After the "Van Bibber" sketches came his most sparkling gem, "Gallegher," a newspaper story which was refused by three editors and then published, with immediate success, in Scribner's Magazine. Later appeared in quick succession "The Other Woman," "An Unfinished Story," "My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegan," and the other short stories which soon made their author's name familiar to the reading public on both sides of the ocean.
In 1890 Davis became editor of Harper's Weekly. This position he left a year or so later to travel across the continent, with "The West Through a Car Window" as the result. Then he went to London, and described the life there; and then he went to Egypt and wrote "The Rulers of the Mediterranean." He was now fairly well started; and since then his pen has never been idle.
Since Mr. Davis's advent as a serious writer of fiction he has been subjected on one side to the most extravagant praise and on the other to the most merciless censure. The critics on both sides have made matters worse by dropping the subject at hand and bringing out for public inspection vast quantities of personal anecdotes about the unfortunate author, most of which stories are probably apocryphal. In fact, at one time the newspaper comments were so vulgar that the helpless victim said to a friend who visited him in New York: "If I thought I was like the man the newspapers make me out to be, I would not only cut my own acquaintance; I'd cut my own throat." But, so far as the public ever found out, he took the slings and arrows philosophically. He could afford to. One by one his new works have prospered.
It was at the height of this hypercritical hostility that, in 1897, Davis was suddenly missed. About the same time the stories in the London Times on the war between Turkey and Greece began to attract universal attention. The Times, said one of the New York newspapers, which had shown especial bitterness toward its former reporter, has discovered a brilliant war correspondent. It seemed that people all over the world were asking, Who is he? It was Mr. Davis, proving, under the cloak of the Times' traditional anonymity his right to be respected as a descriptive writer of the first quality. He repeated this success the next year in Cuba, during the Spanish war, when his extraordinary skill in the description of picturesque incidents was favored by the circumstance that the generals and admirals themselves were sending home virtually all the news.
When, last year, Mr. Davis went to South Africa it was commonly expected that he would take sides with the British. Never was public expectation more emphatically at fault. In a moment he took the measure of the British cause and the British tactics; both of these things disgusted him. He put Mr. Kipling himself to shame by serving "the God of Things as They Are"; and as a result he forfeited many friendships which he had made in England. But he won the hearts of his countrymen. His courageous honesty destroyed in this country the last vestige of captious hostility.
To-day, at the age of thirty-eight, just at the entrance to full-blown life, Mr. Davis is widely admired and honored. He has pleased the light-hearted with his pretty romantic tales, and he has satisfied the strong of heart with his many examples of an unerring sense of the true comedy and the true pathos of life, and, moreover, of his remarkable personal fearlessness. Perhaps the term which a friend applied to him is most fitting—perhaps he may best be called a "sublimated reporter"; for your sublimated reporter must be at once an imperturbable philosopher and an artist holding the mirror up to nature.
The author's marriage to Miss Cecil Clark of Chicago, at Marion, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1899, was an event remarkable for its jollity. Last year Mrs. Davis accompanied her husband to South Africa. She is said to be as skillful with the pencil as he is with the pen.
