and the
shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and
the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for
the purpose of an auto-da-fe. Whereat Japan became rather
serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes.
Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first
matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her
own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still cling to
her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never
again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did
before."

After the lapse of a certain amount of time Hearn gradually became more
reconciled to Kumamoto. The climate agreed with him, he put on flesh,
all his Japanese clothes, he declared, even his _kimono_, had become too
small. "I cannot say whether this be the climate, the diet, or what.
Setsu says it is because I have a good wife: but she might be
prejudiced, you know."

It is more likely that his well-being at this time arose from his having
given up the experiment of living exclusively on a Japanese regimen.
After his bout of illness at Matsue, he found that he could not
recuperate on the fare of the country, even when reinforced with eggs.
Having lived for ten months thus, horribly ashamed as he was to confess
his weakness, he found himself obliged to return to the flesh-pots of
Egypt, and devoured enormous quantities of beef and fowl, and drank
terrific quantities of beer. "The fault is neither mine nor that of the
Japanese: it is the fault of my ancestors, the ferocious, wolfish
hereditary instincts and tendencies of boreal mankind. The sins of the
fathers, etc."

Meantime, his knowledge of the strange people amongst whom his lot was
cast was deepening and expanding. "Out of the East," the collection of
essays--essence of experiences accumulated at this time, and the book,
next perhaps to "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," by which he is best
known--is typical of his genius at its best and at its worst. The first
sketch, entitled, "The Dream of a Summer's Day," is simply a bundle of
impressions of the journey to which he alludes when writing to his
sister, made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland
Sea. This journey, through some of the most beautiful scenery of Japan,
after the horrors of a foreign hotel at an open port, was one of those
experiences that form an epoch in an artist's life, touching him with
the m