nd' for offal, a repository of
human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!--why not
collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends
and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to
see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the
same doom."

No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary
reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted
the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an
artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,--a
wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes
the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in
Japan.

"For myself," he says in one of the _Kobe Chronicle_ leaders, "I could
sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause.
Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a
destroyer,--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they
break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent
the edge,--the _acies_,--to use the Roman word--of Occidental
aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful
and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in
many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and
the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the
Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and
this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by
the 'noble army.'"

Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at
this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He
summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial
element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the
interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The
Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and
homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the
life in Old Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every
way, with only the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury
and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant
was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever
learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against
carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churc