A HOUSEHOLD GOD.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8764, 28 April 1890, Page 4

A HOUSEHOLD GOD.

London Figaro says :—": — " Sir Arthur Sullivan may be interested to learn that scraps from ' Tho Mikado' have been sung before tho great bronze image of Buddha, at Kamakura, Japan. Colonel George P. Bissell, of Hartford, Conn., and a party of friends stood last month before this famous statue, and as the natives gathered around and set up a great clatter, the Americans broke out as one man in ' Here's a how d'ye do.' The Japanese were awed by the song, aud thought it was offered us an invocation to Buddha." Which is a very good story as far as it goes, and reoills another which is absolutely true, of aa important Japanese official at Yokohama, who had his own particular household god decorated with a St. Jacob's oil bottle suspended round the neck by a valuable string of jewels. He had for years been a martyr to the demon of neuralgia, and the contents of that paiticular bottle had effected a rapid and permanent cure, where all ehe had failed. That is one of the peculiar virtues of this remarkable oil, and the one of all others which has made it so amazingly popular in all lands ; but the above is probably the only instance on record in which it bus received such an elevated recognition. The donor of the bottle to the afflicted Jap. was an old sea captain of the moßt pronounced New England type, and the solemnity with which he used to relate the incident was conßid?rab!y intensified by hia own unbounded faith in the pain-3onquering pioperties of St. Jacob's oil.