Of the course and character of his education but little is known. He is said to have spent two years in a Jesuit college in the north of France, where he probably acquired his intimate and accurate knowledge of the French tongue. He was also for a time at Ushaw, the Roman Catholic college at Durham, and here occurred one of the greatest misfortunes of his life. In playing the game known as “The Giant’s Stride” he was accidentally blinded in one eye by the knotted end of a rope suddenly released from the hand of one of his companions. In consequence of this the work thrown upon the other eye by the enormous labours of his later years kept him in constant terror of complete loss of sight. In writing and reading he used a glass so large and heavy as to oblige him to have it mounted in a handle and hold it to his eye like a lorgnette, and for distant observation he carried a small folding telescope.

The slight disfigurement, too,—it was never great,—was a source of perpetual distress. He imagined that others, more particularly women, found him disgusting and repugnant in consequence of the film that clouded the iris.

This accident seems to have ended his career at Ushaw. . . . [Later in life] in a letter written . . . to one of his pupils. . . , he says:—. . .

“When I was a boy of sixteen, although my blood relations were—some of them—very rich, no one would pay anything to help me finish my education. I had to become what you never have had to become—a servant. I partly lost my sight. I had two years of sickness in bed. I had no one to help me. And I had to educate myself in spite of all difficulties. Yet I was brought up in a rich home, surrounded with every luxury of Western life. . . .”

The rupture with his grand-aunt was complete. . . . Her property, which he had been encouraged to look upon as his inheritance, was dribbling away in the hands of those whose only claim to business ability was their religious convictions, and a few years after their separation her death put an end to any efforts at reconciliation. . . . Some provision was made for him in her will, but he put forward no claims, and the property was found practically to have vanished.

To what straits the boy was driven at this time in his friendlessness there is no means of knowing.

. . . .

Sometime during the year 1869—the exact date cannot be ascertained—Lafcadio Hearn, nineteen years old, penniless, delicate, half-blind, and without a friend, found himself in the streets of New York.

. . . .

What drove him . . . to endeavour to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, is not clear. . . . [H]e made the journey in an emigrant train and had not money for food upon the way.

~ Elizabeth Bisland’s The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn,
Volumes 1 and 2 (1906)

Alethea Foley: (1853–1913)

ALETHEA FOLEY

(1853–1913)

. . . .

CINCINNATI, 1906

Pat wasn’t from here.