Facsimile of a postal card sent from Memphis
"My room is carpetless and much larger than your office. Old blocked-up stairways come up here and there through the floor or down through the ceiling, and they suddenly disappear. There is a great red daub on one wall as though made by a bloody hand when somebody was staggering down the stairway. There are only a few panes of glass in the windows. I am the first tenant of the room for fifteen years. Spiders are busy spinning their dusty tapestries in every corner, and between the bannisters of the old stairways. The planks of the floor are sprung, and when I walk along the room at night it sounds as though Something or Somebody was following me in the dark. And then being in the third story makes it much more ghostly.
"I had hard work to get a washstand and towel put in this great, dreary room; for the landlord had not washed his face for more than a quarter of a century, and regarded washing as an expensive luxury. At last I succeeded with the assistance of the barkeeper, who has taken a liking to me.
"Perhaps you have seen by the paper that General N. B. Forrest died here night before last. To-day they are burying him. I see troops of men in grey uniforms parading the streets, and the business of the city is suspended in honor of the dead. And they are firing weary, dreary minute guns.
"I am terribly tired of this dirty, dusty, ugly town,—-a city only forty years old, but looking old as the ragged, fissured bluffs on which it stands. It is full of great houses, which were once grand, but are now as waste and dreary within and without as the huge building in which I am lodging for the sum of twenty-five cents a night. I am obliged to leave my things in the barkeeper's care at night for fear of their being stolen; and he thinks me a little reckless because I sleep with my money under my pillow. You see the doors of my room—there are three of them—lock badly.... They are ringing those dead bells every moment,—it is a very unpleasant sound. I suppose you will not laugh if I tell you that I have been crying a good deal of nights,—just like I used to do when a college boy returned from vacation. It is a lonely feeling, this of finding oneself alone in a strange city, where you never meet a face that you know; and when all the faces you did know seem to have been dead faces, disappeared for an indefinite time. I have not travelled enough the last eight years, I suppose: it does not do to become attached insensibly to places and persons.... I suppose you have had some postal cards from me; and you are beginning to think I am writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and perhaps you are thinking to yourself: 'He feels a little blue now, and is accordingly very affectionate, &c.; but by and by he will be quite forgetful, and perhaps will not write so often as at present.'
"Well, I suppose you are right. I live in and by extremes and am on an extreme now. I write extremely often, because I feel alone and extremely alone. By and by, if I get well, I shall write only by weeks; and with time perhaps only by months; and when at last comes the rush of business and busy newspaper work, only by years,—until the times and places of old friendship are forgotten, and old faces have become dim as dreams, and these little spider-threads of attachments will finally yield to the long strain of a thousand miles."
A postal card of November 3 says: "Will leave Memphis Tuesday next, Perhaps. Am beginning to doubt the existence of the Thompson Dean." November 13, 1877, finds Hearn overjoyed to be in New Orleans. The postal card bears in the left-hand corner a drawing of a door labelled "228." In a window at the side of the door sits the raven. On the other side is the legend:
Raven liveth at
228 Baronne St.
New Orleans
Care Mrs. Bustellos
Then comes another raven, with the doggerel: