would
appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus."

Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at
Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough,
rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the
life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical
pioneer--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a
kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation."

Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a
storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the
Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading
army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild
charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that
the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader,
were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union."

To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking
the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the
cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the
_Thompson Dean_ there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every
corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy
spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at
night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following
him in the dark.

It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself alone
in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary hours of
the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from
vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am
writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and
perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is
accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose
you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would
write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again,
only by years--until the times and places of old friendships were
forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams.

At last the New Orleans steamer, the _Thompson Dean_, arrived, and Hearn
floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and also,
inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the flood-tide of
his genius. A letter contributed to the _Comm