In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head above water until regular work came his way.
Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments. Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which, instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr. Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same place. "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."