eive him forever, to make him one with its religion, its
institutions, its nationality, and that, as he closed the door of the
publisher's room that day, he was closing the door between himself and
western civilisation forever.

CHAPTER XV
JAPAN

"... Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk can give you
all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you
dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have
much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never
forget the dream,--never; but it will lift at last, like
those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness
to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days.
Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into
Fairyland, into a world that is not and never could be your
own. You have been transported out of your own century, over
spaces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into
a vanished age,--back to something ancient as Egypt or
Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of
things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the
elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal!
the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that all
here is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of
the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must
fade away at last into emptiness and silence."

Mrs. Wetmore is inaccurate in stating that Lafcadio Hearn started for
Japan on May 8th, 1890. She must mean March, for he landed in Yokohama
on Good Friday, April 13th, after a six weeks' journey. His paper,
entitled "A Winter Journey to Japan," contributed to _Harper's_,
describes a journey made in the depth of winter.

He stepped from the railway depot, "not upon Canadian soil, but upon
Canadian ice. Ice, many inches thick, sheeted the pavement, and lines of
sleighs, instead of lines of hacks, waited before the station for
passengers.... A pale-blue sky arched cloudlessly overhead; and grey
Montreal lay angled very sharply in the keen air over the frozen miles
of the St. Lawrence; sleighs were moving,--so far away that it looked
like a crawling of beetles; and beyond the farther bank where ice-cakes
made a high, white ridge, a line of purplish hills arose into the
horizon...."

Hearn's account of his journey