Ferbane, for having put me
in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to
Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently
Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to
give me much information concerning his college career.

I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan, to Mr. W. B.
Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter
and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who
gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the
period of his engagement as sub-editor to the _Kobe Chronicle and Japan
Mail_.

But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of
Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs.
Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and
"Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co.,
Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In
Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs.
Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper
for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French West Indies"; and,
above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote
from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's "Letters," for without
quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to
write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn.

What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn
became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a
Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached
England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound
of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was
animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the
Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will
be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in
England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great
deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere."

How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed
amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he
looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in
that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually
growing, that when many s