The little girl stood with one hand on her
hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said
angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly
beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face
hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we
wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down
easily. 'Ah!' she said:--'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my
hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a
large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When
I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I
cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and
rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her
mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and
went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I
think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a
grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was
cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But _how_ I would
love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day--great
huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels.

"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a
little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together
like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then
much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than
now. I rather think I should like to see her."

Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun
was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more
wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at
Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life.

In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from
Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea
is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma,
the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a
magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and
the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love
that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to
be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only