author of "Kokoro" and himself at his
shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in
the year 1859.

"Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?"

"To write, sir."

"Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first,
try your hand at writing later on."

Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied
reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge
of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to,
but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other
than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one
time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy,
Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant,
regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's
weird tales.

The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely
near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had
befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy,
and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself
was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a
something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air
of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says,
hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each
other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a
ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his
printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned
at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality,
and conceived an immediate affection for the boy.

Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left
France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop
in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati.

Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of
events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In
his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had
been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself
in considerable difficulties.

Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he
tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the
names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Wei