and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was
so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of
life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below.

"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch
myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three!
I shall see the sun again!

"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will
come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of
the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,--doubt right and wrong,
friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of
horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one
infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to
remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void,
has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and
destruction hath no covering.

"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that
I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But--

"_Must I believe that I really exist?..._"

Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and
ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have
been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost
circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but
seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without
shore I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face
of my depth....

"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of
things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly
lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and
multiplied. And the dimness flushed.

"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty
Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also
mine!..."

* * * * *

All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn
describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he
moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal
intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of
pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination
almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night,
the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, o