how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was
only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be
kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however,
though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of
enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always
make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work,
the one which is most read and by which he is best known.

Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the
odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue
was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick
warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living
force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still
an animating power.

How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day
and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the
first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled
echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most
pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the
pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the
hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people
saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant
vendors, the sellers of _daikon_ and other strange vegetables ... and
the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of
kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.

Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long
nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral
sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an
exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the
sun's yellow rim came into sight.

From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was
packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old
city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country
round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples.

One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at
night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the
feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint
imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some
commun