of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow,
told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at
the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had
been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His
brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says
that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France,
and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that
Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to
Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has
been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic
colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of
every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of
the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or
destroyed.

Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads
to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and
good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman
Catholic institution of the _Petits Precepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen.
Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he
took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he
went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle
Richard, who was living there at the time.

Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor,
disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort
of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The
church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore,
not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as
far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and
renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.

It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage
of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris,
where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to
express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to
clutch the Unattainable."

A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital
memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.

It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war,
when Paris, under the Empire, ha