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 o