That was my first thought when I saw him at Mrs. Haslam’s boardinghouse. I didn’t know his name right then, but that hunch would prove to be more than true.

While I was in the kitchen, Mrs. Haslam’s was always full. If you were the kind who were only passing through, you might not give much thought to the supper table, but if you were a stayer—the spinsters and the widowers—then a fruit pie every other night and a roast on Sunday were sought-after fare.

Faces like Pat’s were the ones that I’d learned not to get attached to. I didn’t even bother with their names. Same as horses on a farm, the color of their hair was enough to identify them. Chestnut, bay, blond, or black as coal in Pat’s case. If they were male and young, they were soon headed elsewhere. Out West, down South, back East, wherever the trains and steamboats could take them.

Before the Civil War, when we heard “Cincinnati,” we thought of the Promised Land, the Ohio our River Jordan. Who knew that the Promised Land would be full of young white men itching to go elsewhere?

Mr. Bean, the printing-house man with the gray hair and gray fingernails, was introducing Pat to the other boarders seated at the table, and I was placing a tureen down on the sideboard. It was the middle of summer, but Mrs. Haslam always had me prepare a soup because she said it filled people up, and they would eat less of the pies and the roasts, which were more costly for her to provide. Mr. Bean liked a nip of gin before and after supper, so I thought that he was already slurring his words when he said, “This young fellow is named Laf-ca-di-o Hearn.”

My ears couldn’t recognize “Lafcadio” as a man’s name back then. I’d never met another.

Miss Caroline, who was hard of hearing when it suited her to be, asked Mr. Bean to repeat the new one’s name. Mr. Bean stood up again, cleared his throat, and said it twice in full. Pat kept his eyes on the tablecloth the entire time.

I took a moment from serving to study the new boarder’s profile. I liked it. His nose cut a strong, sharp line with a slight bump near the bridge, and he had a mustache but a clean-shaven chin. He looked like he had spent time out in the sun though. His coloring was almost the same as mine. I must have been looking at the right side of his face because I didn’t see anything else out of place.

Then Pat himself stood up and offered the table his name. I could hear from his lilt that he was an Irishman, but not a Cincinnati one. He was soft-spoken, and his words weren’t half-swallowed.