ranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to
make the journey when the day's work was done.

Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of thought.
We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle" as well
as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its astral
visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of
tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects
through space.

These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later,
Hearn was on the staff of the _Enquirer_ as night reporter, his "Dad"
often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as the
water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi valley.

At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the _Enquirer_ staff
visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's Home"
(he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati where
business people of small means spend their declining years. An account
of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The writer
described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many pigeon-holes,
holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels of Tual"--the
letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman tottered when the
reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings, and as he
balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told, in a voice
heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and how their
friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition with the
years.

"I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloomy
views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny
reminded me of Poe at his best--or worst, as you might call it; only, in
my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to my place
when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a raven
varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour he was
in when he sketched it."

Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can hardly
be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of his
statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to see
him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be quite
accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having spent
nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures a