ieroglyphs of
ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in
moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis,
that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost
defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions.

On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In
a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its
head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His
finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a
day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to
lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel.

I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias
Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this
time to the _Commercial_. These letters, his first professional work,
except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St.
Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging
industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit,
giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which,
combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed
him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day.

A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the
identification in the files of the _Commercial_ of these "Midwinter"
letters.

He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the
Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered
windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up
appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted
about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It
gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great
misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came,
the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden
uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of
stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy
brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists
lingering like shades upon its banks.

"Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial
Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and
heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis