A HOUSEHOLD GOD.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8832, 16 July 1890, Page 4

A HOUSEHOLD GOD.

London Figaro says : — "Sir Arthur Sullivan may be interested to learn that scraps from * The Mikado' have been aung before tbe great bronze image of Buddha, at Kamakura, Japan. Colonel George P. Bisßell, of Hartford, Conn., and a p*rty of friends stood last month before this famous statue, and as the natives gathered around and set np 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 recalls another which is absolutely true, of an 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 (he contents of that paitionlar bottle had effected a rapid and permanent cure, where all ehe had failed. That is one of tbe 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 tbe 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 solemnity witb which he used to relate the incident was cotisid3rably intensified by his own unbounJed faith in the pain-3onquering pioperties of St. Jacob's oil.