can only
learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their
opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of
life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so
as a child; I was a perfect imp."

Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his
children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself
was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to
taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild
imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief--traps
arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened,
the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he
selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a
hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and
said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono'
(flatterer) and run away and hide myself."

He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when
she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days
after, she would discover it half-rotten.

Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and
touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the
charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally
Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an
old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a
lap-dog."

But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was
one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore,
and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great
extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison
Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys,
and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that
was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was
staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book
Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he
left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion
with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy,
of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the
transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs.
Molyneux's house at Tramore i