ined 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 Ampere and Madame Recamier is the one
that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is
reversed. Madame Recamier 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