ublin in the
hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation.

Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They
must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton,
has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been
disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the Japanese army.

There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea
of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of
the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he imagined, to
the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of
youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe
limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests,
and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which
Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos.

Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He
never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much
disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in
appearance, especially to women, always pursued him.

Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power,
Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power.

Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he
alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist,
declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more
mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective
sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the
conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as
it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into
others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The
quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind.
"I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being
haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he
says, in his essay on "Dust."

The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and
accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of
his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No
doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of
the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept