brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly
doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that
even now there does not remain one place on earth where life
has not been freely given for love or duty?"

Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite
marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of
operations where effective work and fame awaited him.

"Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin.
"Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little
milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I
have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor
I may do well in Japan."

When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the
publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an
artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was
to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied
from photographs, of the principal exhibits.

On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In
it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese
department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a
flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning;
the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy
hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting
of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere
copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense
as did also the representations of the matchless mountain
Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred
different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of
sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn,
exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above
stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled
by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara.

It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy
world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of
clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty
day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he
ascended Fuji-no-yama.

* * * *