ff his ears. Incertain air. "Oh! yass," he said with an "Well, old man Charlie, what you say: y house for yours,-like you said,―eh, Charlie?" "I dunno," said Charlie; "it's nearly ine now. Why you don't stay dare youe'f?" "Because I don't want!" said the Colonel avagely. "Is dat reason enough for you? You better take me in de notion, old man, I ell you, yes!" Charlie never winced; but how his answer delighted the Colonel! Quoth Charlie: "I don't care-I take him!—mais, posession give right off." "Not the whole plantation, Charlie; nly" "I don't care," said Charlie; "we easy an fix dat. Mais, what for you don't ant to keep him? I don't want him. You etter keep him." "Don't you try to make no fool of me, old nan," cried the planter. "Oh, no!" said the other. "Oh, no! but ou make a fool of yourself, ain't it?" The dumbfounded Colonel stared; Charlie vent on: "Yass! Belles Demoiselles is more wort' lan tree block like dis one. I pass by dare ince two weeks. Oh, pritty Belles Demoielles! De cane was wave in de wind, de arden smell like a bouquet, de white-cap vas jump up and down on de river; seven elles demoiselles was ridin' on horses. Pritty, pritty, pritty!' says old Charlie. Ah! Monsieur le père, 'ow 'appy, 'appy, appy!" "Yass!" he continued-the Colonel still taring-"le Compte De Charleu have two amilie. One was low-down Choctaw, one vas high up noblesse. He gave the low-down Choctaw dis old rat-hole; he give Belles Demoiselles to you gran-fozzer; and now You don't be satisfait. What I'll do wid Belles Demoiselles? She'll break me in two rears, yass. And what you'll do wid old Charlie's house, eh? You'll tear her down and make you'se'f a blame old fool. I ather wouldn't trade!" The planter caught a big breathful of inger, but Charlie went straight on: "I rather wouldn't, mais I will do it for You; just the same, like Monsieur le Compte would say, 'Charlie, you old fool, I want to shange houses wid you.' So long as the Colonel suspected irony he was angry, but as Charlie seemed, after all, to be certainly in earnest, he began to feel conscience-stricken. He was by no means a tender man, but his lately-discovered misfortune had unhinged him, and this strange, undeserved, disinterested family fealty on the part of Charlie touched his heart. And should he still try to lead him into the pitfall he had dug? He hesitated;-no, he would show him the place by broad daylight, and if he chose to overlook the "caving bank," it would be his own fault;-a trade's a trade. "Come," said the planter, come at my house to-night; to-morrow we look at the place before breakfast, and finish the trade." "For what?" said Charlie. 66 "Oh, because I got to come in town in the morning." "I don't want," said Charlie. "How I'm goin' to come dere?" "I git you a horse at the liberty stable." "Well-anyhow-I don't care-I'll go." And they went. When they had ridden a long time, and were on the road darkened by hedges of Cherokee rose, the Colonel called behind him to the "low-down" scion: "Keep the road, old man.' "Eh?" "Keep the road." "Oh, yes; all right; I keep my word; we don't goin' to play no tricks, eh?" But the Colonel seemed not to hear. His ungenerous design was beginning to be hateful to him. Not only old Charlie's unprovoked goodness was prevailing; the eulogy on Belles Demoiselles had stirred the depths of an intense love for his beautiful home. True, if he held to it, the caving of the bank, at its present fearful speed, would let the house into the river within three months; but were it not better to lose it so, than sell his birthright? Again,-coming back to the first thought, to betray his own blood! It was only Injin Charlie; but had not the De Charleu blood just spoken out in him? Unconsciously he groaned. After a time they struck a path approaching the plantation in the rear, and little after, passing from behind a clump of liveoaks, they came in sight of the villa. It looked so like a gem, shining through its dark grove, so like a great glow-worm in the dense foliage, so significant of luxury and gayety, that the poor master, from an overflowing heart, groaned again. "What?" asked Charlie. The Colonel only drew his rein, and, dismounting mechanically, contemplated the sight before him. The high, arched doors and windows were thrown wide to the summer air; from every opening the bright light of numerous candelabra darted out upon the sparkling foliage of magnolia and bay, and here and there in the spacious verandas a colored lantern swayed in the gentle breeze. A sound of revel fell on the ear, the music of harps; and across one window, brighter than the rest, flitted, once or twice, the shadows of dancers. But oh! the shadows flitting across the heart of the fair mansion's master! "Old Charlie," said he, gazing fondly at his house, "You and me is both old, eh?" "Yaas," said the stolid Charlie. "And we has both been bad enough in our time, eh, Charlie?" Charlie, surprised at the tender tone, repeated "Yaas." "No,"-impassively. "And do you think I would cheat you now?" "I dunno," said Charlie. "I don't believe." "Well, old man, old man," his voice began to quiver,-"I sha'n't cheat you now. My God!-old man, I tell you—you better not make the trade!" "Because for what?" asked Charlie in plain anger; but both looked quickly toward the house! The Colonel tossed his hands wildly in the air, rushed forward a step or two, and giving one fearful scream of agony and fright, fell foward on his face in the path. Old Charlie stood transfixed with horror. Belles Demoiselles, the realm of maiden beauty, the home of merriment, the house of dancing, all in the tremor and glow of pleasure, suddenly sunk, with one short, wild wail of terror-sunk, sunk, down, down, down, into the merciless, unfathomable flood of the Mississippi. Twelve long months were midnight to the mind of the childless father; when they were only half gone, he took his bed; and every day, and every night, old Charlie, the "lowdown," the "fool," watched him tenderly tended him lovingly, for the sake of his name, his misfortunes, and his broken heart. No woman's step crossed the floor of the sick-chamber, whose western dormer-windows overpeered the dingy architecture of old Charlie's block; Charlie and a skilled physician, the one all interest, the other all gentleness, hope, and patience these only entered by the door; but by the window came in a sweet-scented evergreen vine. transplanted from the caving bank of Belles Demoiselles. It caught the rays of sunset in its flowery net and let them softly in upon the sick man's bed; gathered the glancing beams of the moon at midnight, and often wakened the sleeper to look, with his mindless eyes, upon their pretty silver fragments strewn upon the floor. By and by there seemed-there was-a twinkling dawn of returning reason. Slowly, peacefully, with an increase unseen from day to day, the light of reason came into the eyes, and speech became coherent; but witha' there came a failing of the wrecked body. and the doctor said that monsieur was both. better and worse. One evening, as Charlie sat by the vineclad window with his fireless pipe in his hand. the old Colonel's eyes fell full upon his own. and rested there. "Charl-," he said with an effort, and his delighted nurse hastened to the bedside and bowed his best ear. There was an unsuccessful effort or two, and then he whis pered, smiling with sweet sadness,— "We didn't trade." The truth, in this case, was a secondary matter to Charlie; the main point was to give a pleasing answer. So he nodded his head decidedly, as who should say “Oh yes, we did, it was a bona-fide swap!" but when he saw the smile vanish, he tried the other expedient and shook his head with still more vigor, to signify that they had not so much as approached a bargain; and the smile returned. Charlie wanted to see the vine recognized. He stepped backward to the window with LAFCADIO HEARN (1850-1904) Hearn was born on one of the Ionian Islands-one which the modern Greeks call Levkas, or Lef cada (hence his name)—on 27 June, 1850. His father came of an English family which had been settled for a century and a half in Ireland. He was a surgeon-major in the British army, attached to a regiment which in the late 1840's was ordered to the Ionian Islands (then held by Great Britain for garrison duty. There he fell in love with a Greek girl, whom he succeeded in marrying despite the violent opposition of her family. Lafcadio was the second of three sons born to them. In 1853 the surgeon-major returned to Ireland with his family; but in less than a year Hearn's mother fei back to her native land, made desperately unhappy not only by her strange surroundings in Ireland but also by her husband's treatment of her. The marriage was annulled, the surgeon-major at once married again, Lafcadio was adopted by a great-aunt who took him to Wales, and he never afterwards saw either his younger brother (his elder brother had died at birth), or his father, or his mother. He was an abnormally sensitive child—and man-instinctively a lover of the beautiful, sensuous, paysionate, imaginative, the creature of strange moods, ready to endow those whom he loved with all the attributes of perfection and equally bitter in his inevitable disillusionments and enmities. He ws a child who needed sympathy and understanding if ever any child did, while his great-aunt was a pious Roman Catholic whose affairs were directed and whose money was spent by priests, so that from the beginning there was a tacit opposition between the two which was bound sooner or later to end in a break. And thus it did end when Hearn was sixteen or seventeen, though meanwhile his aunt ma possible some years of study in several Catholic schools. An accident during a game at the last schoo which Hearn attended caused him (in his sixteenth year) to become totally blind in his left eye. He was probably near-sighted from birth, and his eyes were unusually sensitive, if not weak. In the course of time his right eye became somewhat enlarged because of the strain it had to bear, and his i near-sightedness rapidly increased, so that he had to use a very heavy magnifying glass, and even then could see distinctly only by fairly burying his face in an object. It is not known precisely how or when the break came between Hearn and his great-aunt, but it must have occurred not long after the accident to his eye. He is thought to have spent about t years in London, alone, friendless, and suffering from the direst poverty, before he somehow found the means of crossing over to New York in 1869. There his poverty and loneliness were as unrelieved as in London, but he managed after a time to make his way to Cincinnati, where he found employmes: as a typesetter and proof-reader, and later as a reporter for the Inquirer. The editors of this newspaper by accident made the discovery that their shy, strange-looking young employee was a painstaking artist in words, with a remarkable power for vivid and colorful descriptive writing which he delighte to exercise upon subjects terrible or horrible in character. Thus his place in journalism was made secure, even in spite of the difficulties he was bound to keep creating for himself. In time he drifted from the Inquirer to other Cincinnati newspapers, and in 1877 he departed for New Orleans. One reason for his departure was the universal condemnation which greeted his quixotic attempt to marry a mulatto girl, Althea Foley, because he had formed a connection with her and thought marriage du her. She had been, it would appear, the one person in Cincinnati who had given Hearn food and warmth and sympathy when he had most needed them, and, in addition, he did not then, nor until much later, understand the reasons behind American race-prejudice, but thought it a cruel wrong which ought to be combated. However, in any event Hearn would not long have remained in one place He felt irresistibly the call of the remote and the strange, and he was born a wanderer. He loved the warmth and color and melancholy beauty of New Orleans after his experience of the trying climate and alien atmosphere of Cincinnati, and he there readily found journalistic employment which gave him an excellent opportunity to develop and perfect his literary artistry, partly through careful and discriminating translation from the French; but, nevertheless, as early as 1884, while he was on a visit to Grande Isle in the Gulf of Mexico, he was writing: "One lives here. In New Orleans one only exists." To Grande Isle he returned more than once, and it became the scene of his tale entitled Craz (printed in the New Orleans Times-Democrat; several years later, 1889, published in book-form), which was his earliest notable piece of original work. Partly because of the excellence of this tale he obtained in 1887 a commission from Messrs. Harper and Brothers which took him to the West Indies, where : remained in all about two years, writing for Harper's Magazine the sketches which were later (1890) thered into a book entitled Two Years in the French West Indies. In 1889, when Hearn was in New York, he was hoping to return to the West Indies and go on to explore the exotic possibilities of South America; but, instead, he agreed to a proposal at he should make a journey to Japan, and he left in the spring of 1890. He intended to reain in Japan only a few months, but things so turned out that he lived there until his death on › September, 1904. Immediately upon his arrival he quarreled with the Harpers, considering that e terms of his agreement with them were grossly unjust, and abandoned journalistic work. He cured a post in a school, and within a few months definitely threw in his lot with Japan by marrying Japanese woman, Setsu Koizumi. During the remainder of his life he taught in several schools or iversities, save for two intervals when he devoted his time wholly to writing. In 1894 he published 'impses of Unfamiliar Japan (2 vols.), the first of the series of works in which he attempted to interet Japan and far Eastern thought to Western minds. There followed: Out of the East, Reveries id Studies in New Japan (1895); Kokoro, Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896); Gleanings Buddha-Fields, Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East (1897); Exotics and Retrospectives (1898); Ghostly Japan (1899); Shadowings (1900); A Japanese Miscellany (1901); Japanese Fairy Tales vols., 1902, published in Tokyo); Kotto, Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (1902); Kwain, Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904); Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation (1904); and he Romance of the Milky Way, and Other Studies and Stories (1905). In form these studies are class of their kind, and classics without rivals in American literature. Some aspects of the substance of earn's efforts in what he himself felt to be the ultimately impossible task of expounding the East the West are discussed in Mr. P. E. More's essay on Hearn reprinted in this volume. In recent ars the list of Hearn's works has been increased by the publication of several volumes containing tures-derived from a student's notes-which he delivered in Japan. FUJI-NO-YAMA 1 Kité miréba, Seen on close approach, the mountain of Fuji es not come up to expectation.-Japanese probial philosophy. THE most beautiful sight in Japan, and rtainly one of the most beautiful in the orld, is the distant apparition of Fuji on udless days,-more especially days of ring and autumn, when the greater part the peak is covered with late or with rly snows. You can seldom distinguish e snowless base, which remains the same lor as the sky: you perceive only the hite cone seeming to hang in heaven; and e Japanese comparison of its shape to an verted half-open fan is made wonderfully act by the fine streaks that spread downard from the notched top, like shadows of -ribs. Even lighter than a fan the vision pears, rather the ghost or dream of a 1 This and the following two papers are copyrighted Messrs. Little, Brown, and Company, and they are e reprinted with their permission. They are taken m Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), and illustrate work of Hearn's maturity, for which the greater t of what he wrote before going to Japan was only a paration. fan; yet the material reality a hundred miles away is grandiose among the mountains of the globe. Rising to a height of nearly 12,500 feet, Fuji is visible from thirteen provinces of the Empire. Nevertheless it is one of the easiest of lofty mountains to climb; and for a thousand years it has been scaled every summer by multitudes of pilgrims. For it is not only a sacred mountain, but the most sacred mountain of Japan, the holiest eminence of the land that is called Divine, the Supreme Altar of the Sun; and to ascend it at least once in a life-time is the duty of all who reverence the ancient gods. So from every district of the Empire pilgrims annually wend their way to Fuji; and in nearly all the provinces there are pilgrim-societies-Fuji-Kō,-organized for the purpose of aiding those desiring to visit the sacred peak. If this act of faith cannot be performed by everybody in person, it can at least be performed by proxy. Any hamlet, however remote, can occasionally send one representative to pray before the shrine of the divinity of Fuji, and to salute the rising sun from that sublime eminence. Thus a single company of Fujipilgrims may be composed of men from a hundred different settlements. By both of the national religions Fuji is held in reverence. The Shinto deity of |