Yours very sincerely,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO MRS. WETMORE
Yaidzu, August, 1902.
Dear Mrs. Wetmore,—Your kindest letter of July 23d reached me on the 15th of August,—at this little fishing-village of Yaidzu, where I am staying with my boy.
What you say about my finding you a “grey-haired woman of forty” is, of course, impossible. Even if my eyes said so, I should say that they were telling untruth. It is quite certain that you are a fairy,—capable of assuming myriad shapes,—but I know the shapes to be each and all—Maya! I never really saw any of the magical forms but two—no, three—in photograph; and they were all different persons, belonging to different centuries, and containing different souls. About you I should not even trust the eyes of the X-rays. My memory is of a Voice and a Thought,—multiple, both, exceedingly,—but justifying the imagination of une jeune fille un peu farouche (there is no English word that gives the same sense of shyness and force) who came into New Orleans from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a particular variety of savage that he could not understand—and was afraid.
I am half-sorry already for not having written you more fully. I fear you think that I am in a very immediate hurry. No: if a fair chance can come to me in the course of a year, or even fifteen months, I can easily wait. My people have their own homes now, and I have some little means; and nothing presses. Even if the ——s should find ways and means to poke me out of the Government service (they have tried it—in oh! so many ways—for four years past), I should feel quite easy about matters for a twelvemonth. Please do not think that I would dream of giving you any hurry-scurry trouble. But, perhaps in a year’s time, something might offer itself.
I am afraid of New York City for my boy’s sake. I should not like to let him risk one New York winter. Besides, what exercise can a boy have in New York—no trees, fields, streams. Awful place—New York. If anything were to happen to him, the sun would go out. I can’t take risks—must be sure what I am doing.... Oh, if I were by myself—yes: twenty dollars a month in America would suit me anywhere. I have no longer any wants personal.
Every year there are born some millions of boys cleverer, stronger, handsomer than mine. I may be quite a fool in my estimate of him. I do not find him very clever, quick, or anything of that sort. Perhaps there will prove to be “nothing in him.” I cannot tell. All that I am quite sure of is that he naturally likes what is delicate, clean, refined, and kindly,—and that he naturally shrinks from whatever is coarse or selfish. So that he might learn easily “the things that are most excellent”—and most useless—in the schooling of civilization. Anyhow, I must do all I can to feed the tiny light, and give it a chance to prove what it is worth. It is me, in another birth—with renewed forces given by a strange and charming blood from the Period of the Gods. I must not risk the blowing out of the little lamp.