ication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the
world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls,
that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish
little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day
of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all
waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant
Land."

Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy
precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the
spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their
ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary
urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family
to which Hearn's future wife belonged.

To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living
centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing
in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past--that religion that
lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The
magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him,
working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion
of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary
mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the
very heart and soul of ancient Japan.

If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was
called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this
strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could
create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had
selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy
cycle of its eternal utterance.

The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in
which the real development of his genius lay; the loose, quivering
needle of thought, that had moved hither and thither, was now set in one
direction. The stage he was treading, though at first he did not realise
it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a drama with eternal and
immutable forces as scene-shifters and curtain-raisers. The qualities
that had enabled Japan to conquer China, and had placed her practically
in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to analyse
and explain; to interpret the curious myths of this great people of
little men, who, sh