"The day after I wrote you, I got a position (without asking for it) as assistant editor on the Item, at a salary considerably smaller than that I received on the Commercial, but large enough to enable me to save half of it."
And the old gentleman appears still to regard the Hearn he recalls with the sort of half-admiring, half-contemptuous, wholly marveling affection which a fine healthy turkey-cock would feel for the "ugly duckling" just beginning to reveal himself of the breed of swans.
Apparently he and Bigney allowed Hearn considerable latitude in his choice and treatment of subject. The three years of his work in their employ show bolder and more varied editorial comment, as well as five or six times as many "Fantastics" as are to be found in the six years of his work under the Bakers, and prove that the quality of his work was already fine enough to justify Page Baker's choice of him for a place on the staff of "the new literary venture."
How these strange little blossoms of Hearn's genius attracted the admiration of lovers of beauty and won him fame and friends among professional men and scholars is told most viv-
