foot of the page you see it
is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:--

"Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people.
On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself
alone, you may often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than
hear behind you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body,
dumb oscillations of raiment,--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter
swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..."

"Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated

"A mon cher ami,
"LEOPOLD ARNOUX
"Notaire a Saint Pierre, Martinique.

"Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des
sympathies echangees, de tout le charme d'une amitie inalterable et
inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle a l'ame au doux Pays des Revenants."

* * * * *

Arnoux is mentioned subsequently in one or two of Hearn's letters. He
alludes to suppers eaten with him at Grande Anse, in a little room
opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of
the sea, with the great voice thundering outside so that they could
scarcely hear themselves speak, and the candle in the verrine fluttering
like something afraid.

In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly
after the great eruption of Mt. Pelee that destroyed Saint Pierre, he
alludes to Arnoux' garden, and speaks of a spray of arborescent fern
that had been sent him. In the fragment, also, called "Vanished Light,"
he describes the amber shadows and courtyard filled with flickering
emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. A little boy and girl run to
meet him, and the father's voice, deep and vibrant as the tone of a
great bell, calls from an inner doorway, "Entrez donc, mon ami!" "But
all this was--and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the
streets of that city; never again will its ways be trodden, never again
will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams."

Hearn definitely left Martinique in 1889, bound for America; having
completed the task he had undertaken to do. Much as he loved the lazy,
easy tropical life, "the perfumed peace of enormous azured noons, and
the silent flickering of fire-flies through the lukewarm distance, the
turquoise sky and the beautiful brown women," he began, before the end
of his stay, to ackn