reeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a
delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life
restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder
of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your
eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the
awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its
own thick breath.'"

Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end
of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the
picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite
resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light
wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule
supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves
come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break
with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay
presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever
on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.

There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when
impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is
stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's
brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea
listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of
sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent
of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness,
something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse,
raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos,
sometimes of inspiration.

Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so
bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes
unconsciously, memories of these childish days.

At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years
later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there
came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at
something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether
suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo
hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black
beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable
in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly
there bec