ncerned about the enigmas, he said, except
that he wondered what his boy would do if he were to die. To his "Old
Dad" he writes a whimsically affectionate letter, his old and dearest
friend, he calls him. Practical, material people predicted that he was
to end in gaol, or at the termination of a rope, but his "Old Dad"
always predicted he would be able to do something. He was anxious for as
much success as he could get for his son's sake. To have the future of
others to care for certainly changed the face of life; he worked and
hoped, the best and only thing to do.

CHAPTER XXII
TOKYO

"... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of
circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line
of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always
too much for my own peace of mind,--places, things, and
persons,--and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and
becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a
great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an
All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil
falls, himself in each and all."

One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,--and he made many
for the sake of his wife and family--was the giving up of his life in
the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its _Yashikis_ and
ancient shrines--to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The
comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high
salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing
was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the _Kobe
Chronicle_, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the
ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate
horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling
surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have
been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place
pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle.

His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as
Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of
the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind;
she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples.

Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the
beginni