nturies of cultivation and
care.

The summer passed in this Japanese _Yashiki_ was as happy as any in
Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing
regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf
shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy
peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul
stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free,
clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully.
Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were
soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he
could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life
was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment
receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said,
twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds,
this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of
two.

Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the
announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland.

He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his
Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household.
After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian
dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss
Elizabeth Bisland.

Hearn's description of the old _Yashiki_ garden is done with all the
descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described
Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the
special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of
the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to
follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls
it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and
_Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature
hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by
flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from
spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the
curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these
sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their
effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native
gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in