The brief essays in this book are as charmingly phrased as anything this master of charming phrases ever wrote, and they are--unlike his later work--imaginative. That is, they are interpretations and idealizations of the things naturally familiar to Hearn. He had not yet committed the artistic heresy of confusing strangeness with beauty. He was not yet deluded into the belief that romance belongs exclusively to Nippon. He still was loyal to the traditions of his own civilization. The literary value of Hearn's work is not to be questioned. No living writer (not even Algernon Blackwood) has so great and fiery an imagination as had this quondam reporter of the New Orleans _Daily Item_; no living writer (except Alice Meynell) understands so thoroughly the art of putting together a few hundred words so as to form a structure of enduring loveliness. It was in 1878 that Lafcadio Hearn, half starved and dressed in rags, persuaded Colonel John W. Fairfax, owner of the New Orleans _Item_, to give him work. He was called "assistant editor," but it may be supposed that the "assistant editor" of this little two-page paper did most of the reportorial work. What treasures of glowing narrative its news columns may hold can only be conjectured. But on its editorial page appeared from time to time for several years brief sketches, some whimsical, some sombre, all highly imaginative and beautifully phrased. These, with other writings which Hearn contributed later to the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, Dr. Hutson has searched out and brought together in this volume of real charm and value. Any trivial incident of his daily round, any quaint bit of history or legend that he came upon in his amazingly extensive reading, would furnish this strangest of newspaper men with a theme. He saw in some antique shop a faun and dryad pictured in enamel on a little golden case, and, sitting at his littered, ink-stained desk in his noisy office, he wrote the exquisite "Idyl of a French Snuffbox." Riding to work in a clanging street car, he found on its floor a Japanese fan of paper, and wrote of its unknown owner with a gay fervor surprising in such an amateur of grief. Mark Twain came to New Orleans, and the result was that masterpiece of vivid and sympathetic description, "A River Reverie." He was not always absolutely original, this obscure hack whose genius was one day to surprise and delight the world. Subconsciously, he remembered his spiritual brother, Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote those tales of the grotesque and arabesque, "The Black Cupid" and "The One Pill Box." Also there are echoes of Coleridge, and of those Parnassian Frenchmen whose methods and ideals Hearn always shared.