INTRODUCTION
Until the publication of his "Fantastics and Other Fancies" the work done by Lafcadio Hearn for the Item was utterly unknown. But those weird or dreamy sketches constituted but a small part of his work on that little journal. As assistant editor during the earlier years of his stay in New Orleans, he produced an immense number of editorials, translations, book reviews, dramatic criticisms, and sketches of all sorts, writing as he did for the paper every day, and not merely on Sundays, as was for the most part his custom in the case of his work with the Times-Democrat in the later years of his sojourn in this city.
The present volume contains a selection from his "Creole Sketches" together with a few other fanciful papers in a similar vein.
