have been a
girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his
father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at
seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that
he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that
really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to
imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under
civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think
superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."

He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion
one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as
a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century
false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and
Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies
in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and
recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese.

After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn
retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was
dedicated:--

TOKYO
"to my friend
Amenomori Nobushige
poet, scholar and patriot."

We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he
left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that
Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous
correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on
the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To
Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial
surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the
place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the
approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new
sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead
sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to
feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for
me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality?
Alas! I don't know...."

Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little
genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and
apparently unaccountable vagaries. In