ne more exquisitely and fancifully
than by Lafcadio Hearn.

In one of his sketches, entitled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence
of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling
a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable
things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies,
the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the
silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines.

"The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the
emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,--that the
mystery was of other existences than mine."[18]

[18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co.

Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is
the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products
of evolution--created by experiences of vanished being more countless
than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he
imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried
loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless
remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark
the sadness only lingered--unutterable--profound.

CHAPTER XIV
WEST INDIES

"Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden
leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred
peaks,--over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes
from the hills--all cool out of the sleep of the forest, ...
and the wild high winds that run roughling and crumpling
through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery
sound. And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green drenched
with silent pouring of creepers ... and the eternal azure
apparition of the all-circling sea.... And the violet velvet
distances of evening, and the swaying of palms against the
orange-burning sunset,--when all the heavens seem filled with
vapours of a molten sun!"

In the early part of June, 1887, Hearn left New Orleans, and made his
way to New York via Cincinnati. He went to see no one in the western
city, where he had been so well known, but his old friend Mr. Watkin.
Seated in the printing-office, then situated at 26, Longworth Street,
they chatted together all day to the accompaniment of the ticking of t