quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I
am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in
Japan."

Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain,
alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine,"
of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and
she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little
like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a
gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their
tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had
everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all,
however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and
selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring
off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in
riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese--don't you think so?
And the man was certainly a detestable fellow."

Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper,
he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese
food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to
interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose
knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women."

"Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one
of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later.
Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild,
wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone
by.

When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the
wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha.
After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies,
and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear
the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan,
where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man
is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it,
and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of
existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over
the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about.

A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the ve