Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the
indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the
club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one
at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make
jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond:
"Very well, if you can eat it, so can I."

Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and
smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the
twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with
fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse,
though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I
think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided
the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and
in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine,
the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to
recall."

Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough
to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese
books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept
them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and
more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He
imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim
of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas
were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal
mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden
fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers,
ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season.

We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune,
which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were
fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony
blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese
hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination
with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found
frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows
not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection
with the incident.

But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast,
where he generally spent his summer vacation wi