the staff of the
paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his
wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them
and to his fellow-reporters.

After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in
the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning,
under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its
wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations
from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire.

Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the
Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create
something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the
latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified
considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art,
he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and
finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right
phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position,
the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to
vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined
conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist
of Hearn's quality.

Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first
translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification
of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales,
included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he
undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de
Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man
cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I
translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass
without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I
think nothing ought to be suppressed."

As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech
at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's
productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and
Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets
and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the
matter of social morality.

When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp"
was refused admittance to the pages of a