Volume I Part 4 (1/2)
Oh!--the idea of telling _him_ what I should like to say to her!
Yet it is not possible to see him smile, and to remain vexed with him
Anyhow, I do not feel inclined to talk For thirty-eight hours I have not eaten anything; and my romantic dreams, nourished with tobacco-s thatI shall be able to remain without food Three hbour yesterday asked ed the subject when I told hiht to complain: there is no reason why he should feed me And I reflect upon the folly of improvidence
Then my reflection is interrupted by the apparition of a white hand holding out to e slice of brown bread, with an inch-thick cut of yellow cheese thereon; and I look up, hesitating, into the face of the Norwegian girl Slish, with a pretty childish accent:
”Take it, and eat it”
I take it, and devour it Never before nor since did brown bread and cheese see the very last cruer, I forgot to thank her Irateful words
Instantly, and up to the roots of her hair, she flushes cri forward, she puts some question in a clear sharp tone that fills me with fear and shame I do not understand the question: I understand only that she is angry; and for one cowering moment er My face burns; and her grey eyes, watching it burn, are grey steel; and her sh when they are angry
And I wish ht forever But hbour makes some low-voiced protest,--assures her that I had only tried to thank her Whereat the level brows relax, and she turns aithout a word, to watch the flying landscape; and the splendid flush fades from her cheek as swiftly as it came But no one speaks: the train rushes into the dusk of five and thirty years agoand that is all!
What _can_ she have iined that I said? My swarthy coain at the thought of having caused a ht a blush to the cheek of the being for whose sake I would so gladly have given olden shadow of her, is alith me; and, because of her, even the name of the land from which she came is very, very dear to me
In Cincinnati Hearn eventually found work that enabled hih this did not come immediately, as is proved by an anecdote, related by himself, of his early days there A Syrian peddler employed hi hin wasthan Lafcadio Hearn, and at the end of the day he returned to the Syrian with the consignize for his failure he put his foot accidentally upon one of the mirrors, and thrown into a panic by the sound of the splintering glass, he fled incontinently, and never saw the ain atteular work he obtained was as a type-setter and proof-reader in the Robert Clarke Company, where--as he mentions in one of his letters--he endeavoured to introduce reforms in the American methods of punctuation, and assilish standards, but without, as he confesses, any success It was froes, undertaken with hot-headed enthusiasm for perfection, that he derived his nicknaiven him in amiable derision by his fellows Mechanical work of this character could not satisfy hi artist in words beginning his laborious self-training in the use of his tools Punctuation and typographical form remained for him always a matter of profound importance, and in one of his letters he declared that he would rather abandon all the royalties to his publisher than be deprived of the privilege of correcting his own proofs; corrections which in their aes the bulk of his profits
[Illustration: LAFCADIO HEARN _About 1873_]
Later he secured, for a brief period, a position as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, at that tiain he found food for his desires in a free access to the recondite ain he was driven by poverty and circu as a general reporter on the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ His as of a kind that gave him at first no scope for his talents andof daily market reports, until chance opened the eyes of his es A peculiarly atrocious crime, still known in Cincinnati annals as the ”Tan-yard Murder,” had been communicated to the office of the _Enquirer_ at a moment when all the n upon the indifferent Gods for some one instantly to take up the matter, was surprised by a timid request from the shy cub-reporter who turned in daily edy, and after some demur, he consented to accept what appeared an inadequate answer from the adjured deities The ”copy”
submitted some hours later caused astonished eyebroas considered worthy of ”scare-heads,” and for the nine succeeding days of the life of the wonder, Cincinnati sought ardently the Hoffnantly chosen phrases set before therim picture that caused the flesh to crawl upon their bones It was realized at once that the cub-reporter had unsuspected capacities and his talents were allowed expansion in the direction of descriptive stories One of the most admired of these was a record of a visit to the top of the spire of St
Peter's Cathedral, where hauled in ropes by a steeple-jack to the arms of the cross which crowned it, he obtained a lofty view of the city and returned to write an article that enabled all the town to see the great panorah his myopic eyes, which yet could bear testimony to colour and detail not obvious to clearer vision
It was in this year that so to advance a small sum of money for the publication of an amorphous little Sunday sheet, professedly colampz_ H
F Farny contributed the cartoons, and Lafcadio Hearn the bulk of the text On June 21st of that year the first number appeared, with the announcement that it was to be ”published daily, except week days,” and was to be ”devoted to art, literature, and satire” The first page was adorned with a dicky Doylish picture of Herr Kladderadatsch presenting Mr Giglampz to an enthusiastic public, which showed decided talent, but the full page cartoon, though itwhen published, is satire turned dry and dusty after the lapse of thirty-two years, and it uely discerned now to refer in some way to the question of a third term for President Grant
The pictures are easily preferable to the text, though no doubt it too has suffered from the desiccation of tiht infer, better fitted for satire than for peddling; _Ye Gigla journalist's views upon art and politics are such as ht be expected from a boy of twenty-four
The prohibition question, the Chicago fire, a local river disaster, and the Beecher scandal are all dealt with by pen and pencil,from _Punch_ and some translations from the comic journals of Paris fill the colulampz_ met an early and well-deserved death The only copies of the paper non to be in existence are contained in a bound volu to Mr Farny, discovered by him in a second-hand bookshop, with so One of these notes records that an advertisement--there were but three in the first number--was never paid for, so presumably this volume, monument of an unfortunate juvenile exploit, was once in Hearn's re library, but was discarded when he left Cincinnati
In the following year Hearn had left the _Enquirer_ and was recording the Exposition of 1876 for the _Gazette_, and in the latter part of that year he was a regular reporter for the _Co to Professor Basil Hall Cha japan, and draws an astonishi+ngly vivid picture of the editor as in command of the Cincinnati _Enquirer_ in the '70's These occasional trenchant, accurate sketches from life, to be found here and there in his correspondence, show a shrewdness of judgement and coolness of observation which his coan daily newspaper work in 1874, in the city of Cincinnati, on a paper called the _Enquirer_ edited by a sort of furious young man named cockerill He was a hard master, a tremendous worker, and a born journalist I think none of us liked his He used to swear at us, work us half to death (never sparing hih skill in sarcasm that ere all afraid of He was fresh from the army, and full of army talk In a few years he had forced up the circulation of the paper to a very large figure and ot jealous of hiot rid of him He afterwards took hold of a St Louis paper,--then of a New York daily, the _World_ He ran the circulation up to nearly a quarter of a ain had the proprietor's jealousy to settle with He also built up the _Advertiser_, but getting tired, sold out, and went travelling Finally, Bennett of the _Herald_ sends him to japan at, I believe, 10,000 a year
”I met hientler and more pleasant, and seerey What I have said about him shows that he is no very common person The man who canthe sa for himself, seldom is He is not a literary man, nor a well-read e experience of life,--besides being, in a Mark-Twainish way, much of a humourist”
Those who knew John cockerill will find in this portrait not one line omitted which would make for truth and sympathy One of Hearn's associates of this period, Joseph Tunison, says of his work:--
”In Cincinnati such as much harder than now, because more and better as demanded of a man for his weekly stipend than at present Had he been then on a New York daily his articles would have attracted bidding froeement for such brilliant powers as his The _Coh he worked hard for a pittance he never slighted anything he had to do He was never known to shi+rk hardshi+p or danger in filling an assignment His e paper--the night stations--for in that field developed the est in the unusual and the startling”
For two years more this was the routine of his daily life He formed, in spite of his shyness, some ties of intimacy; especially with Joseph Tunison, a , with H F Farny, the artist, and with the noell-known musical critic and lecturer, H E
Krehbiel Into these co man; an ardour increased beyond even the usual intensity of young friendshi+ps, by the natural wars and the loneliness of his life, bereft of all those ties of family common to happier fates In their company he developed a quality of bonhomie that underlay the natural seriousness of his te through the gravity of his usual trend of thought