ith a certain amount of
difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some
sort--everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good
or bad omen.

Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because
her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson
was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same
respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys,
were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance
recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the
subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he
had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to
the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of
the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese,
declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in
mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many
others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted
by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine
race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially,
indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and
intelligent.

What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_
and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish
smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of
their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English
books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese _kakemonos_ and ideographs.

Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely
have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up.
The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days
"freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone
down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost."

I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of
unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a
household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her
knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for
Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient,
indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the
_Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height o