ata or an opera by Wagner.

Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "Hearn and
Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he
ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he
wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British
characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had
heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were
fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he
thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was
constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions,
by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The
_glissando_ effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of
tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal
splinterings.' They had for him a great charm."

Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the
_Cosmopolitan Magazine_. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see
her. "Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything
seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and
confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you--but since you
live in Hell what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison.

To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him,
so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters
when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British
Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the _Barracouta_
for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a
trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared
originally in _Harper's Monthly_. It was afterwards incorporated in his
larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies."

Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics,
is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans
physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as
ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced
enthusiasms.

He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and,
unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at
Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply
heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no snobs; everything primitive
and morally pure. Confoun