I have no doubt at all of good things to come for you, if you keep as strong as your picture now proves you to be. The rest will be, I think, only a question of time and patience. I look forward with pleasure to the probability of seeing you again. (Except that I have got greyer, I fear you will find me the same as of old,—somewhat queer, etc.) I have been working very steadily, rather than hard; but by systematically doing just exactly so much every day, neither more nor less, I find that I am able to do a good deal in the course of a year. I mean “good deal” in the sense of “quantity”—the quality, of course, depends upon circumstances rather than effort.

Thanks, again, for your kindness in sending the photograph, and for the pleasant letter about yourself. May all good fortune be yours is the earnest wish of

Y. Koizumi.

TO YRJÖ HIRN
Tōkyō, January, 1902.

Dear Professor,—About a week ago I received from Messrs. Wahlstrom and Weilstrand—how strangely impressive these Northern names!—the dainty “Exotica,” with its sunrise and flying-swallows-design, and—my name and private address in Japanese thereon!... I have sent a book for Mrs. Hirn. If there are any of my books that you do not know, and would like to have,—such as “Gleanings in Buddha-Fields” or “Youma”—I shall be glad to have them sent you from America.

Thanks indeed for the photograph. I had imagined a face with the same strong, precise lines, but in a blond setting. Yet some shades of fair hair come out dark in photographs—so that I am not yet quite sure how far my intuition miscarried. You are what I imagined—but a shade or two stronger in line.

As for myself, I have no decent photograph at present.... I am horribly disfigured by the loss of the left eye—so get photographed usually in profile, or looking downward. I am a very small person; and when young, was very dark, with the large alarming eyes of a myope.

I imagine that you have been tactfully kind in your prefatory notice of me. I could only guess; but your letter confirms a number of my guesses. The article by Zilliacus, to which you refer, I do not know: I cannot read German in any event. The paper by Dr. Varigny in the Revue des Deux Mondes was a mere fantasy,—unjust in the fact that it accredited me with faculties and knowledge which I do not possess. The mere truth of the matter is that I have had a rather painful experience of life, for lack of the very qualities ascribed to me. (In American existence one must either grind or be ground—I passed most of my time between the grindstones.)