agic wand of inspiration. All the delightful impressions made by
the poetry and the elusive beauty of old Japan seem concentrated into
six pages of poetic prose. To the world it is known as "The Dream of a
Summer's Day."[24] To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate
beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the
indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful
memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its
picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of
sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote
in the warm air. Like a bubbling spring the sense of beauty broke forth
from the caverns of ancient memory, where, according to Lafcadio, it had
lain imprisoned for years, to ripple and murmur sweet music in his ears.
He went back to the days of his childhood, back to dreams lying in the
past in what had become for him an alien land; the fragrance of a most
dear memory swept over his senses. The gnat of the soul of him flitted
out into the gleam of blue 'twixt sea and sun, back to the cedarn
balcony pillars of the Japanese hotel, whence he could see the opening
of the bay and the horizon, haunted by mountain shapes, faint as old
memories, and then again to distant and almost forgotten memories of his
youth by Lough Corrib, in the West of Ireland, the result being as
beautiful a prose poem as Hearn ever wrote.

[24] "Out of the East," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

[Illustration: Dorothy Atkinson.]

The last essay in the collection is called "Yuko," a reminiscence.

There are many of Lafcadio Hearn's critics who say that, in consequence
of his ignorance of the Japanese language, and the isolation in which he
lived, he never could have known anything really of the innermost
thoughts and feelings of the people to whom he professed to act as
interpreter. Sometimes they maintain that his views are unfavourable to
an exaggerated extent, at another too laudatory. His essay entitled
"Yuko" might certainly be taken as an example of the manner in which he
selected certain superficial manifestations as typical of the inner life
of the Japanese--a people as reserved, as secretive, as difficult to
follow in their emotional aspects as the hidden currents to which he
compares them, quoting the words of Kipling's pilot: "And if any man
comes to you, and says, 'I know the Javva currents,' don't you listen to
him; for those currents is