(1899)
Although the frog is no longer playing an inaudible tune on an immovable instrument, I keep it on a corner of my desk, where it has been for nearly twenty years. Sometimes of a winter’s night, when I take my seat at the desk before the crackling and cheerful hickory fire, the frog that played the trombone catches my eye, and I go back in memory to the evening when it performed its first solo in my presence, and I see again the beautiful liquid eyes of the friend who brought it to me. We were very young then, both of us, that night before Christmas, and our hearts kept time with the lilt of the tune that the frog played silently on his trombone. Now I am young no longer, I am even getting old, and my friend has been dead this many a year. Sometimes, as I look at the gaping frog, I know that if I could hear the song he is trying to sing I should hate it for the memories it would recall.
He who gave it to me was not a school fellow, a companion of my boyhood, but he was the friend of my youth and a classmate in college. It was in our Junior year that he joined us, bringing a good report from the fresh-water college where he had been for two years. I can recall his shy attitude the first morning in chapel when we were wondering what sort of a fellow the tall, dark, handsome new-comer might be. The accidents of the alphabet put us side by side in certain class-rooms, and I soon learned to know him, and to like him more and more with increasing knowledge. He was courteous, gentle, kindly, ever ready to do a favor, ever grateful for help given him, and if he had a fault it was this, that he was jealous of his friends. Although his nature was healthy and manly, he had a feminine craving for affection, and an almost womanly unreason in the exactions he made on his friends. Yet he was ever ready to spend himself for others, and to do to all as he would be done by.
Although fond of out-door sports, his health was not robust. He lacked stamina. There was more than a hint of consumption in the brightness of his eye, in the spot of color on his cheek, in the hollowness of his chest, and in the cough which sometimes seized him in the middle of a recitation. Toward the end of our senior year he broke down once, and was kept from college a week; but the spring came early, and with the returning warmth of the sunshine he made an effort and took his place with us again. He was a good scholar, but not one of the best in the class. He did his work faithfully in the main, having no relish for science, but enjoying the flavor of the classics. He studied German that year, and he used to come to me reciting Heine’s poems with enthusiasm, carried away by their sentiment, but shocked by the witty cynicism which served as its corrective. He wrote a little verse now and then, as young men do, immature, of course, and individual only in so far as it was morbid. I think that he would have liked to devote himself to literature as a career, but it had been decided that he was to study law.
After Class Day and Commencement the class scattered forever. In September, when I returned to New York and settled down to my profession, I found my friend at the Columbia Law School. His father had died during the summer, leaving nothing but a life-insurance policy, on the income of which the mother and son could live modestly until he could get into a law office and begin to make his way in the world. They had taken a floor in a little boarding-house in a side street, and they were very comfortable; their money had been invested for them by one of his father’s business associates, who had so arranged matters that their income was much larger than they had expected. In this modest home he and his mother lived happily. I guessed that the father had been hard and unbending, and that my friend and his mother had been drawn closer together. Of a certainty I never saw a man more devoted than he was to her, or more tender, and she was worthy of the affection he lavished on her.