His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on "Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"?
"The air—the delicious air!—is full of sweet resinous odours shed from the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; semi are whizzing; wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy repairing their damaged habitations....
" ... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy. They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to attempt an essay on Ants."
After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants, and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants' talk, he would hear of something to his advantage—
"Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible and perceive things imperceptible."
After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic law, he thus ends his essay:—
"Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned.
"The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency' in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism."
In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of "things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets;—the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,—their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;—but in the knowledge of the natural,—in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,—they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,—substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,—that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed."