ake, the appeal to the ghost of
the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a
thousand years."

Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld
Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some
everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas,
connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely
recounted:--

"'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years
ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been
surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed
not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a
stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then
came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly
sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense
thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in
tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang
Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous,
audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in
my heart still."

Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there
were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance.
Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among
these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of
Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysantheme," Hearn retained the same
admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman
d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaitre or Anatole
France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will
have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die,
one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read
'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..."

Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of
the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told
us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an
argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's
criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement,
repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his
soft musical voice.

A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject
of Napoleon cropped