Kott Author:Lafcadio Hearn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Kusa-Hibari HIS cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide : its tiny wooden door, turning upon a pivot, will scarcely admit the ti... more »p of my little finger. But he has plenty of room in that cage, — room to walk, and jump, and fly ; for he is so small that you must look very carefully through the brown-gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. I have always to turn the cage round and round, several times, in a good light, before I can discover his whereabouts ; and then I usually find him resting in one of the upper corners, — clinging, upside down, to his ceiling of gauze. Imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito,—with a pair of antennas much longer than his own body, and so fine that you can distinguish them only against the light. Kusa-Hibari, or " Grass-Lark," is the Japanese name of him ; and he is worth in the market exactly twelve cents :that is to say, very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing ! ... By day he sleeps or meditates, except while occupied with the slice of fresh egg-plant or cucumber which must be poked into his cage every morning. . . . To keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome : could you see him, you would think it absurd to take any pains for the sake of a creature so ridiculously small. But always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awakens : then the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of indescribable sweetness, — a thin, thin silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepens, the sound becomes sweeter, — sometimes swelling till the whole house seems to vibrate with the elfish resonance,—sometimes thinning down into the faintest imaginable thread of a voice. But loud or low, it keeps a...« less