INTRODUCTORY SKETCH
I.Boyhood[3]
II.The Artist’s Apprenticeship[40]
III.The Master Workman[103]
IV.The Last Stage[136]
LETTERS[165]

ILLUSTRATIONS

Lafcadio Hearn (photogravure)[Frontispiece]
From a photograph taken about 1900.
Lafcadio Hearn[50]
From a photograph taken about 1873.
Lafcadio Hearn and Mitchell McDonald[110]
Lafcadio Hearn[198]
From a photograph taken in the ’70’s.
Facsimile of Mr. Hearn’s Earlier Handwriting[340]
Saint-Pierre and Mt. Pelée[410]
From a photograph in the possession of Dr. T. A. Jaggar, Jr.

INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD

Lafcadio Hearn was born on the twenty-seventh of June, in the year 1850. He was a native of the Ionian Isles, the place of his birth being the Island of Santa Maura, which is commonly called in modern Greek Levkas, or Lefcada, a corruption of the name of the old Leucadia, which was famous as the place of Sappho’s self-destruction. This island is separated from the western coast of Greece by a narrow strait; the neck of land which joined it to the mainland having been cut through by the Corinthians seven centuries before Christ. To this day it remains deeply wooded, and scantily populated, with sparse vineyards and olive groves clinging to the steep sides of the mountains overlooking the blue Ionian sea. The child Lafcadio may have played in his early years among the high-set, half-obliterated ruins of the Temple of Apollo, from whence offenders were cast down with multitudes of birds tied to their limbs, that perchance the beating of a thousand wings might break the violence of the fall, and so rescue them from the last penalty of expiation.

In this place of old tragedies and romance the child was born into a life always to be shadowed by tragedy and romance to an extent almost fantastic in our modern workaday world. This wild, bold background, swimming in the half-tropical blue of Greek sea and sky, against which the boy first discerned the vague outlines of his conscious life, seems to have silhouetted itself behind all his later memories and prepossessions, and through whatever dark or squalid scenes his wanderings led, his heart was always filled by dreams and longings for soaring outlines, and the blue, “which is the colour of the idea of the divine, the colour pantheistic, the colour ethical.”