A HOUSEHOLD GOD.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8765, 29 April 1890, Page 4

A HOUSEHOLD GOD.

London Figaro siys:— "Sir Arthur Sullivan may be interested to learn that scraps from • The Mikado' have been Bung before tho great bronze image of Buddha, at Kumakura, 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'B a how d'ye do.' The Japanese were awed by the song, übd thought it was offered us nn invocation to Buddha." Which is a vory good story as far as it goes, and recalls another which »s absolutely true, of an important Japanese official at Yokohama, who had his own particular household god decorated with a St. Jacob's oil bottlo suspended round the neck by a valuable string of jewels. He had for years been n martyr to tho demon of neuralgia, and tho contonts of that paiticular bottle had effected a rapid and permanent cure, where all etee had failed. That is one of the peculiar virtues of this remarkable oil, and the one of ull others which has made it so amazingly popular in all lands ; but the above is probably tho only instance on record in which it has received such an elevated recognition. The donor of the bottle to the afflicted Jap. was an old sea captain of the most pronounced New England type, and the aolemnity with which he ÜBed to relate the incident was consid3rably intensified by his own anbounJed faith in the pain- conquering piopertieß of St. Jacob's oil.