ppeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence."

Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much
perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"[21] she
says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently,
was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so
interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at Kumamoto he told her
that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there,
she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He
said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the
Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark
and the eerieness.

[21] It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or write a word
of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her by the
Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi.

She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store,
when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he
selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or
spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful.

"I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an
unmistakable streak of passion for gay things--however, his quiet
conscience held him back from giving way to it."

His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of
etiquette--looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially for people
in official positions--was a continued source of trouble to the little
woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite
garments," which were _de rigueur_ at any official ceremony. On one
occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the
Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat.

The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they
instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called
it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The
"race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two.
That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between
two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and
Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little
wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to
me, though always in a lovable way--of course a man and a woman know
each ot