title: Chita; A Memory of Last Island
author: Lafcadio Hearn
description: Born in Greece to an Irish soldier and a Greek mother, Lafcadio Hearn emigrated to the United States at the age of nineteen. While working as a newspaperman in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hearn married a black woman, which was then illegal, and fled to New Orleans to escape prosecution. Once there, he began to work for the New Orleans Item. During his time in New Orleans, Hearn published several books while continuing his work as a journalist.
zlib_text: CHITA : A Memory of Last Island
  1
  CHITA : A Memory of
  Last Island
  by Lafcadio Hearn
  "But Nature whistled with all her winds, Did as she pleased, and went
  her way."  ---Emerson
   To my friend Dr. Rodolfo Matas of New Orleans
  
  CHITA : A Memory of Last Island
  2
   The Legend of L'Ile Derniere
  I.
  Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through a
  strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways.  You can
  journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the trip may be made
  much more rapidly and agreeably on some one of those light, narrow
  steamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receive
  passengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street, hard
  by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking of steam
  craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts against the levee, side
  by side,--like great weary swans.  But the miniature steamboat on which
  you engage passage to the Gulf never lingers long in the Mis