Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_ hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business affairs from sending a reply for some weeks.
His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time, surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched close by.
"I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American city appals me--because I remember."
The _Hermes_ of Æschylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in any other city in the world.
From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric façades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves, dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron, framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels, American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings.