adds that their skin was extremely fine, and of velvety softness;--"_le velours n'est pas plus doux_."... Among the 30,000 blacks yearly shipped to the French colonies, there were doubtless many representatives of the finer African races.] [Footnote 38: "Leur sueur n'est pas fétide comme celle des nègres de la Guinée," writes the traveller Dauxion-Lavaysse, in 1813.] [Footnote 39: Dr. E. Rufz: "Études historiques et statistiques sur la population de la Martinique." St. Pierre: 1850. Vol. i., pp. 148-50. It has been generally imagined that the physical constitution of the black race was proof against the deadly climate of the West Indies. The truth is that the freshly imported Africans died of fever by thousands and tens-of-thousands;--the creole-negro race, now so prolific, represents only the fittest survivors in the long and terrible struggle of the slave element to adapt itself to the new environment. Thirty thousand negroes a year were long needed to supply the French colonies. Between 1700 and 1789 no less than 900,000 slaves were imported by San Domingo alone;--yet there were less than half that number left in 1789. (See Placide Justin's history of Santo Domingo, p. 147.) The entire slave population of Barbadoes had to be renewed every sixteen years, according to estimates: the loss to planters by deaths of slaves (reckoning the value of a slave at only £20 sterling) during the same period was £1,600,000 ($8,000,000). (Burck's "History of European Colonies," vol. ii., p. 141; French edition of 1767.)] [Footnote 40: Rufz: "Études," vol. i., p. 236.] [Footnote 41: I am assured it has now fallen to a figure not exceeding 5000.] [Footnote 42: Rufz: "Études," vol. ii., pp. 311, 312.] [Footnote 43: Rufz: "Études," vol. i., p. 237.] [Footnote 44: _La race de sang-mêlé, issue des blancs et des noirs, est éminement civilizable. Comme types physiques, elle fournit dans beaucoup d'individus, dans ses femmes en général, les plus beaux specimens de la race humaine_.--"Le Préjugé de Race aux Antilles Françaises." Par G. Souquet-Basiège. St. Pierre, Martinique: 1883. pp. 661-62.] [Footnote 45: Turiault: "Étude sur le langage Créole de la Martinique." Brest: 1874.... On page 136 he cites the following pretty verses in speaking of the _fille-de-couleur_:-- L'Amour prit soin de la former Tendre, naïve, et caressante, Faite pour plaire, encore plus pour aimer. Portant tous les traits précieux Du caractère d'une amante, Le plaisir sur sa bouche et l'amour dans ses yeux.] [Footnote 46: A sort of land-crab;--the female is selected for food, and, properly cooked, makes a delicious dish;--the male is almost worthless.] [Footnote 47: "Voyage à la Martinique," Par J. R., Général de Brigade. Paris: An, XII., 1804. Page 106.] [Footnote 48: According to the Martinique "Annuaire" for 1887, there were even then, out of a total population of 173,182, no less than 12,366 able to read and write.] [Footnote 49: There is record of an attempt to manufacture bread with one part manioc flour to three of wheat flour. The result was excellent; but no serious effort was ever made to put the manioc bread on the market.] [Footnote 50: I must mention a surreptitious dish, _chatt_;--needless to say the cats are not sold, but stolen. It is true that only a small class of poor people eat cats; but they eat so many cats that cats have become quite rare in St. Pierre. The custom is purely superstitious: it is alleged that if you eat cat seven times, or if you eat seven cats, no witch, wizard, or _quimboiseur_ can ever do you any harm; and the cat ought to be eaten on Christmas Eve in order that the meal be perfectly efficacious.... The mystic number "seven", enters into another and a better creole superstition;--if you kill a serpent, seven great sins are forgiven to you: _ou ké ni sept grands péchés effacé_.] [Footnote 51: Rufz remarks that the first effect of this climate of the Antilles is a sort of general physical excitement, an exaltation, a sense of unaccustomed strength,--which begets the desire of immediate action to discharge the surplus of nervous force. "Then all distances seem brief;--the greatest fatigues are braved without hesitation."-- _Études_.] [Footnote 52: In the patois, "_yon rafale yche_,"--a "whirlwind of children."]