n between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's
common-sense.

"I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years
after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely
Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light,
things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so
impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I
have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned
to prize some of them at their weight in gold."

Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese
union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various
letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching
home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not
bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the
valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't
you feel just a little bit ashamed?'"

On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his
face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got
possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next
day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He
acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent."

She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one
day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy
sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the
murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden
and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the
Japanese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals.
"He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish
sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a
catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he
laughed the whole household laughed, too."

His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was
kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with
them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his
merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's
nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude
towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the
cheeriest