n his correspondence; from chapter to
chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the
memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best
inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his
genius and quickened his pen.

I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when
she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I
looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in
lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as
he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers
was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the
Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for
dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front.

In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the
_Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent
correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters.

She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think
I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a
pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much
better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own
personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does
a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books?

"... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow,
but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at
this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the
nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of
existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved
simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of
the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek
romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic
sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing
but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case,
this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work
he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever
attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was
occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at
highest intensity and no