d fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave
them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West
Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but
nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms
distilled _Elixir Vitae_."[19]

[19] Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"
published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.

There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in
the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for
Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope
that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or
somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of
safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the
publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friendship, the two
comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the
close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as
if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion.

During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in
the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on
the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on
board the _Barracouta_, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the
French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird
atmosphere, that make his Japanese books so arresting and original, is a
delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart
of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never
written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at
least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end
of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is
well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West
Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep,"
written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are
interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly
you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the
music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking
through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank
the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing
magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the