l, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere
shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he
goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the
unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant,
never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy
music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold
in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I
have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a
barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm
of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon
my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,--telling me
also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost
within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the
vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and
thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of
his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely,
nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had
eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,--especially Hana the
housemaid!

"Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst
that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human
crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing."

During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight,
every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the
polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title
"Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the
crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the
country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which
is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long
years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension."

Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these
Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product
of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the
work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk
again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion
he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so
big a book in so short a ti