nson 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 g