vations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost
impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been
accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation
rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must
also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the
Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign
teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier
for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed
at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the
ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his
disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and
guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls?
and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the
uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of
years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him
to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far
from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,--sturdy and not likely
to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I
must devote the rest of my life to looking after him."

And she--his wise friend--knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's
isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that
awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action
and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself."

"Very true," was Hearn's answer--and well did he know, for had not he,
the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the
position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day?
"No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid:
the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,--and I flee, and
bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might
be, that a man should not be,--except as to bodily strength.... I taught
him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit
of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil--what
chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly
pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?"

The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:--

"Sense with keenest edge unused,