he
tall clock, loud and insistent, like the footstep of a man booted and
spurred. We can imagine their discussions and arguments on the subject
of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, Esoteric Buddhism, and "that which the
Christian calls soul,--the Pantheist Nature,--the philosopher, the
Unknowable."

Hearn took his departure from Cincinnati late in the evening. A
delightful trip, he wrote to Mr. Watkin, had brought him safe and sound
to New York, where his dear friend, Krehbiel, was waiting to receive him
and take him as a guest to his cosy home. "I cannot tell you," he adds,
"how our little meeting delighted me, or how much I regretted to depart
so soon.... I felt that I loved you more than I ever did before; feel
also how much I owed you and will always owe you."

Mr. Watkin, who died in the spring of 1911, aged eighty-six, spent the
last years of his life in the "Old Men's Home" in Cincinnati. I received
a letter from him a few months before his death relating to his friend
Lafcadio Hearn. After this meeting in 1887, he was never fated to see
his "Raven," but the old man kept religiously all the letters written to
him by the odd little genius, who forty years before had so often sat
with him in his printing-office, pouring forth his hopes and ambitions,
his opinions and beliefs, his wild revolts and despairs. Loyally did the
old printer add his voice to Krehbiel's and Tunison's in defence of his
reputation after Hearn's death in 1904.

The Krehbiels lived in a flat, 438, West Fifty-seventh Street, New York,
and Lafcadio had arranged to stop with them there before he left New
Orleans.

Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the _Tribune_ necessitated his
frequenting busy literary and social circles; it is easy to imagine how
Hearn, just arrived from the easy-going, loafing life of New Orleans,
must have suffered in such a _milieu_.

Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's
letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds,
"that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either
Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of
the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's
temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found
himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told
Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a
horrible nightmare, that he