ove water until regular work came his way.

Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth
birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file
of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery
in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway
by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments.
Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some
unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness
and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which,
instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid
frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this
he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr.
Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been
through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when
twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he
said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in
retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he
damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that
gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he
disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same
place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for
the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow
and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a
broken capital of the Parthenon."

About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city,
desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a
severe attack of "dengue" fever.

"I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson.
It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken
city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky
bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river,
its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with
vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale
smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each
day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the
faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles,
pillars of verandahs, lamps over gove