“Tell me the street to Heaven.
This? Or that? Oh, which?
What webs of streets!”
And it was by Westminster Bridge where I heard the evening chime that I wrote again in hokku which appears, when translated, as follows:
“Is it, Oh, list!
The great voice of Judgement Day?
So runs Thames, so runs my Life.”
In September of 1904, I returned home; the tender silken autumnal ram that was Japanese poetry, and my elder brother welcomed me (what a ghost tired and pale I was then), and I was taken to his house in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo to wash off my foreign dust and slowly renew my old acquaintance with things Japanese; Oh, that memorable first night after thirteen years abroad! I spent it alone in the upstairs room where I was left to sleep. I did not fall asleep for many many hours as my back already began to ache from lying on the floor in the Japanese fashion; and my nostrils could not make themselves free from a strange
