Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/68

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

hair. I would not tell you its history for the world, (I often smile to myself, thinking a lite secret is rather cosy.) It is a charm which my old mother sent me quite long ago, when I was washing breakfast dishes from which drivers or milkmen had. eaten, in the cellar of a country hotel in California, and I carried it even to London afterwards, as I was afraid to call at Carlyle’s House alone. His hard face always terrified me. This is my clumsy copying of a page from dear Blake's fat book kept at the British Museum; you shouldn’t mistake it for a sample of child's art. I always think it is only Blake among the other thousand English poets and writers whom I can associate with our hibachi, whose fairy-like flame would be his poetical aspiration. Certainly he would have been pleased with it. Isn't the intensiveness of burning charcoal the intensiveness of his work? There should be a close relation between the modern writers in the West and the stove or fireplace, without whose help their sustaining work would not be half well done. How could Ibsen and Shaw become so thoroughly egoistic if they had not

54