Lafcadio Hearn

with perfume prevails over the land,-made only more impressive by the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy voices of business are dead. The boats are l

novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declar

ter, we find him begging his old Dad to sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds, as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to

itting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting clo

estaurants of the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate, it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for mastering the ignoble necessity for

at of his pants, and he could only enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the Commercial hadn'

one this time, surmounted by a crescent moon, wi

ering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket-and to send off a letter that I must send will t

n fire. Not only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orl

esqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves, dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron, framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine the l

sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by u

g to hide its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left untouched only because their French Creole owners, t

d Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a

holic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knigh

ay those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened

mall minority, obliged to submit to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of futi

read and orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the mont de piété) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; th

of his youthful days, Hearn mixed with

tten in the autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value; but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of the word they come under the head of satis

g, and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent m

the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all grace

Orleans signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and

ss of temper, and impatience, which, instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr. Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in

he city, desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a

r, its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour-a stale smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the

o insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the cit

e-no money, no friends. My best friend was a revolver kep

h all sensitive natures must wage in their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutte