up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat
apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the
insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a
flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so
accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement.

Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the
biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the
world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little
boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in
Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the
Japanese kimono.

At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of
promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he
was a much more responsible and important person than the little
"brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office,
turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or
doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in
consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping
gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his
complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient
features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes,
the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the
other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the
disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in
conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always
photographed in profile looking down.

In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and
well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited
the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the
musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo
University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and
white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made
his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal
manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before
the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I
first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to
begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the leas