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first employer in New Orleans is still living—an active old gentleman of eighty-two, who may be found at his desk in the bank any day during business hours. He is Colonel John W. Fairfax, a veteran of the Confederate army, having gone into the war at the age of twenty; and he was a newspaperman of the sixties and seventies.

He was the owner of the Daily City Item when that paper gave Hearn his first employment in the city to which he came so enthusiastically in the winter of 1877-78, and where he so nearly starved before he got that job, in the summer of 1878.

"I remember Hearn very well, indeed," says Colonel Fairfax, "even that first day when he came to us for work. I am not sure whether he came to me in my office