Whether this custom still prevails, I know not. Fifty years ago I was assured that it was “very much alive.” Habits have undergone a mighty change since then, but superstition dies hard, and there are many out-of-the-way places even in Japan into which the newness of things has hardly penetrated. It must have been a ghostly sight to meet a maiden thus harnessed in the grove of the god on a dark night. Lafcadio Hearn, that wayward child of the muses, a prose poet if ever there was such an one, who, after wandering for many years through untold misery and suffering, at last found rest and his soul in Japan, has left to us as precious legacies many a rare conceit which would fit in well here. It would have been strange if he, a mystic himself, had not been willingly haunted by the folk-lore of the country which he loved, a country “fabulosa et externis miraculis adsimilata.” Sometimes, indeed, he was more Catholic than the Pope, living in a Japan that was almost a dreamland of his own wild fancy. And yet he was a creature of curious contradictions, for he seems to be half in earnest, half mocking, when he holds us spellbound with weird tales of goblin trees, luring men to love or to death; of a camellia tree which listens to the prayers of lovers; of other camellias which, like spectres, walk about at night, the terror of mankind. “There was one in the garden of a Matsné Samurai which did this so much that it had to be cut down. Then it writhed its arms and groaned, and blood spurted at every stroke of the axe.” Like every other writer, native and foreign, Lafcadio Hearn is entranced by the loveliness of the cherry blossom, the emblem of all that is bodily delicate and spiritually beautiful. He quotes an old stanza, which says: “If one should ask you concerning the heart of a true Samurai, point to the mountain cherry flower gleaming in the morning sun.” Again: “As the cherry flower is first among flowers, so should the warrior be first among men.” By this nature-loving people, the highest form of female beauty and excellence is symbolized by the willow for grace, the cherry flower for youthful charm, the plum blossom for virtue and sweetness. I should add that the oval outline of the melon seed represents in the shape of the face the type of high breeding and aristocratic distinction. The poets are never weary of drawing upon the cherry flower for their metaphors. A Japanese gentleman, looking out upon a snow-storm, will say: “See how the petals of the cherries are drifting before the wind.” The Yanagi—the weeping willow—is a much haunted tree. Here is a story told by Lafcadio Hearn which is worth quoting: