rounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose
to his eyes.

In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus
alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in
the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a
child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I
forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been
eight or nine years old--I might have been twelve. And that's all."

It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who
could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday.

Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These
visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's
life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered,
spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon
Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience
of the artistic productions of the Far East.

One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a
sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in
every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient
gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence
these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a
lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid
description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the
midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather
beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the
roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the
Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.

By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to
manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it
would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought
to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much
alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was,
moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an
incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same
feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except
when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is
finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one