In the course of the preparation of these volumes there was gradually accumulated so great a number of the letters written by Lafcadio Hearn during twenty-five years of his life, and these letters proved of so interesting a nature, that eventually the plan of the whole work was altered. The original intention was that they should serve only to illuminate the general text of the biography, but as their number and value became more apparent it was evident that to reproduce them in full would make the book both more readable and more illustrative of the character of the man than anything that could possibly be related of him.