or the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit.

Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some
of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same
impression--a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine
consideration for others, the thought of the future of his wife and
children, triumphing over suffering and death.

He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he
was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say
my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep
thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was
strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I
made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our
house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.'

"'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither
in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said."

While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up
and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he
died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her
_tokonoma_ she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a
moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I
could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had
passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve
hours were over!

Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the
daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree
in the garden,--not much to look at--but it was a blossom blooming out
of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant
Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi.

"I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at
it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is
here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful,
but will soon die under the approaching cold.'

"You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking
that the _Kaerizaki_, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid
farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...."

In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's
death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of
September 26th, aft