Lafcadio Hearn

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II Hearn was forty when he reached Japan. He had been drifting about the world, rather more obviously a pawn of circumstances than other men. Nothing could stop him except sickness or poverty. He had made some friends and acquired some books, but there can have been few less substantial men than he. In his unfriendly way, due to his having heard that while Hearn was writing to him in love and trust he was speaking of him " with bitterness and malevolent injustice," Dr. Gould says that except in " the pursuit of literary excellence, Hearn had no character. His was the most unresisting, most echo-like mind I have ever known. He was a perfect chameleon ; he took for the time the colour of his surroundings." 1 This probably means little more than that Hearn was abashed before Dr. Gould, and was dimly 1 G. M. G