n of a new volume of Lafcadio Hearn's exquisite studies
of Japan happens, by a delicate irony, to fall in the very month when
the world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the latest
exploits of Japanese battleships. Whatever the outcome of the present
struggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the fact
that a nation of the East, equipped with Western weapons and girding
itself with Western energy of will, is deliberately measuring strength
against one of the great powers of the Occident. No one is wise enough
to forecast the results of such a conflict upon the civilization of the
world. The best one can do is to estimate, as intelligently as
possible, the national characteristics of the peoples engaged, basing
one's hopes and fears upon the psychology of the two races rather than
upon purely political and statistical studies of the complicated
questions involved in the present war. The Russian people have had
literary spokesmen who for more than a generation have fascinated the
European audience. The Japanese, on the other hand, have possessed no
such national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or
Tolstoy. They need an interpreter.

It may be doubted whether any oriental race has ever had an interpreter
gifted with more perfect insight and sympathy than Lafcadio Hearn has
brought to the translation of Japan into our occidental speech. His
long residence in that country, his flexibility of mind, poetic
imagination, and wonderfully pellucid style have fitted him for the
most delicate of literary tasks. Hi has seen marvels, and he has told
of them in a marvelous way. There is scarcely an aspect of contemporary
Japanese life, scarcely an element in the social, political, and
military questions involved in the present conflict with Russia which
is not made clear in one or another of the books with which he has
charmed American readers.

He characterizes Kwaidan as "stories and studies of strange things." A
hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most
of them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness. To read the
very names in the table of contents is like listening to a Buddhist
bell, struck somewhere far away. Some of his tales are of the long ago,
and yet they seem to illumine the very souls and minds of the little
men who are at this hour crowding the decks of Japan's armored
cruisers. But many of the stories are about women and children,--the
l