f 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, 190