et things, likewise there was the wind that
rustled through the bamboo-grove.

Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could
indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's
Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else.

This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and
humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time
he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's
"Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised,
also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but
in England.

The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his
pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that
"he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada
that could not sing."

No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of
hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking
that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit
of the public.

Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors,
and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University,
at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a
Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything
was favourable to absorption in his work.

He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one
hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling
well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write."
Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a
new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes
he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a
month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his
drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many
stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the
drawer of his mind when he passed away.

Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of
excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and
though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was
slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign
husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss
might yaw