ristmas time, where there is no Christmas. Don't you know that
you are very happy to be able to live in England? I am afraid you do
not. Perhaps you could not know without having lived much elsewhere....
Your photo has come. The same eyes, the same chin, brow, nose: we are
strangely alike--excepting that you are very comely, and I very much the
reverse--partly by exaggeration of the traits which make your face
beautiful, and partly because I am disfigured by the loss of an
eye--punched out at school.... Won't you please give my kindest thanks
to your husband for the pains he has taken to please me! I hope to meet
him some day, and thank him in person, if I don't leave my bones in some
quaint and curious Buddhist cemetery out here...."

The wonderful series of letters to Professor Hall Chamberlain, recently
published by Miss Bisland, are also written from Kumamoto and Kobe, and
to a great extent run simultaneously with those to his sister. He had a
habit of repeating himself; the same expressions, the same quotations,
appear in both series, and sometimes are again repeated in his published
essays. When struck by an idea or incident, it seems as if he must
impart it as something noteworthy to every one with whom he was holding
communion. He gives, for instance, the same account to his sister of the
routine of his Japanese day as related to Professor Hall Chamberlain and
Ellwood Hendrik.

We can imagine his rigidly Protestant Irish relations amidst the
conventional surroundings of an Irish country house, following minutely
the services of the established church as preached to them by their
local clergyman, utterly bewildered in reading the description of the
outlandish cult to which he, their relation, subscribed in Japan. The
awakening to the rising of the sun with the clapping of hands of
servants in the garden, the prayers at the _Butsudan_, the putting out
the food for the dead, all the strange, quaint customs that mark the
passing of the day in the ancient Empire of Nippon. Not by thousands of
miles only was he separated from his occidental relations, but by
immemorial centuries of thought.

On May 21st, 1893, there is another letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson,
in which he first announces his expectation of becoming a father. It is
so characteristic of Lafcadio to take it for granted that the child
would be a boy, and already to make plans for his education abroad.

"_Tsuboi, Nichihorabata_