"Can I keep any single situation for any great length of time? You know I can't,—couldn't stand it; hate the mere idea of it,—something horribly disagreeable would be sure to happen. Then again, I can't even stay in one place for any healthy period of time. I can't stay anywhere without getting in trouble. And my heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian colossus or a broken capital of the Parthenon.
"I know just exactly what I should like to do,—to wander forever here and there until I got very old and apish and grey, and died,—just to wander where I pleased and keep myself to myself, and never bother anybody. But that I can't do. Then what in the name of the Nine Incarnations of Vishnu, can I do? Please try to tell me.
"Shall I, in spite of myopia, seek for a passage on some tropical vessel, and sail hither and thither on the main, like the ghost of Gawain on a wandering wind, till I have learned all the ropes and spars by heart, and know by sight the various rigging of all the navies of the world?
"Shall I try to go back to England at once, instead of waiting to be a millionaire? (This is a seaport, remember: that is why I dread to leave it for further inland towns. I feel as if I could almost catch a distant glimpse of the mighty dome of St. Paul's from the levee of New Orleans.)
"Shall I begin to eat opium, and enjoy in fancy all that reality refuses, and may forever refuse me?
"Shall I go to Texas and start a cheap bean-house—(hideous occupation!) with my pact, who wants me to go there?
"Shall I cease to worry over fate and facts, and go right to hell on a 2.40, till I get tired even of hell and blow my highly sensitive and exquisitely delicate brains out?
"Shall I try to get acquainted with Yellow Jack and the Charity Hospital,—or try to get to St. Louis on the next boat? Honestly, I'd like to know. I'm so tired,—so awfully, fearfully, disgustingly tired of wasting my life without being able to help it. Don't tell me I could have helped it,—I know better. No man could have helped doing anything already done. I hate the gilded slavery of newspaper work,—the starvation of Bohemianism,—the bore of waiting for a chance to become an insurance agent or a magazine writer,—and oh, venerable friend, I hate a thousand times worst of all to work for somebody else. I hoped to become independent when I came down here,—to work for myself; and I have made a most damnable failure of it. In addition to the rest, my horrid eye is bad yet. I had lost nearly half the field of vision from congestion of the retina when I wrote you the rather frantic epistles which you would not answer. Now I see only in patches, but am getting along better and hope to be quite well in time,—certainly much better. You see I can write a pretty long letter to while away Sunday idleness."
Hearn had reached New Orleans at the time the yellow fever was raging there, and in April, 1878, he wrote reassuring his old friend that his health was not endangered:
"Dear Old Man: Yellow Jack has not caught me; and since I was laid up with the dengue or break-bone fever, I believe I am acclimated.... They sprinkle the streets here with watering-carts filled with carbolic acid, pour lime in the gutters, and make all the preparations against fever possible, except the only sensible one of cleaning the stinking gutters and stopping up the pest-holes. Politicians make devilish bad health officers. When I tell you that all of our gutters are haunted by eels whose bite is certain death, you can imagine how vile they are.... Nobody works here in summer. The population would starve to death anywhere else. Neither does anybody think of working in the sun if they can help it. That is why we have no sunstroke. The horses usually wear hats."