"In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,—that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three! I shall see the sun again!
"Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn—... Doubt the reality of the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,—doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;—there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,—one infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent for ever away;—the Sheol is naked before us,—and destruction hath no covering.
"So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist—which is horror!... But—
"Must I believe that I really exist?..."
Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have been. Before the beginnings of time I was;—beyond the uttermost circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without shore I am;—and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth....
"Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;—and the gloom slowly lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and multiplied. And the dimness flushed.
"Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty Purifier,—symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also mine!..."
All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night, the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere.
"It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight hundred"—which represent the customary abbreviation of the word yaoya (vegetable-seller)—any yaoya being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog; but she was well protected by all that caligraphy.