rnment letter-boxes, glimmered the
white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And
lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after
sunset.

After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to
insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he
had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected.

"I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no
friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor
failed," he tells his sister.

In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences,
he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a
sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began
within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair,
between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in
their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a
coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self
something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and
human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart
and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth
living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up
the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish
tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the
infinite world.

CHAPTER X
WIDER HORIZONS

"There are no more mysteries--except what are called hearts,
those points at which individuals rarely touch each other,
only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a
ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what
lies out of soul-sight."[13]

[13] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf
Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person
in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost
stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months
his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular
literary work.

Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic
admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection,
and years a