er supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he
was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The
pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he
wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in
bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a
little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the
world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate."

CHAPTER XXVI
HIS FUNERAL

"If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong,
as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange
possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal
records in the Universal life,--every thought of good or ill
or aspiration,--and the Buddhistic Karma would be a
scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the
thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds
would be forever acting invisibly on us."

Perhaps of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with
Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than
his funeral.

It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a
Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no
religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the
last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions"
in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any
boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all
fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were
swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious
palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space.

Yet--Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien
to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his
latter years--at his death his body was taken possession of by priests,
who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over,
and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of
Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple!

A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss
Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration
for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him
lect