The chief literary expression of this impulse in its early phase was his 'Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures,' chiefly written before 1883, and published two years later. This, a series of reconstructions of what impressed him as most fantastically beautiful in the most exotic literature he was able to obtain, shows a remarkable growth in mere craftsmanship over his translations from Gautier. The cadences are surer, the weird or gorgeous pictures built up from simpler words, and the exotic atmosphere is more enveloping and persuasive. But the handful of arabesques that Hearn brought together in his 'Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures' was only a drop in the bucket that came up brimming from that deep well of 'the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.' In the first five years of his work for the 'Times-Democrat,' he made and printed in the paper no fewer than two hundred translations of French stories and striking chapters or passages from the French books that engaged his eager attention. When we remember that the bulk of these versions were from the writings of the greatest contemporary masters of French prose,--thirty-one were from Maupassant,--we become aware of at least one of the sources of that extraordinary growth in Hearn's mastery of his instrument that can be seen when we compare the suave and luminous current of the prose of 'Some Chinese Ghosts' in 1887, with the volume from Gautier, or even with the 'Stray Leaves.' It was at this time, too, that Hearn, forsaking translation for original work, began to follow the leading of his imagination into characteristic paths. The readers of the 'Times-Democrat,' largely, of course, of French descent, gave him a sympathetic public for a type of work that could perhaps have appeared in no other paper in America. He printed, even apparently with a certain _réclame_, curious, condensed, personalized paraphrases of out of the way books, like Perron's 'Femmes Arabes,' and other curious investigations of the Exotic, and passed easily from this into such excursions in aromatic impressionism as those that record his vacation in Florida, colored by his reading of Gaffarel's 'Floride Française,'[1] or his studies of the Creole life and language.