down the Mississippi, and two or three
days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants 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 making expenditure tally with
revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with
the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a
fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in
the matter of ways and means.

Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his
literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his
shirt was sticking through the seat 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't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his
helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business
affairs from sending a reply for some weeks.

His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time,
surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched
close by.

"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when
referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty
and suffering 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 take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for
the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American
city appals me--because I remember."

The _Hermes_ of AEschylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer
of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The
same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean 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 Orleans, in the seventies and
eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and
expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in
any other city in the world.

From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's
Romances," that appeared at this t