sted with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in
occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a Japanese woman
can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom
looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nishida, when
he undertook to act as intermediary, or _Nakodo_, as they call it in
Japan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu
Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously,
but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that
the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and
then only by his nationalising himself a Japanese citizen.

One of Hearn's saving qualities was compassion for the weak and
suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the
deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted--as he was--behind the
closely drawn veil of pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats
drew between their poverty and public observation.

What the Samurai maiden,--brought up in the seclusion of Matsue--may
have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of
forty-four (a patriarchal age in Japan), who was offered to her as a
husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, Japanese fashion, and as
the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding
and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred
ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during
these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection,
indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the _Gakusha_ (learned
person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all
the American and English tourists at Tokyo.

So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the
exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible
fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to
Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,--the complexion darker
and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women--but comely, with the
comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have
been.

Tender and true, as her _Yerbina_, or personal, name, "Setsu,"
signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of
patience and self-restraint--a daughter of Japan--one of a type fast
becoming extinct--who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to
wound ot