lstrand. It is
sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading
of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian
publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the
same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago
in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food,
he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian
peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of
brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the
vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a
beauty and charm that never were hers--and under the title of "My First
Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers.

After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have
touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of
misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement
in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he
had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to
seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot."

"My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson,
when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very
lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the
apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.

"I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew
nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out
of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's
photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had
to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then
I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to
sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen
from the house."

This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as
having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister
and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses,
unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at
that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen.

His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft,
delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his
hay-bed, the first bed of any sort