l hours of the morning. She was a
handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed
him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the
circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and
compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near
Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863
President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted
into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself.

In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She
saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they
talked much of her early days and years of slavery.

His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no one
so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave
herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found
himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible
position.

After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to
assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books.
The _Enquirer_ had articles running through several issues in 1906 on
the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after his
death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws of
Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage
between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone
through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto,
or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole."

It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his work
called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it would
have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of French
writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so great an
influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for alien races
and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness, primitive impulses,
as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and admiration of strange
people, were a vital part of the impressionist creed, constituted,
indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations of their unwholesome
opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared his preference for the
women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's earlier novels were but the
histories of love affairs with women of "dusky races," either Eastern or
Polynesian.

Hearn, as we h