holy groves and weirdly-smiling Buddhas! So the extermination of the Culex fasciatus would involve the destruction of the poetry of the ancestral cult,—surely too great a price to pay!………
Besides, I should like, when my time comes, to be laid away in some Buddhist grave-yard of the ancient kind,—so that my ghostly company should be ancient, caring nothing for the fashions and the changes and the disintegrations of Meiji. That old cemetery[1] behind my garden would be a suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been shaped by some old, old ideal which no longer exists in any living brain; even the shadows are not of this time and sun, but of a world forgotten, that never knew steam or electricity or magnetism or—kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big belt there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them[2] make me afraid,—deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but[3] I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost,—a sensation as of memories strug-
註
