y lives to love and take
care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy
to college there must remain merely a possibility.

The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two
friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental
tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession,
and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary
tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get
behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them.

He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen
from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at
his hole, but he zigzagged away from them.

He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him,
who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you
would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her
'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'"

The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind
of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged
calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if
not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite
subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories
of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and
their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them.

But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work,
believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings
and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly.
Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him
they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the
sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be
forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come."

Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or
cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet
here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and
brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I
right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought
never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these
protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come d