tical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing
displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in
the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross,
red-faced women; no coarse, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling.
Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge
a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to
be found in European cities.

The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not
satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the
victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season,
about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres
that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from
the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the
cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen--about half a dollar
in American money at the present rate of exchange."

From the upper balcony of his house the Japanese street, with its rows
of little shops, was visible to the bay; from thence he watched the
cholera patients being taken away, and the bereaved, as soon as the law
allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered abodes, while the ordinary
life of the street went on day and night, as if nothing particular had
happened. The itinerant vendors with their bamboo poles, and baskets or
buckets, passed the empty houses, and uttered their accustomed cry; the
blind shampooer blew his melancholy whistle; the private watchman made
his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; and the children chased one
another as usual with screams and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished,
but the survivors continued their play as if nothing had happened,
according to the wisdom of the ancient East.

A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the
depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries
and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of
1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of
inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been
worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he
or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great
deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will
be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which
the said Lafcadi