The Project Gutenberg eBook, Famous Authors (Men), by E. F. (Edward Francis) Harkins

The cover image was restored by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. The photograph on the cover image is of Mark Twain.

FAMOUS AUTHORS—MEN

Reproduced, by permission, from "A Pair of Patient Lovers."—Copyright, 1901, by
Harper & Brothers.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

Copyright, 1901
By L. C. Page & Company

(INCORPORATED)

All rights reserved

Fourth Impression, February, 1906

COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U.S.A.

PREFACE

The aim of this book is to present to the reading public sketches of some of its American literary heroes. There are heroes young and old; but in literature, especially, age has little to do with favorites. At the same time, it will be noted that the subjects of these sketches occupy places in or near the centre of the literary stage. The lately dead, like Maurice Thompson; the hero of the last generation, like Edward Everett Hale; the young man who has made his first successful flight—these do not come within the scope of the present work. So, if some reader miss his favorite, let him understand that at least there was no malice in the exclusion.

A part of the aim has been to present the social or personal as well as the professional side of the authors. Many of the anecdotes commonly told of well-known novelists are apocryphal or imaginary. Care, therefore, has been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. Wherever it was possible, preference has been given the statements of the authors themselves.

The sketches are arranged chronologically, that is, in the order of the authors' first publications. No other arrangement, indeed, would seem fair among so gifted and popular a company, writing for a public that discriminates while it encourages and enjoys.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Mr. Howells has reached that point of life and success where he can afford to sit down and look back. But he is not that sort of man. He will probably continue to work and to look forward until, in the words of Hamlet, he shuffles off this mortal coil.

William Dean Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837. He has therefore reached the ripe age of sixty-four. When he was three years old his father moved from Martin's Ferry to Hamilton and bought The Intelligencer, a weekly paper. Nine years afterward he sold The Intelligencer and moved to Dayton, becoming proprietor of the Dayton Transcript. This paper had been a semi-weekly, but Mr. Howells changed it to a daily; and his son William went to work for him. It was William's business to rise at four in the morning and sell the paper about town. But the Transcript proved a failure, so the Howells family left Dayton and moved into the country on the banks of the Miami, where for a year a log-cabin was their home.

Mr. Howells tells a characteristic story of those struggling days, "When I was a boy," he said some years ago, "I worked on my father's paper. Among other things, I set type. Those were days of great struggle for all of us. The paper was not profitable, and ours was a large family. My tastes and ambitions were all literary, and I wanted to write a story. Instead of writing it and then setting it up in type, I composed it at the case and put it in type as I invented it. We printed a chapter of it weekly in the paper, and so it was published as fast as I got it up. I tried to get three or four chapters ready in advance, but I could not do it. All I could possibly accomplish was to have one installment ready every time the paper went to press. This went on for a long while, and that story became a burden to me. It stretched out longer and longer, but I could see no way to end it. Every week I resolved that that story should be finished in the next week's paper; every week it refused to be finished. Finally I became positively panic stricken, and ended it somehow or other. The experience discouraged me to some extent. I made up my mind that I could not invent."

In 1851, when William was fourteen, the family moved from the country to Columbus, where his father got employment as a clerk in the House of Representatives, and also as a compositor on the Ohio State Journal. William went to work as a reporter on the Journal. Five years later he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette. In 1859 he took the position of news editor of the Ohio State Journal. Later that same year Howells senior, from whom the son evidently inherited his industry and ambition, bought the Ashtabula Sentinel and transferred the property to Jefferson, whither the family moved. William took the position of subeditor of the Sentinel.

From time to time poems by young Howells had appeared in the Ohio newspapers. Some of his verses, too, had even been published by The Atlantic Monthly. In 1860, in collaboration with John J. Piatt, he published his first volume of verse—"Poems by Two Friends." In 1860, also, Howells's "Life of Abraham Lincoln" was published. With the earnings of this immediately popular work our author journeyed to the East by way of Canada. In Boston he first met James Russell Lowell, who was then editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Afterward he visited the publishers, Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, primarily in connection with one of his poems which The Atlantic then had in hand, "The Pilot's Story." Mr. Fields introduced Howells to Mr. Ticknor, "who, I fancied," says Howells in his "Literary Friends and Acquaintance," "had not then read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, 'I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold.'"

While making his residence in Boston, Howells met Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne and Emerson. Emerson rather discouraged him by remarking as they were saying good-bye to each other, that one might very well give a pleasant hour to poetry "now and then."

When the young Ohioan met Mr. Fields again he proposed himself as assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Fields replied that if the post had not just been filled the intrepid poet certainly should have had it.

"He was charmingly kind," writes Mr. Howells of the interview; "he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very seriously that I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something he asked with dancing eyes,

"'Why, how old are you?'

"'I am twenty-three,' I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again.

"'Well,' he said, 'you begin young, out there!'"

From 1861 to 1865, during the War of the Rebellion, Mr. Howells was United States Consul at Venice, which position was a reward for his life of Lincoln. In Venice he wrote occasionally for American newspapers; and there he also wrote the articles of which, eventually, his delightful "Venetian Life" and "Italian Journeys" were composed.

Returning to this country, he re-entered the newspaper world, working mostly for the New York Tribune and the New York Times; and he also became a regular contributor to The Nation. In 1866 he achieved his great ambition, Mr. Fields appointing him assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly. From that year until 1886, when he moved to New York, he lived on terms of enviable intimacy with the group of great writers which made Boston the one brilliant literary centre the country has ever seen.

However, this success did not come until after many defeats. Mr. Howells's letters from Venice were published regularly in the Boston Advertiser; but elsewhere, for the most part, the young author had met little encouragement. It was only just before he left Venice, when Lowell, then, with Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of the North American Review, accepted Howells's article on "Recent Italian Comedy," that the cloud broke. Lowell accepted the manuscript in "one of his loveliest letters," as Mr. Howells says. "His message" the author confesses, "came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief in Vienna; but I valued my admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor." Financially, the encouragement was slight. The North American was "as poor as it was proud"; and it paid Howells for his article at the rate of only two dollars a page. From the Advertiser he had been paid at the rate of about a dollar a thousand words. It was on March 19, 1866, his twenty-ninth birthday, that the vagrant author began his work on The Atlantic at a salary of fifty dollars a week.

"The whole affair," Mr. Howells writes, "was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly."

It was a most delicate position which he occupied on The Atlantic from 1866 to 1872, when Fields withdrew and Mr. Howells became sole editor. In the beginning, as he says himself, he ventured to distinguish mediocrity in some verses by Whittier. "He sent me a poem," says Howells, "and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it, and printed it, and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them."

At another time, when a choice was accidentally enforced between a poem by Holmes and a poem by Emerson, Mr. Howells had the courage to request Emerson that his poem might be held over for the next number. Emerson wrote back to "return the proofs and break up the forms." "I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine," says Mr. Howells, "but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds."

From 1872 until 1880 Mr. Howells was sole editor of The Atlantic; and the rich social and literary experience which he gained during that term he has embodied in that most delightful of American bookmen's chronicles, "Literary Friends and Acquaintance."

Mr. Howells's first piece of fiction, "Their Wedding Journey," was published in 1872, the year that he became sole editor of The Atlantic. Seven years ago in a newspaper interview, Mr. Howells made this statement in regard to this work: "I wrote 'Their Wedding Journey' without intending to make it a piece of fiction or considering it to be one after I had finished it. It was simply a book of American travel, which I hoped to make attractive by a sugar coating of romance. I was very familiar with the route over which I had taken the bridal couple, and I knew it was beautiful, and, like most American scenery, was not appreciated. The book was more of a success than I expected it to be. I attributed its success to the descriptions of American scenery and places. I gave it to a family friend and asked her to mark those parts of it which she thought real incidents. I was very much astonished and greatly pleased to find, when she returned it, that she had marked some passages which were purely invention. This made me ask myself if I might not hope to write a novel some day."

The question was evidently answered in the affirmative, for after 1872 Mr. Howells's output of fiction became regular and profuse. His novels have all been more or less popular. He is fondest himself of "A Modern Instance," we are told; and he regards "A Hazard of New Fortunes" as his best novel. It may safely be said that the book which it was the greatest pleasure to him to write is "Literary Friends and Acquaintance," published late last year. Altogether his works number about seventy-five. Mr. Howells is a plodder. "I believe," he once said to an interviewer, "in the inspiration of hard work." As a rule all successful authors have held this belief.

Mr. Howells resigned from The Atlantic in 1880 to engage in general literary work. Six years later he formally transferred his allegiance from Boston to New York by accepting charge of "The Editor's Study" in Harper's. Afterward, for a time, he was editor of The Cosmopolitan. Late in 1900 he resumed his editorial connection with Harper's.

Although admired the world over, and dignified with the title of Doctor of Laws, which he got from Yale in 1871, Mr. Howells is hospitable and genial, just as Dr. Holmes was; and many young writers with more or less glittering names owe much to his counsel and his encouragement.

BRET HARTE.

BRET HARTE

Bret Harte has been called the writer of the best short stories in the English language. A literary court of arbitration would doubtless find that the best of his short stories are without superiors. It should not be forgotten that the reading public is still under the magic spell which Mr. Harte wove more than a third of a century ago with "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Plain Language from Truthful James," "Tennessee's Partner," "Miggles" and the other works which first called attention to the author's still unquestioned genius. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "Under the Redwoods" mark the present extremes of one of the most romantic chapters in our literary history.

Some years ago, when the popular writer and his wife were spending the summer at Newport, a woman said confidentially to Mrs. Harte, "What is your husband's real name?" It evidently did not seem natural to the inquirer that an author could always have borne such a crisp and striking name; and the same idea, that the name must be simply a happy pseudonym, has, we believe, struck many others. The idea is partly wrong and partly right. Francis Brett Harte was his name originally. That form was changed to Francis Bret Harte, then to F. Bret Harte, and finally to the attractive form which long ago endeared itself to the whole English-reading world. For it is well known, undoubtedly, that the Bret Harte stories are quite as popular in England and in the British colonies as in the United States; that Germany yields to none in her admiration for them; and that one of them, "Gabriel Conroy," has been printed in at least fourteen languages. Indeed, a quarter of a century ago the name of Bret Harte was as powerful the world over as was Mr. Kipling's a few years since. Perhaps the felicitous brevity of the name was one of the elements of that power.

Bret Harte was born in Albany, N. Y., on August 25, 1839. His father was at that time a teacher in the Albany Female Seminary. Bret was still in boyhood when his father died. The boy, who had received an ordinary public school education, went to California with his mother in 1854. The Golden State was then one enormous mining-camp. The laws were largely unwritten. A passion either for gold or for adventure had taken possession of thousands of persons and thrown them together in one of the wildest parts of the world. In this exciting school of life young Harte studied his first lessons of life. For three years he was thrown hither and thither, with his eyes and his ears wide open, and with his mind sponging up the lively incidents which, through his skillful pen, have since become the idyls of the pioneer West, with all its vice and virtue, its heroes and cravens, its showy wealth and its heart-touching poverty. For a year he was an express rider, with a route lying among the ravines and gulches of the northern part of the State; and what he had not learned by his own observation he learned during this period from other observers. This was the time when Yuba Bill and the other heroic road-agents took form in his imagination. At another time he picked up the trade of compositor in a newspaper office in Eureka; and at still another time he went out prospecting, and there was a sign of later days in the fact that before the three years of his uncertainty came to an end he taught school for a short while. It was then that, for the first time, he indulged the literary instincts awakened by his experience in the newspaper office in Eureka. This budding age is outlined in "M'liss."

In 1857 the young man settled down in San Francisco as a compositor in the office of the Golden Era, a weekly periodical. A few round-about-town sketches called "A Boy's Dog," "Sidewalkings," and "In a Balcony," submitted most humbly and respectfully to the editor, brought to the ambitious printer the reward of an invitation to join the editorial staff. With the acceptance of the invitation began a most brilliant literary career. We are indebted to a friend of the author's for the statement: "Those were busy days, and much of the matter ground out in that time of probation is as pregnant with genius and wit as any that he has seen fit to retain in his complete edition." But the edition is not yet complete, we may remark.

When, not long afterward, a weekly called The Californian was established in San Francisco, the new writer went over to it enthusiastically. In the columns of this periodical and of some of the daily papers appeared the poems and the sketches which rounded out Mr. Harte's "time of probation." The Californian was the means of acquainting him with Mark Twain, also a new figure on the literary horizon. Indeed, it has been said by men who knew the little group of enthusiasts connected with The Californian that it was Harte who induced the Mississippi pilot first to put to use his genius as a humorist.

This catch-penny work of the days of The Californian was profitable to Harte simply as experience. Like many another story-teller, he came to the conclusion that steady employment, with a few leisure hours in the day, would do more to advance him than anything else, and so he found work, first in the United States Surveyor General's office, then with the United States Marshal, and later in the mint. Shortly before going to the mint he was introduced to Easterners by a sketch in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Legend of Monte Diablo," which introduction was due largely to the patronage of Jessie Benton Fremont, one of the most cultivated women in California. His secretaryship at the mint, which began in 1864, led to a very productive period, some of the fruits of which are "John Burns of Gettysburg," "The Pliocene Skull," "The Society on the Stanislow" and the remarkable "Condensed Novels," in the writing of which, as one of the old-time critics remarked "a new set of faculties was required."

At this point naturally comes in the question, What was Bret Harte's first book? The question was answered last year by the author himself, in this statement: "When I say that my first book was not my own, and contained beyond the title page not one word of my own composition, I trust that I shall not be accused of trifling with paradox, or tardily unbosoming myself of plagiary. But the fact remains that in priority of publication the first book for which I became responsible, and which probably provoked more criticism than anything I have written since, was a small compilation of California poems indited by other hands. There was an ominous calm when the book reached the market. Out of it the bolt fell. A well-known mining weekly, which I will poetically veil under the title of the Red Dog Jay Hawk, was the first to swoop down upon the tuneful and unsuspecting quarry as follows: 'The hog wash and "purp" stuff ladled out from the slop bucket of Messrs. —— and Company, of 'Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice and called "A Compilation of Californian Verses," might be passed over as far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture "Californian," it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted Yellow Hammer, whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the Jay Hawk. That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and the thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make allusion to California's greatest bard, is rather a confession of idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.'"

There were other bolts quite as forceful, but as a sample of the literary criticism found in California in the great mining days, and also of the reins that kept editorial enterprise in check, the foregoing will suffice.

In 1868, while Mr. Harte was still working in the mint and quietly hitching his literary wagon to a star, Mr. Roman, an ambitious San Francisco publisher, projected The Overland Monthly, a periodical that has had considerable influence on the literary growth of the far West. He invited the secretary of the mint to be its editor. The invitation was accepted, and the editor-to-be at once went to work on a story for the first number, which was to appear in July. The scheme of the magazine was thoroughly Eastern, but the editor decided that, for the honor of the West, his story should have a strong local flavor. He called it "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and, without a thought of any impropriety, had it put into type. For the sake of accuracy we take the liberty of relating the consequences as they were related in the old days:

"The first intimation that it was likely to arouse criticism of any kind, good or bad, came to him in the form of a protest from the young woman who read proof on the paper. She sent word to him that if matter as indecent as 'The Luck of Roaring Camp' was to be printed in The Overland Monthly she could not retain her place as an employee of the paper. Harte read the story over again in proof to see where the indecencies were, but could find none. Then he took it to the owner of the paper, and asked his opinion of it. The owner took it home and read it to his wife. It made her cry, and she thought it was a powerful production, but she agreed with the proof-reader that it was too daring in its conception, and too frank in its details even for the not-over particular society which inhabited California. Harte heard her judgment with amazement. He was utterly unable to see anything improper in the story. Finally the owner of the paper so far went over to the side of the story's critics as to say that he thought the story would have to be left out. Harte took a day and a night to think the matter over, and then he announced his own decision. He said that if the story was left out of that month's issue of The Overland Monthly he would himself insist on being left out of all connection with the paper in the future. There was no quarrel. He simply was certain that his judgment was good, and felt that if it was considered bad on this occasion by the owner, he would never be able to suit him in the future. Finally, after the matter had been placed on this definite basis, the owner made up his mind to let the story run." We have met the account of the momentous difficulty in a slightly different form, but the account which we have repeated may be accepted as substantially correct.

"The Luck of Roaring Camp" did not please the Californians, and it seemed for some time as if the censure of the feminine critics would be justified popularly; but when the flattering opinions of the Eastern readers were reported, the gold hunters changed their minds. No doubt they were astonished to hear that a Boston publishing house, at that time the most powerful organization of its kind in the land, had offered to accept anything the author might offer at his own terms.

Harte was busy sending provisions to the snowbound camps in the Sierras in the fall of 1868, so that his next story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," made its appearance as late as January, 1869. That same year, too, "Plain Language from Truthful James," popularly known as "The Heathen Chinee," came to delight the reading public; and since that time Bret Harte's fame has remained more or less brilliant.

For a time he filled the chair of Modern Literature in the University of California. In 1871 he came East. The journey was a triumph. Nothing like it ever occurred before, or has occurred since. Once in the East, The Atlantic Monthly agreed to pay him one thousand dollars a month for a poem and a short story; but the author soon found the agreement irksome. He lectured and wrote at his leisure in this country until 1878, when he was appointed United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and two years later he was sent to Glasgow. His term there closed in 1885, and ever since he has made London his home.

However, he has always been Californian in his stories. His latest offering, "Under the Redwoods," is as reflective of the growing days of the West as are early masterpieces like "Tennessee's Partner" and "Miggles." His star may be a trifle lower in the heavens than it was when he went abroad, but it is still of the first magnitude.

MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain's real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. There is a story to the effect that one of his ancestors, by name Gregory Clement, an adherent of Cromwell, added his voice to the condemnation of Charles I. and was beheaded for it by Charles II. However, it is neither as Clement nor as Clemens that the most celebrated of contemporaneous American authors is, or has been, popularly known, but by the pen-name of Mark Twain, which he adopted when he was piloting on the Mississippi, more than forty years ago.

In fun or in earnest—it is hard to fathom his moods—Mr. Clemens said lately that he was working on an autobiography which must not be opened until he has been in his grave for a century. So far as the main facts are concerned, however, the humorist's autobiography is already an open book. It has been chronicled piece by piece in a hundred magazines and in a thousand newspapers since 1868, when "Innocents Abroad" appeared, up to the present day. Probably no other living author has been so beset by the requests of editors and the importunities of reporters; and assuredly no other living author has been more amiable or more liberal in his responses. No, a good portion of the autobiography of Mr. Clemens, or Mark Twain,—we shall use each name impartially,—will be submitted to the public within a hundred hours after his death—and may that inevitable conclusion be far, far off!

As a man and as a writer Mr. Clemens has invariably carried the colors of the typical American. A stern sense of duty and of honor, a seldom absent sense of humor, inexhaustible energy, dauntless pluck, unfeigned simplicity and abiding sympathy and fidelity, are the salient characteristics of the typical American—of Mr. Clemens. At the same time, above and beyond the writer's unexcelled powers of observation and richness of imagination is his fine sense of artistry. "Mark Twain's humor will live forever," Mr. Howells is reported to have said some years ago, "because of its artistic qualities. Mark Twain portrays and interprets real types, not only with exquisite appreciation and sympathy, but with a force and truth of drawing that makes them permanent." So fastidious a critic as Prof. Barrett Wendell has lately dwelt on the constant and irresistible charm of Huckleberry Finn.

Mr. Clemens was born in a little Missouri village named Florida on Nov. 30, 1835. His father, John Marshall Clemens, of a good Virginia family, was one of the pioneers who, early in the century, crossed the Alleghanies and sought new fortunes in the unsettled West. His mother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Lampton, also, like her husband, came of good English stock. Her forefathers had plunged into the wilds with Daniel Boone; and she herself has been described as "one of those beautiful, graceful, and vivacious Kentucky girls who have contributed so much to the reputation of that fortunate State." A cousin of Mr. Clemens, by the way, who was one of the humorist's playmates sixty years ago, is the Rev. Eugene Joshua Lampton, who, by some of the people in Missouri, is called "the Bishop of the diocese." Elder Lampton is the possessor of the original subscription list which Mr. Clemens carried when he was a newspaper boy in Hannibal. But this is reaching ahead a little.

They say that Mr. Clemens's mother was not only remarkably winsome but remarkably intelligent. When the author was a youngster one of his relatives said of him: "He's a perfect little human kaleidoscope." "Yes," added another, "and he gets that from his mother." Samuel's mother could "write well," which was no small accomplishment in the south-west in the thirties.

When Samuel was about nine years old his father decided to move to Hannibal, in the same State. The prime cause of this immigration was the failure of the elder Clemens to make Salt River navigable; hence, as one writer has suggested, the probable origin of the old synonym for disaster, "gone up Salt River."

Young Clemens was sent to school in Hannibal. Some of his schoolmates are living in the old town to-day. He seems to have enjoyed the rule of two teachers, Miss Newcomb and Miss Lucy Davis. Physically, he was not a strong boy, but intellectually he seems always to have been more than a match for any boy of his age. He had two brothers, Orion, who was considerably older, and Henry, who was the youngest of them all. Samuel attended school until his father died in 1847. The death of the father, who had just been elected county judge, was a hard blow to the family. After the death of his father, the subject of our sketch went to work for the local newspaper as a carrier. Afterward he served as "devil" and type-setter, and then, having completed his apprenticeship and thinking to better himself elsewhere, he set off on foot for the East. Doing odd jobs at the case and the press, he finally reached Philadelphia. Thence he went to New York. But the East did not please him, and at seventeen he was back in Hannibal.

He was now on his uppers, as the phrase is, and, in addition to its adventurous side, the financial side of steamboat life on the Mississippi magnetized him. There, for instance, was the pilot, the guide of the great smoking craft, a man who knew everything thought worth knowing, a man looked up to by every merchant, every traveler and every desperado. Samuel determined to become a pilot, and the picturesque Capt. Horace E. Bixby took him under his wing. In his "Life on the Mississippi" Mark Twain describes with all his eloquence the interesting and exciting life of a pilot on the treacherous river. And was not the pilot's a great and attractive post for a young man? "If you will take," says Mark, "the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky-black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street-crossing, the character, size and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs on that long street and change their places once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi."

The life on the river, with its ever-changing dramatic and entertaining incidents, awoke the young man's sleeping imagination—gave him a strong desire to put to use the modest literary methods which he had acquired as an itinerant printer. Mr. Howells, too, it will be noticed, first had the passion for authorship aroused in him by the types and the presses.

The first sketches which Mr. Clemens sent to the local papers were signed "Iosh," a meaningless signature, which quickly made the young author desire something better. The improvement came to him when one day he heard a "big black negro" who was taking soundings call out "Mark twain!" which meant that there were two fathoms of water. The call struck the pilot's fancy, and he kept it in mind for future use.

Mr. Clemens served in the pilot-house—one of the best school-houses in the world, it may be said—until the war broke out. Then he ran blockades for a while, and for two weeks he carried a gun in the Confederate army, under General Harris. The two weeks' service cooled his ardor, and he went farther west with his brother Orion, who, as a sympathizer with the Union side, had received an appointment as Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. Samuel was to act as his brother's secretary, but as in this office he did nothing and earned nothing, he, after an attempt at prospecting, joined the staff of the Virginia City Enterprise. It was as the Enterprise's correspondent at the capital of the Territory, Carson City, that Mr. Clemens first used the striking pseudonym "Mark Twain." But he had no taste for routine work; or, rather, his manner of garnishing, often with his stinging satire, his routine work, did not suit the taste of the editor of the Enterprise, and at the end of six months Mark Twain stamped the dust of Nevada from his shoes and struck out for California, where he readily secured employment on the Union. In the spring of 1865 he took an interest with Bret Harte in a short-lived weekly called The Californian, and some of the humorous articles which he wrote for that publication were widely copied in the East. Later the Union sent him to the Hawaiian Islands to describe the sugar industry. His work as a correspondent was very successful, and so was the lecture tour which he made in California when he returned.

Major Pond, by the way, relates that Mark Twain committed his lecture to memory and was entirely confident of success; still, desiring to forestall even the possibility of failure, he arranged with some friend of his—Major Pond has forgotten her name—to sit in a box and start the applause if he should look in her direction and stroke his mustache. "Instead of failing, however," the Major reports, "the lecture started propitiously, and that caused Mark to forget his instructions to the lady. By and by, unconsciously, when the audience was filled to the neck with pleasure and sore with laughter, he unwittingly turned to the box where his friend sat and pulled his mustache. At the time he was saying nothing particularly good or funny, but the anxious lady took his action for the signal, and almost broke her fan on the edge of the box in a fury of applause." It took all the nerve which Mark had accumulated among the gamblers and crevasses of the Mississippi to pass through the embarrassment.

In 1867 Mr. Clemens published his first book, "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches," of which about four thousand copies were sold. That same year he went to Europe with the excursionists aboard the Quaker City.

This excursion proved to be the turning point in his career. He had a commission to write sketches of the journey for the Alta Californian. The sketches were duly published, and were then collected and offered to a publisher for marketing in book form. The material did not appeal to the publisher; it was startlingly uncut and undried. But Mark was insistent, and by and by the book appeared under the title of "Innocents Abroad." That book established Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist. During the thirty-three years which have intervened between that day and the present, Mark Twain's reputation has been maintained at a matchless height. No one has been deemed worthy by the reading public—which, after all, is the Supreme Court in literary matters—to be called his rival. And since the publication of "Innocents Abroad" Mark Twain's career has been public property, with no signs, no fences, not even a dog therein to bark at night.

Mark Twain's career stands unequalled in the literary history of America. He has been honored as an author and as a lecturer in almost every part of the world. He made a fortune and lost it; and now he is making another.

The literary historian must record in his case the prodigious achievement of an author remaining for at least thirty-three years—and who knows how many more will follow?—in almost steady demand in print and on the platform.

But in more than a literary sense was that excursion to Europe on the Quaker City the turning-point in Mark Twain's career, for it was on that memorable journey that he met Miss Olivia L. Langdon of Elmira, N. Y., who afterward became his wife; who is the subject of the most eloquent words which he ever penned, and who, if we are to believe their long-termed friend, Major Pond, "makes his works so great."

"LEW" WALLACE

Gen. "Lew" Wallace is the author of the most popular story ever written by an American. "Ben Hur" has been translated into every language which can boast of a literature. In the summer of 1900 it was estimated that nine hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold. It is safe to say that by this time the million mark has been reached. This literary phenomenon is enlarged by the fact that "Ben-Hur" has never appeared in a cheap, that is, a paper-covered, edition. The General has been urged repeatedly to authorize the publication of such an edition, but his refusal has been firm from the first. A friend of his who once heard the author repeat his refusal, exclaimed: "Good for you!" It is a question whether this friendly enthusiasm served any high purpose. If, as has often been reported, "Ben Hur" has converted many readers to Christianity, then its circulation might well be furthered in every way possible.

We mention this circumstance because of the half-sacred nature which, not simply in the minds of emotional readers but also in the mind of the stern-charactered author himself, the book has been gradually assuming. A few years ago General Wallace, while on a lecture tour among the big cities, related how "Ben Hur" was conceived and brought forth. He frankly admitted that prior to its conception, his religious views were unstable. But as the ideas took hold of him, as chapter followed chapter, as the central figure emerged under his pen from the mist of the early years in Bethlehem into the divine glow of the later years around Jerusalem, his own life underwent changes, until at length, when the work was done, he stepped forth a militant Christian for the first time in his life. We have heard many authors describe the manner in which their books were born, but Lew Wallace's description of the birth of "Ben Hur," for impressiveness and for entertainment, stands alone.

If the General had done nothing else but write the tale of Christ his fame would be certain of outlasting generations. But, as a matter of fact, the wonderful book represents only one of his many qualifications to sit among the Immortals, as we shall see presently.

The author was born in Brookville, Ind., on April 10, 1827. His father was David Wallace, who, after graduation from West Point and a two years' service in the army, adopted the profession of law and went to live in the little Indiana town. Six years after Lewis was born his father was elected lieutenant governor by the Whigs, and three years later he was elected governor. From 1841 to 1843 Governor Wallace represented his district in Congress. His political career was brought to a close simply, it is said, because he voted for an appropriation to assist Professor Morse to establish telegraph communication between Baltimore and Washington. Lewis's mother was Esther Test, a daughter of a well-known Indiana judge, who is described as a woman of marked beauty and culture, and to whom may be traced the son's artistic and literary genius. She died in 1837, but her children were fortunate to be reared and trained by a woman of extraordinarily strong character, Zerelda Saunders, the daughter of an Indianapolis doctor, who, when she had devotedly completed her performance of the none too attractive duties of a stepmother, worked for the causes of temperance and equal suffrage, according to a woman who knew her well, with "eloquence, dignity, enthusiasm and conscientiousness."

General Wallace avoided school. Thus he missed the basis which erudition demands, but he at least improved his passion for art and for literature. What he enjoyed most was to stroll out of town to the wild-grown fields and woods, and there he would read his favorite books and study nature. Not one of our authors knows nature more intimately. In fact, in those juvenile days he thought seriously of becoming an artist; and though, if the thought had ever been realized, literature would have lost much, still art might have gained in equal proportion. For at the General's home in Crawfordsville are some excellent examples of his skill with the brush. One of his notable pictures represents the conspirators concerned in the assassination of President Lincoln. Another equally remarkable work of art is his portrait of the Sultan of Turkey. Many of the General's friends have valuable samples of his artistic genius.

We mention these facts to show that there was once good ground for the author's ambition to be an artist. Yet at the age of eighteen, just when one would expect such a talent to exert itself irresistibly, young Wallace enlisted to fight against Mexico. He was made a second lieutenant and ordered to guard the stores at the mouth of the Rio Grande. In Mexico he found the material for "The Fair God," his first novel, on which he worked occasionally for twenty years. At the end of the Mexican war he returned to Indiana to study law, in which respect, it will be noticed, he followed in the footsteps of his father. Three years after his admission to the bar he married Susan Elston, of Crawfordsville, herself of no mean literary gifts, as her three collections of charming sketches, "The Land of the Pueblos," "The Storied Sea," and "The Repose in Egypt," attest. The Wallaces lived in Crawfordsville until the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion. Thereupon the young lawyer went straight to Indianapolis and offered his services to the governor. For a while he served as adjutant-general. Then he took the colonelcy of a regiment of zouaves, and with such vigor and success that early in September, 1861, he was brevetted brigadier-general. For gallantry at Fort Donelson he was afterwards brevetted major-general. At the close of the war he was one of the most distinguished soldiers in the land. As a recognition of his great services—in July, 1864, according to Secretary Stanton and General Grant, he had saved Washington from destruction—he was appointed to the commission which tried the assassins of Lincoln. That duty done, he returned to Crawfordsville.

This return home signalized the real beginning of his literary career. He was now not far from forty years of age, and he was not content to live on his military reputation. Law had little power over him. So he turned to the manuscript which had been growing slowly for many years; and 1873 saw the publication of "The Fair God," the souvenir of the author's service in the Mexican war. Compared with the average romance, "The Fair God" possesses exceptional power and originality. "Ben-Hur" appeared in 1880; but it must not be supposed that General Wallace gave this second book his exclusive attention for the seven years that had passed. It was half written when, in 1878, President Hayes appointed the distinguished Indianian Governor of New Mexico. The visitor at the Wallace homestead in Crawfordsville will be shown the beech tree in the shade of which the work was done. To the way in which he works we shall turn later. The concluding half of the tale was written at spare moments in the governor's palace in Santa Fé, which Mrs. Wallace has described as "the last rallying-place of the Pueblo Indians."

At first the more captious of the critics accented their discovery that "Ben-Hur" showed no rhetorical improvement over "The Fair God"; and, though they were right, they erred sadly in trying to measure the book with narrow rules. It has defects, as the most sympathetic critic must admit; but the impartial critic must also admit that in boldness and grandeur of conception and in vigor and beauty of style, the story stands unequalled in American literature, and, in parts, unexcelled in the romantic literature of any nation. Here and there are unbalanced sentences, graceless phrases, misplaced words, and interpolations that detract from the unity of effect desirable in all works of art; but here and there, too, especially in the chapters descriptive of the Grove of Daphne and of the chariot race, is a vivid power at once more charming and more thrilling than anything to be found in any other English novel. "A great historical romance," as one of our critics remarked many years ago, "is not to be made with reference to the square and the compass. It must be a vivid historical impression, and at the same time a wisely considered story of life." "Ben-Hur" adequately fulfills these two fundamental conditions. Moreover it perfectly fulfills, delicately yet impressively, the great moral purpose which the author imposed upon himself. As we recall the author's narrative of the writing of the tale, this moral purpose, beginning gently, gradually acquired a force that mastered him completely. It was like a flood that first trickles through the seam in the dam, and then, gathering in volume, sweeps all before it. The characters themselves, from Christ to the faithful steward, display the highest flight of imagination to be found in any American novel. Indeed, many of the landscape features themselves are so wonderfully vivid that the same praise awarded Tom Moore for his imaginative descriptions of the East may judiciously be extended to General Wallace. We have heard the General say that a scene which he had regarded as purely fictitious or imaginative appeared in surprising reality when, years after the book was published, he first visited Palestine.

Of the tremendous sensation which "Ben-Hur" made when it appeared, and of the phenomenal success which it has maintained even down to the present time, it is, we presume, unnecessary to speak. The author, as we noted before, has guarded its fame diligently, jealously; in fact, although Lawrence Barrett urged him years ago to allow the book to be dramatized, he did not yield to solicitation in this form until 1900. This circumstance reminds us that the General once wrote a play called "Commodus," but its multiplicity of leading characters has kept it in his desk. It would bankrupt any manager in America, they told him. "The Prince of India," the romance published in 1893, suffered, as it must have suffered, by comparison with "Ben-Hur." Judged by itself, it is delightful. It exemplifies the writer's remarkable creative force and his ever-youthful enthusiasm. Probably the last notable work from the General's pen will be the autobiography on which he has been at work for the last few years.

General Wallace's diplomatic experience at Constantinople is worthy of a chapter, but we must content ourselves with saying that it added brilliancy to the honors which he had earned as a soldier and as an author. Of late the General has been living a semi-pastoral life at his estate in Indiana. He has himself described his daily habits:

"I begin to write at about 9 a.m. Keep at work till noon. Resume about 1.30 p.m., and leave my studio about 4. I then exercise for two hours. I walk or ride horseback, according to the weather. When it rains I put on a heavy pair of boots and trudge five to seven miles across the country. I usually ride about a dozen miles. To this habit of taking regular exercise I attribute my good health. I eat just what I want and as much as I want. When night comes I lie down and sleep like a child, never once waking until morning. I usually retire at 9.30 and rise at 7.30, aiming to secure nine hours' sleep. I smoke at pleasure, a pipe or a cigar, but never a cigarette, which I consider the deadliest thing a person can put in his mouth. The amount of work I produce in a day varies greatly. Sometimes I write four hundred and sometimes twelve hundred words. What I write to-day in the rough, to-morrow I revise, perhaps reducing it to twenty words, perhaps striking out all the day's work and beginning at the same point once more. That constitutes my second copy. When proofs come from the publisher another revision takes place. It consists chiefly of condensation and expurgation."

He was asked once what he considered the secret of his success. "Work," he answered, "and, as an author, the doing it myself with my own hand, not by means of a typewriter, or amanuensis or stenographer. To work I would add universal reading."

"Who is your favorite novelist?" the questioner went on.

"Sir Walter Scott."

"What is your favorite novel?"

"'Ivanhoe.'"

"And your favorite poem?"

"'Idylls of the King.'"

"What do you consider the sublimest poetry in the world?"

"You will find it in the Psalms and Job, in Homer, in Milton and in Shakespeare."

"Who, in your judgment, are the three greatest warriors the world has produced?"

"Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon."

"Who, in your opinion, were the greatest American statesmen?"

"George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Alexander Hamilton is, in my judgment, the father of the American Constitution. But that Constitution would never have been adopted save for the support given it by the great name of George Washington."

We have said, after all, far too little of this distinguished man, but all that we might say would hardly give the right emphasis to the greatness of his manifold deeds and to the charm of his personal character.

GEORGE W. CABLE.

GEORGE W. CABLE

During his visit to this country a few years ago Mr. J. M. Barrie said to the students at Smith College that no American novelist merits a higher rank than Mr. George W. Cable. True as, in the abstract, this foreign estimate of Mr. Cable's worth is, it would awaken a rather feeble echo among the devourers of our colonial literature. Yet one of the Southerner's characteristic stories, "The Grandissimes," for instance, or "Posson Jone," or "Madame Delphine," is deserving of a recommendation to the liveliest admirer of eighteenth century heroes and heroines.

At bottom, there is much in common between Mr. Barrie and Mr. Cable, and this circumstance may account for the Scotchman's enthusiastic utterance at Smith College. Each has a poetical love for nature; each has portrayed a picturesque corner of the world with the kindest intention, the broadest sympathy and the choicest skill; each has been the object of misunderstanding at home and of warm admiration abroad, and each has led where others may only follow. It is perfectly natural that two such lovable and loving men should clasp hands across the sea.

We must admit that the writer who has pictured New Orleans as vividly as Balzac pictured his beloved Paris was better known, say, ten years ago, than he is to-day. Then he had fewer distractions than he has to-day. Then he had reached the climax of his literary productivity. Then he was personally endearing himself to his fellow-countrymen with his inimitably delightful recitations and songs. There have been authors who drew larger audiences, and who, to use a homely phrase, made more noise on their tours, but there has never been an author whose readings from his works gave sweeter pleasure; and, as for his manner of singing the Creole folksongs, it was indescribably charming. Mr. John Fox, Jr., is the only other American author who has ventured to sing folk-songs publicly; and we may say, without fear of suggesting the odious comparison, that the younger man has been very successful, too.

"Many years ago," Mr. Cable once said, "when I discovered that these folk-songs of the slaves of former Louisiana Creoles had a great charm of their own and were preserved by tradition only, I was induced to gather them and reduce them to notation. I found that others were so strongly interested in the songs that, without pretending to any musical authority or original charm of voice, I was tempted to sing one or two of them before public audiences. The first time I did so was in Boston, and since then I have rarely been allowed to leave them out of my entertainment, when the length of my literary program left room for them."

But we must look back farther. To start at the very beginning, George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans on October 12, 1844. His father was of Virginian descent; his mother of New England. They were married in Indiana ten years before George was born, and they moved to New Orleans after the hard times of 1837. The father died in 1859, and then George, at the age of fifteen, went to work to help support the family. He was a very small boy for his age; and indeed it is related that in 1863, when the family was sent outside the Union lines for refusing to take the oath of allegiance, his sisters had no difficulty in obtaining permission to have their "little brother" accompany them. The "little brother," however, was not so harmless as he looked. He volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, and was mustered into the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, then in Gen. Wirt Adams's brigade. For a time after the war he rolled cotton on the New Orleans levees and carried a surveyor's chain along the banks of the Atchafalaya; and by and by he found a place on the New Orleans Picayune. He is therefore to be counted among the authors whose literary career started in the reporter's room. His strong taste for culture and his zeal for the public welfare soon made an outlet for themselves in short articles touching on current topics; and, though the articles were much enjoyed by the readers of the Picayune, the young writer before long felt the distaste for newspaper work which, early or late, comes to almost every journalist with high literary aims. Journalism is the best school of experience in the world, but it can be attended too long.

Cable resisted the fascinations of journalism firmly and wisely. At the height of his success he left the Picayune and went into the counting-room of a cotton house. He had a good eye for the picturesque features of daily life, the features met commonly in the daily papers, and at his leisure he wrote a few short stories based on New Orleans characters. One day these stories, which he had made no attempt to sell, came into the hands of an agent of the old Scribner's Monthly, who happened to visit Louisiana in connection with the well-remembered Great South papers. This agent, by name Edward King, praised the stories, and, at the author's request, sent one of them to New York. The story, for some reason, came back; but the next one sent, "Sieur George," brought a note of acceptance and encouragement from Richard Watson Gilder, Doctor Holland's associate.

A few years later a volume of these Louisiana sketches was published under the title of "Old Creole Days." It was immediately recognized as a notable addition to our short story literature. Nevertheless, the author stuck to his desk in the counting-room. Many another ambitious young writer, in the circumstances, would have given up his position and leaned entirely upon his pen. Young Cable had a cool head. He knew that he was moving forward handsomely, and that if he yielded to the excitement of the situation for a moment he might fall back. So his pen rusted for two years, when he accepted an order for a serial story. This turned out to be "The Grandissimes," a clear and entertaining exposition of the author's views of the old-fashioned Southern life, a happy mingling of fact and fiction, of fun and sobriety, of calm appreciation of the Louisiana aristocracy and a warm toleration of the struggles of the poor negro slaves. Of course, this attitude added nothing to the author's popularity among Southerners.

To illustrate this, a Southern woman, who happened to visit Northampton, where of late Mr. Cable has made his home, was asked if she ever read his stories. "Of course not," she indignantly answered; "I wouldn't think of looking at them." However, she was persuaded to look at them after a while; and it is a peculiar tribute to their delicate yet powerful charm that the woman expressed regret that she had misconceived his work and opposed his ideas.

"The Grandissimes" was so successful that the publishers are said to have sent the author a check for five hundred dollars more than the contract price. This first long tale was followed by another much the same in vein and in atmosphere, "Madame Delphine," which is the story-teller's own favorite. The subject and the style are equally delightful.

In 1879, when Mr. Cable was thirty-five years old, the business house in which he had worked to keep his feet on earth dissolved, and the clerk had to choose between returning to journalism and devoting himself entirely to literature. By this time he seems to have been more self-reliant and more confident. At any rate, he chose literature. The first thing he did was to decline to write for more than one publisher. It must be said again that a steadier head never produced a story.

A strong sense of duty, in fact, early established control of his work. His interests were not permitted to grow narrow. He realized that he possessed exceptionally abundant resources for the production of miscellaneous literature touching on the development of the middle South, and he determined to make the most of his possessions. In 1880, for example, we find him engaged in a special article on New Orleans for the Census Bureau, and his native city was also the theme of an article which he wrote for the "Encyclopedia Britannica." One of his critics has said: "Since Hawthorne's Custom House reports, few pages of the Government documents have been enriched by so discriminating a pen as in the exhaustive census monograph upon the past and present of the Southern metropolis." This paper led to a series of articles entitled "The Creoles of Louisiana," written for The Century, in which the reader will note an artistic combination of dry history and vivid imagination.

That such a painstaking, conscientious, dutiful writer should ever be charged with falling into an anachronism may seem preposterous; but although the charge has been made, we find no instance in which it has been sustained. A writer who once visited him brushed the charge aside vigorously: "Mr. Cable's plan of work," he said, "is unusually methodical, for his counting-room training has stood him in good stead. All his notes and references are carefully indexed and journalled, and so systematized that he can turn, without a moment's delay, to any authority he wishes to consult. In this respect, as in many others, he has not, perhaps, his equal among living authors. In making his notes, it is his usual custom to write in pencil on scraps of paper. These notes are next put into shape, still in pencil, and the third copy, intended for the press, is written in ink on note-paper—the chirography exceedingly neat, delicate and legible. He is always exact, and is untiring in his researches.... Before attempting to write upon any historical point, he gathers together all available material without reckoning time or trouble; and, under such conditions, nothing is more unlikely than that he should be guilty of error."

The business life which fortunately imposed so valuable a system upon him incidentally inspired his second novel, "Dr. Sevier," many of the scenes in which are faithful pictures of his own experiences as a youth. As in the historical sketches, so in this second novel the poetic imagination of the author fairly rivals his grasp of the prosaic relations existing between man and man. But such relations were supremely vital from his viewpoint, and his third novel, "Bonaventure," was written in moments stolen from the discussion of the questions of elections, prison systems, and the future of the negro. The reader will note in the hero of this story the personification of the practical strengthening and yet spiritualizing gospel which the author has enunciated in his private and public religious work. For it is important to chronicle that Mr. Cable has done as much to Christianize several communities as the most energetic minister would be expected to do; and from his scrupulous performance of not merely the ordinary Christian duties but also of duties self-imposed, he has never allowed literature or society to beguile him.

Naturally his social and political studies drew many invitations to address public meetings. It was at Johns Hopkins University, while lecturing on literary art, that, upon the suggestion of President Gilman, he ventured for the first time to read selections from his own stories. The delight of the audience was no less a surprise to him than the realization of his own elocutionary skill. This he set about to cultivate, and with such success that for years afterward he was enthusiastically welcomed to the great cities. It was once estimated that in his busiest years on the platform he traveled more than ten thousand miles every twelve months.

For various reasons, particularly that he might be able to write of the South impartially and that he might be nearer the literary market, he moved to Simsbury, Conn., in 1884, and the next year to Northampton, Mass., where he has lived ever since. But he has never lost sight of his native concern in the progress of the South; and as for his philanthropy, in Northampton it has spread wider and wider.

There, on the edge of one of the quietest and loveliest towns in Massachusetts, he has had built for himself a home suited to all his excellent tastes, and there he lives, intent always on making someone happy, and writing simply enough to maintain the brilliancy and popularity of his name.

HENRY JAMES

Henry James has been at pains, lately, to put a stop to a report that he proposes to return to America, yet by descent and at heart he is undoubtedly as loyal an American as his neighbor in England, Bret Harte. Even a cosmopolite may be patriotic.

Mr. James has been called the first American cosmopolitan author. It is an unusually interesting fact that, like Mr. Harte, who also lives in England, James was born in Albany, N. Y., the date of his birth being April 15, 1843. His grandfather, William James, who made a fortune in the Syracuse salt works, had settled in Albany soon after his immigration from Ireland. His millions were divided among eleven children, one of whom was Henry James, Sr., the novelist's father. This branch of the James family moved to Germany when our author was a boy; and there he and his brothers and sister were educated for some years. It used to be said that, like his distinguished contemporaries, Howells and Aldrich, James never enjoyed the advantages of a college education; but it is a fact, nevertheless, that the James children were thoroughly educated. Henry James, Sr., intellectually, was a remarkable man, and Miss Walsh of New York, whom he married, has been described as "his complement in the possession of sterling practical qualities and the sustaining common sense of woman." Besides, there were the educational advantages of travel which the James children enjoyed. When the Jameses returned to this country they settled in Cambridge. It was there that Howells made the acquaintance of the elder James.

We are tempted to quote extensively from Howells's memories of Henry James, Sr., but we shall confine our quotation to a single paragraph:

"At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, he said: 'He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced him.' His written style had traits of the same adventurousness, but it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he wore."

Henry James, Jr., is one of five children. Equally as celebrated as Henry, both at home and abroad, is William James, a professor at Harvard. In March, 1865, a month before his twenty-second year, Henry James made his first appearance in literature with a contribution to The Atlantic Monthly, entitled "A Story of a Year," which naturally had to do with the War of the Rebellion. It was The Atlantic which also published his first serial story, "Poor Richard," which ran through three numbers. Later followed "Gabrielle de Bergerac" and "Watch and Ward," each a little more ambitious than its predecessors; and finally came his first long story, "Roderick Hudson," which lasted through twelve numbers of The Atlantic. The stories aroused a great deal of comment, most of which was favorable. This encouraged him to abandon all thought of law, which he had studied at Harvard, and make literature his profession. About the same time he went to England, where he has since spent most of his time.

Like Harte, James has suffered from the charge of expatriation. The very fact that the English reading public, which is a most discerning public, was quick to appreciate the rare quality of James's style has been sufficient to keep some American critics in bad temper—as if the mere matter of residence has any intimate connection with literature! If James were an utter snob, if he slurred Americans or disclaimed any acquaintance with them, if his cynicism were not well founded, or if his satire were simply burlesque, he might justly be attacked; but as, personally, he is gentle and unassuming, as his cynicism is not a mania, and as his satire is more or less truthful, the belligerent critics have been largely wasting their ammunition. Probably no story of his has ever stirred up bitterer talk than "Daisy Miller," with its unconventional American heroine; yet it was only justice, not to mention literary acumen, which prompted so spirited an American as Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his "Short Studies of American Authors," to say of the author of "Daisy Miller" that "he has achieved no greater triumph than when, in this last-named book, he succeeds in holding our sympathy and even affection, after all, for the essential innocence and rectitude of the poor wayward girl whose follies he has so mercilessly portrayed." It is a singular commentary on the injustice of the denouncers of "Daisy Miller" that the young lady of Boston whom gossip made the original of the story was "cut" by society.

His friends and enemies were still further divided by "The American" and "The Portrait of a Lady," and we suspect that the author was poking a little fun at the hostile camp when he had the American woman journalist in the latter story say, "I was going to bring in your cousin—the alienated American. There is a great demand now for the alienated American, and your cousin is a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely."

Mr. James's friends say that he went to England, originally, for the benefit of his health. It cannot be gainsaid that he has a temperament which makes itself at home in all lands. He is, indeed, as much a citizen of Paris as of London, and his stories in French have been warmly praised by French critics. But it may be that, after all, he saw the wisdom of writing reminiscently, of writing at a distance from his subjects. Mr. Cable, for example, saw it when he moved North from New Orleans; and, furthermore, we know that many an author has been condemned unjustly for telling the truth. The great novelist is not the idealist, with his world of prize-baby angels and impossible saints; he is a photographer, and his mind and his hand are a camera that cannot lie. Mr. Warner once said that the object of the novel is to entertain; Mr. James has said that it is to represent life. James Lane Allen, we remember, joined the two statements thus: "The object of the novel is to entertain by representing life."

James's reach is transatlantic. Americans and Britons alike share prominence in his works. Then, too, of late, his characters have grown more and more ethereal and ghostly; they have such faint connection with the world of chalk-cliffs and prairies that the question of their citizenship is insignificant. Physically they appear to us only in episodes; intellectually they are universal types. But, really, the last word on Henry James's art was said long ago by The Spectator:

"Mr. Henry James is certainly a very remarkable illustration of the tendency of our age to subdivide, in the finest way, the already rather extreme division of labor, till a very high perfection is attained in producing articles of the most curiously specialized kind, though apparently without the power of producing anything outside that kind. For a long time we have had novelists who are wonderfully skillful in a particular form of novels, but who seem unable to master more than one form for themselves. But Mr. Henry James, though he has attained a very great perfection in his own line, seems not to aim at anything quite so considerable as a story of human life of any sort. He eschews a story. What he loves is an episode, i. e., something which by the nature of the case is rather a fragment cut out of life, and not a fair or average specimen of it, nor even such a part of it as would give you the best essence of the whole,—but rather an eddy in it, which takes you for an interval out of its main current, and only ends as you get back into the main current again, or at least at the point at which you might get back into the main current again, if some event (accidental, in relation to the art of the story) did not occur to cut off abruptly the thread of the narrative.... One might perhaps say that Mr. Henry James has discerned in relation to literature what has long been known in relation to art—that with artists of any genius, 'sketches' are apt to be more satisfying than finished pictures. But then the sketches we like so much in artists' studios are, though unfinished pictures, still pictures of what the painter has been most struck with, pictures in which he has given all that struck him most, and left only what did not strike him to be filled in by the fancy of the public. Now, Mr. Henry James does not give us sketches of the most striking features in what he sees of human life and passion, so much as finished pictures of the little nooks and bays into which human caprice occasionally drifts, when the main current of life's deeper interests has left us for a moment on one side, and rushed past us.... Mr. Henry James is not so much a novelist as an episodist, if such a term be allowable. But he is a wonderful episodist."

All in all, that is the keenest and fairest criticism of James's works ever written. It should be taken with every one of his stories, just as soda is taken with brandy. Such a criticism is not fugacious; it is complementary.

It brings to mind the amusing criticism of "The Sacred Fount," notably Carolyn Wells's "Verbarium Tremens," published in The Critic, with its bright termination—

The mad gush of "The Sacred Fount" is ringing in my ear,
Its dictional excitements are obsessing me, I fear.
For its subtle fascination makes me read it, then, alack,
I find I have the James-james, a very bad attack!

James is an exceedingly neat man, and this side of him at once strikes every visitor to his home. The only known exception to this characteristic neatness is his handwriting, which is said to be as vexatious as Horace Greeley's was. "I have a letter from him before me now," says one of his correspondents. "The signature I know to be 'Henry James.' You might take it for Henryk Sienkiewicz."

The same correspondent relates a story which throws a new light on his personality:

"You will be astonished, possibly, to know that his income from his writing is a scant three hundred pounds a year, though in spite of this there has never come a man in need to Henry James to whom he has not offered a part of what he calls his own.

"Not so long ago a novelist in England died. He left two little children, absolutely alone in the world. One of that man's friends put by a little sum for them, and, out of the kindness of his heart, wrote to other literary men soliciting their help. He sought a maker of books who lives in a castle ... whom he knew to have an income of over twenty thousand pounds from his literary work.

"'Won't you aid these little folk?' he asked. Not a cent was forthcoming.

"Henry James was written in the matter. By return mail came a check for fifty pounds, one-tenth of his whole year's income."

We have been informed that this estimate of Mr. James's income is rather small; but, even if his income be as large as that of the "maker of books who lives in a castle," the fact remains that Mr. James proved his generosity handsomely.

James has acquired his extraordinarily brilliant style at the expense of incessant and determined effort. The dazzling spontaneities are really the product of toilsome hours. He works mostly in the morning, writing slowly, and his stories are written again and again before they go off to his publisher's. With him writing is a profession, a task; he is not the child of moods. Occasionally he visits friends—old friends, like Marion Crawford—but the greater part of the year he spends quietly and almost reclusely in England.

Photo by Parker, Morristown.

FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON.

FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON

At a dinner given in honour of Mr. Frank R. Stockton by the Author's Club of New York, early in the year 1901, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the Editor of The Century, is reported to have told the following story: "A young man once came to me and said that he would like to contribute to The Century every month. I asked him what he wanted to write. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'd like to send you each month a story like "The Lady or the Tiger?"'" Mr. Gilder, we are told, said at the end of his speech that night: "When I think of the immense amount of pleasure Mr. Stockton brought into the life of Stevenson it seems to me that alone would be to him a benediction forever."

The Editor of The Century thus happily illustrated the attitude of the reading world toward Mr. Stockton: on one side is an eager desire to emulate him, and on the other an equally eager desire to go to him for pleasure or for comfort. There is a natural grace about his stories which has often deceived the inexpert into an attempt to rival him, while the sweet and simple comedy of the stories has for more than a quarter of a century been the delight of young and old. The young man who visited Mr. Gilder, and the brilliant novelist solacing himself with the acquaintance of Pomona, Ardis Claverden, Mrs. Null, and Chipperton, are types.

The object of this variety of admiration was born in Philadelphia on April 5, 1834. He belongs to the Stockton family of New Jersey, but not, he has informed us, to the Princeton branch. His father, William S. Stockton, was a well-known writer on church government.

On the matter of his ancestry Mr. Stockton has given us this interesting information: "The ancestor of the Stockton family in New Jersey came from Flushing, L. I., in 1690, and purchased a tract of several thousand acres, to which he gave the Indian name of Oneanickon. His oldest son, Richard, did not settle here, but went to Stony Brook, afterward Princeton, where he founded that illustrious line of Stocktons, among whom were the signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Commodore Stockton, to whom this country owes, in great part, the possession of California, and to whom the negro race owes Liberia. My ancestor was the second son, John Stockton, and his descendants, like himself, were generally yeomen, or farmers; but they remained true to Oneanickon, and that estate, shorn of many of its acres, but still containing the site of the old homestead of Richard and Abigail Stockton, now remains in the possession of my branch of the family, where it has been for 211 years, a pretty long stretch for America."

The story-writer's father married twice, and his second wife was the mother of Francis Richard. She was a Virginian, and from her side of the family tree was derived the name Ardis found in "Ardis Claverden." There is a Stocktonian touch in the familiar story that the author's Christian name was imposed upon him by one of his half-sisters, who borrowed a part of it from Francis I. of France and a part from Richard Cœur de Lion. The same relative gave Francis's sister the full name of Napoleon's second wife. Strange to say, Mr. Stockton has avowed a difficulty in giving his characters names.

The boy first was sent to a private school in West Philadelphia. Later he attended the public schools, and at the age of eighteen was graduated from the Central High School with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was noticed at school that his bent was to literature. In fact, this was obvious to his parents when he was only ten, for at that age he began to scribble verses. In spite of this proclivity, however, Francis, after leaving the high school, took up engraving as a profession. Just one bond was left existing between himself and the world of letters, and that was his membership in an organization of young men called the "Forensic and Literary Circle." Upon this slight basis has been erected an exceptionally successful career, for it was to the Circle that the "Ting-a-ling Stories" were first read. The Circle also heard "Kate" as soon as it was written. This tale and "The Story of Champaigne" were published by the Southern Messenger; and it is sufficient to relate that they created a demand for more like them. Thereafter, until 1874, Stockton wrote many short stories, his star all the time rising a little higher above the horizon.

But in 1874 the star blazed forth wondrously with the appearance of the first part of "Rudder Grange." From that day the author's place among the foremost American humorists has been secure. "Rudder Grange" is undoubtedly his most popular work, for it is in demand even at this late day. We have heard it said that among many of Mr. Stockton's admirers—and who, by the way, would attempt to number those happy beings?—it is regarded as his masterpiece. We shall let the statement pass without examination, believing as we do that in this case comparisons would be particularly odious. However, it is no backhanded compliment to say that upon the profusion and the quaintness of the humour of "Rudder Grange" the author has never improved.

Meantime, we should say here, the young Pennsylvanian had definitely adopted literature as a profession. He had served an apprenticeship on the Philadelphia Morning Post; later he had joined Edward Eggleston on Hearth and Home; then he had become a member of the editorial staff of Scribner's Monthly. It was while occupying this last position that he wrote "Rudder Grange." Afterward he cast his lot with the editors of St. Nicholas. In 1880, determining to devote his time entirely to story-writing, he abandoned editorial work for good and all.

Even more remarkable than the success of "Rudder Grange" was the success of "The Lady or the Tiger?" How the reading public has pondered that cunningly made mystery! How it has written and talked about it! Truly it has been—and is to-day, indeed—one of the nine wonders of the literary world! It still is unsolved. Mr. Stockton himself cannot, or perhaps will not, offer any solution. So much has been said of the puzzle that doubtless by this time the subject is distasteful to him. He has declared repeatedly that he does not know whether the Lady or the Tiger——. But there! We are raking a fire that perhaps had better be allowed to go out. Just for the sake of history we will add that a comic opera based on the story was produced in 1889.

During the last twenty years Mr. Stockton has written the stories that make up the greater part of the familiar Shenandoah edition. He always dictates his manuscript for publication, and he does his work in the morning. In the early days he dictated to his wife, who was Miss Marian E. Tuttle, of Amelia County, Virginia; but in recent years he has employed a stenographer. We have seen the statement that when the author has his subject well in mind he delivers fifteen hundred words before the morning is over.

A few years ago Stockton moved from Convent Station, New Jersey, to Charles Town, Jefferson County, West Virginia. The estate, named Claymont, embraces one hundred and fifty acres, and it was once a part of a large estate owned by Washington. There the author spends the pleasant seasons of the year, taking his vacation in the winter.

In answer to a question as to his recreations, the famous humorist has informed us: "I generally spend my afternoons out-of-doors, and my recreation is driving—doing the driving myself. For a good many years I have driven every afternoon. I lately calculated (the date of his letter is Dec. 4, 1901) that in the eight months I usually spend in the country I have driven as many miles as would take me across the continent. Wherever I am I explore every road within a radius of a dozen miles or more. My mare, Kitty, used to be my traveling companion, but now Kitty is old and I drive a pair of younger animals. But in wandering through the fields and woods Kitty still goes with me, caring no more for roads and regular ways than a poet does for the market reports. My wife and I are very fond of the country, and in all our married life, except for one month when we hired a furnished house in Washington, we have never kept house in a city.

"I am not a farmer, but I have a farm, and it is a great pleasure to me to overlook its operations; but I have inherited from my ancestors a great love of gardening, and to my garden of two acres and a half I give my special attention. Under my study windows I also have a little walled garden, thirty feet square, which is crowded with flowers from the tulip season to the days of the hardy marigold and the enduring cosmos. I very much enjoy the woods and fields about my present home.

"I used to be an enthusiastic fisherman, and have fished for many years in many waters, but of late I have not lived near any suitable stream or body of water, and in my outdoor hours I prefer the whip to the rod."

In appearance Mr. Stockton is small and spare, with partly white hair. At first glance he might be taken for a sad man, and judging by his portrait one would hardly associate him with humor—ah! and such quaint, original humor. That is the author in repose. Animated, he is another man. "The big, dark eyes, full of patient, weary expression, are luminous," says one who knew him years ago; "the mouth, close and discouraged, expands into smiling curves, sweet and sympathetic; the whole soul is in the face, and, from head to foot, Frank Stockton is the genial, responsive man. It is like a brilliant burst of sunshine following a cloud, suddenly and unexpectedly, and therefore more delicious in surprise and beauty."

No one, it is said, by the way, has ever heard Stockton laugh, but he is reputed to be a "beautiful smiler."

Mr. George Cary Eggleston once spoke of the author of "Rudder Grange" as "the greatest story-teller America has ever produced." Certainly America has produced no more delightful or more original humorist. He has given an immense amount of pleasure to the young and to the old. Now the critic is constrained to acclaim him as a spring of purest humor, and again to question whether he is not an incomparable spinner of fairy-tales. From the very first (note "The Ting-a-ling Stories") he has been very happy in his tales for children—whimsical and fanciful, but never artificial or clownish. He is always master of the situation, and he can be dignified, and even imposing, in his drollest adventures. His stories are not a mere day's tickling. They will refresh and entertain generations to come. This is no prophecy; it is rather an opinion derived from the history of his successes up to date. His early productions are no less popular than his later ones. Stockton is no stylist; he is a plain humorist. Style may be acquired, but humor must be born in a man. To be sure, there are several kinds of humor, and each kind has its devotees, some choosing Chicago slang, others the laboriously exaggerated bad spelling, and still others that vulgar offshoot colloquially known as "freshness;" but we think that they are wiser and happier who choose the odd, sweet, and charming kind developed by the creator of Pomona, Mrs. Lecks, and Mrs. Aleshine. The characters in Mr. Stockton's books are one of the best companies to be met in our literature.

Unlike most American writers, Frank R.—as he has called himself ever since his literary beginning—has drawn back from personal contact with the reading public, for, as we have said, he is a shy man. It must be hoped by his idealizing admirers that he will never overcome that shyness. Some authors are to be seen and heard—though few of them are to the platform manner born, like Mr. Cable or John Fox, Jr. We would have this beloved story-teller of the present moment remain where he has ever been—in the background, close to Wonderland. There, we like to imagine, he dwells only to conjure up the inimitable children of his brain and send them forth to give us pleasure. What a beautiful life—to ease the troubled, to cheer the downcast, to amuse all sorts and conditions of men and women and children!—to be conscious of all that and yet to continue unaffectedly simple and genial!

In the portrait accompanying this sketch the reader will see the kindliness of the eyes. It is the direct reflection of kindliness of the heart. Yes, in that heart, freshened daily perhaps by the waters of some fountain of perpetual youth, is kindliness (we have testimony to that effect before us), sweetness, and unlimited cheerfulness—enough, indeed, to re-create all those who seek his heart in his books.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS

In an article published by The Bookman not very long ago Mr. James Lane Allen remarked that Uncle Remus was one of the two names in American fiction which have attained anything like universality of acceptance, the other name being, of course, Uncle Tom. And yet fame was thrust upon Mr. Joel Chandler Harris.

It happened in this wise. Mr. Harris went to work for the Atlanta Constitution as an editorial writer in 1876, succeeding Mr. Samuel W. Small, who has since prefixed to his name the title of Reverend. Mr. Small had made a success with sketches dealing with a character called Uncle Si, and Capt. Evan P. Howell, the editor of the Constitution, desired to have the success maintained in some form. So he approached Mr. Harris with the suggestion that he should try his hand at negro sketches. The young writer was diffident. He pleaded inexperience, incapability; but Captain Howell wouldn't listen to the excuses. In a good-natured way he pursued his associate, requesting, begging, entreating, encouraging. If Mr. Harris would only put into black-and-white those plantation stories with which he was accustomed to entertain the staff! If he would only get his courage up! Finally, the young man yielded and put some of the memories of his boyhood in Putnam County, Georgia, into the mouth of a negro named Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus he has been ever since the publication of the first sketch—Uncle Remus, famous and beloved throughout the land.

Captain Howell is said to have gone to the editors' room the morning of the first appearance of Uncle Remus and shouted: "Well, Harris, you're a trump! If you just keep up that lick your fortune is made. Everybody is talking about Uncle Remus, so give us another story." It was given willingly.

Mr. Harris was born in 1848 in what used to be known as Middle Georgia. Like many another of our well-established authors, he received a good part of his education at the printer's case in a country newspaper office. It was at the case—just as in the story of Howells and of Mark Twain—that the Georgian acquired his love of journalism—a love which often very naturally develops into a love for higher and more durable literature. He joined the staff of the Atlanta Constitution at the age of eighteen. For a time he served as dramatic critic, in addition to his other service; but he soon found that he had no taste for the theatre. It must be that it was his hard lot to fall among poor actors, for it was not long before he gave up the work and formed a determination to visit the theatre as seldom as possible. Thereafter, he was virtually permitted by the editor of the Constitution to follow his own bent.

But the story is moving along a little too fast. It should be said that Mr. Harris was fortunate in his birthplace. Eatonton, the capital of Putnam County, was not a lively spot, in a mercantile sense, in the days before the war, but it could boast of an excellent school, Eatonton Academy.

Speaking of Eatonton, the Baltimore American, some thirteen or fourteen years ago, printed this strange biography of Mr. Harris under the title of "A Humorist's Sad Romance":

"Joel C. Harris, the famous humorist, of the Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, has had a strangely romantic career. His father was a missionary, and it was at the small town of Boog-hia, on the southern coast of Africa, that Joel was born. He was educated by his father, and is a profound Sanscrit scholar, besides being thoroughly versed in Hebraic and Buddhist literature. Just before the Civil War he emigrated to America, and taught school in a village near Lake Teeteelootchkee, Fla. There he fell in love with Sallie O. Curtis, daughter of a wealthy planter, and soon was engaged by Colonel Curtis as a private tutor. The parents made no objection to their daughter's choice of a husband, but the war came on before the marriage could take place, and so Colonel Curtis and Mr. Harris went away to the war. The Colonel lost all his property during the strife, and at the battle of Columbia, S. C., a grape shot tore his leg into shreds. When the war closed Miss Sallie died of yellow fever, and Mr. Harris became the support and comfort of the maimed sire of his dead sweetheart. The two yet live together in a vine-covered cottage near Atlanta. Mr. Harris is hardly forty years of age, but his snow-white hair tells the sorrow of his life. He is noted for his generosity, his amiability and his tenderness."

The fact is that from the time of his birth until General Sherman swept toward the sea after burning Atlanta, Mr. Harris lived in Eatonton. When he was six years old he could read, and it is said that a stray copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield," met in his juvenile days, did much to develop his taste for good literature. Joel attended Eatonton Academy for a few terms, and at the age of twelve went to work for Colonel Turner, the publisher of a weekly called The Countryman.

It was the boy's own enterprise and ambition which brought this about. It was Joel himself who heard that Colonel Turner was in need of a boy with "willing hands" to learn the printer's trade, and who went unbidden and unendorsed to apply for a job. The publisher and the youngster took a liking to each other on sight, and young Harris was put to work forthwith.

Those were unquestionably among the happiest days of the humorist's life. This is not saying, of course, that his cup of happiness is not brimming over to-day; but those were days of new contentment. The young printer's work was not burdensome; but the happiest fact of all is that his employer, Colonel Turner, had a rich library, in which his youngest workman was free to browse in leisure moments. The acorn of taste for good books which the boy had cultivated at home here developed into an oak; and the soil in which the acorn took root was fertile, and there was ample room for the spread of every growing limb and bough.

At first the lad delved among the Elizabethans. Sir Thomas Browne, too, became one of his favorite authors—nowadays Mr. Harris leans toward Thackeray, Stevenson, Scott, Kipling and James Whitcomb Riley—a good catholic taste. Few boys ever enjoyed a more advantageous course of reading. Gradually the juvenile printer drifted from his books into writing, just as a student one day quits the gallery and starts to paint some work of his own. Colonel Turner responded to the ambition of his protégé most generously. He praised the little works judiciously, and before long young Harris was prompted to doff his anonymity and stand up to be judged by himself. Thereafter he became a regular contributor to The Countryman—which was truly rustic in scope as well as in title—and the name of Harris began to be spoken throughout Georgia.

This pleasant existence was interrupted by the war, which to the editor and his assistant was indeed the fulfilment of an ancient threat. When Sherman left Atlanta to march to the sea, he shaped his course through Eatonton, and before him fled the loyal Southerners. Among the last to leave the town was the proprietor of The Countryman. Young Harris remained behind to look after the property. Little damage was done in Eatonton, but the budding author, finding the state of affairs chaotic, started, when the war was over, to make his fortune elsewhere. He found employment on various newspapers, first in Macon, then in New Orleans, then in Forsyth, and then in Savannah. In Savannah he secured an editorial position on the Morning News, of which W. T. Thompson, the author of "Major Jones's Courtship," and other once popular humorous writings, was then the general manager. In Savannah, the vagrant Eatontonian married Miss La Rose, and there he lived, with ever-increasing success, until 1876, when yellow fever swept through the town. Then he moved to Atlanta and went to work for the Constitution. And here we shall take up the original thread of this article.

In 1880, four years after the beginning of Mr. Harris's connection with the Constitution, the Uncle Remus sketches, which meantime had won much praise throughout the country, were numerous enough to make a book of, and "Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings" was published by the Appletons. The book solidified the author's fame. It had the good fortune to be reprinted in England. Even then, more than twenty years ago, it was reasonable to say that Uncle Remus was one of the foremost characters in American fiction. In 1883, "Nights with Uncle Remus," was published; the following year "Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White"; in 1887, "Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches." Up to date, Harris's books number at least sixteen.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that all the time the successful story-teller kept up his editorial work on the paper to whose fame he was contributing so materially. Indeed, until his retirement from newspaper work, in 1900, his chief title was that of a "hard-working journalist." It was his habit until within recent years to give his mornings and afternoons to the Constitution work, and his evenings to miscellaneous literary work. He was able to maintain this arduous program for so long a time because of his apparently inexhaustible good nature and his simple manner of life; and, moreover, attention to duties at hand soon became second nature in him. In recent years, however, he gave only his mornings to his editorial labors. "His habit," says an Atlanta correspondent, "was to come down to the office at nine o'clock in the morning, get his editorial assignments for the day, and then go home and do his work, sending his copy down early in the afternoon." Such was his spirit of independence that if the editor chanced to be late in coming down to the office he would not waste time in waiting for him, but would pick up his bundle of newspapers and start for home. Nevertheless, he would send in his copy without fail. On making his morning visit to the office Mr. Harris was never out of sorts. His good humor was perennial, and he never failed to impart it to his co-workers. Though it was his lot to write editorials on political topics, he never enjoyed the rancor of partisan politics, and he managed to put into his editorials enough of humor to make the work pleasant to himself as well as to others.

At the same time, the idol of the Constitution staff, it is said, never took a hearty interest in politics; he simply bowed to the fact that as an editorial writer he could hardly eschew politics entirely. But he felt that he owed much to the Constitution for the opportunity it had given him to make his reputation; and he allowed this circumstance to outweigh his personal inclinations until the time came when he found that he would either have to give up his editorial work or neglect his literary contracts. So, finally, on Sept. 6, 1900, he departed from the office of the Constitution for good, taking with him the tearful love of all his associates. As a sort of legacy, he left two sons on the paper, Julian, the managing news editor, and Evelyn, the city editor.

And then, almost at the end of his fifty-second year, the dearest Georgian of them all entered upon an unembarrassed literary career, with every promise of doing more work and better work than ever. But even if this promise should rest unfulfilled—which seems almost out of question—we have with us Uncle Remus and Aunt Minervy Ann, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, creations unsurpassed in originality and in delightfulness.

Mr. Harris's work is done at his home in West End, one of the suburbs of Atlanta, and few visitors are permitted to interrupt him. Not that he is gruff; he is simply retiring. He prefers to be known by his books. They who know him intimately—and they are not many—say that he is remarkably kind and hospitable. We respect his desire for privacy. We will not even knock on the door and beg one glimpse of his private life. With the whole reading public we shall be content to note his boundless cheerfulness and rare enjoyableness as a story-teller.

DR. S. WEIR MITCHELL.

S. WEIR MITCHELL

About sixty years ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, taking dinner one night in Philadelphia with his friend, Dr. John K. Mitchell, was so pleased with one of Dr. Mitchell's boys, by name Silas Weir, then a little more than ten years old, that he gave the boy a copy of his famous ballad on the frigate Constitution.

Some seventeen years later, in 1856, when Silas was a young doctor, with a brand-new degree, he showed Dr. Holmes a book of poems which he hoped to have published. Dr. Holmes advised the young man to put the poems away until he was forty, and then to reconsider his determination to have them published. "The publication of these verses at this time," said the genial but shrewd Autocrat, "will do you no good. They will not help you in your life as a physician, and they cannot stand alone." The soundness of Dr. Holmes's judgment was later proved by the circumstance that the young man blossomed into one of the most distinguished physicians of his time. Dr. Mitchell's volume of poems, "The Hill of Stones," published about four years ago, contains just one of the poems offered to the Boston poet in 1856, namely, "Herndon." As an author, Dr. Mitchell is less celebrated than his friendly counsellor; but as a doctor he is far more celebrated than was Dr. Holmes in his palmiest days.

S. Weir Mitchell, one of the six sons of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, was born in Philadelphia on February 16, 1829. His father was then a leader in his profession. He was one of the first Americans to investigate scientifically "animal magnetism," as hypnotism was called in the early part of the last century; and, moreover, he was a highly valued contributor to the medical periodicals of the day. It is noteworthy that he had a taste for literature. Two of his lyrics, "The Old Song and the New Song" and "Prairie Lea," had a wide popularity in their day.

At the age of fifteen Weir Mitchell entered the University of Pennsylvania. There he spent three years; and afterward he entered Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in which his father was a professor. One of the severest disappointments in the son's life came in 1870, twenty years after graduation, when, notwithstanding the solicitation of influential friends, he failed of election to a professorship in Jefferson College. However, this disappointment, like the one which he met when he consulted Dr. Holmes about his first book of poems, worked eventually to his greater glory.

After graduation from Jefferson College Dr. Mitchell, as we shall call our author henceforth, went to Paris, whence, owing to an attack of smallpox, he was obliged to return in less than two years.

By this time the young doctor had lost sight of his literary star. His ambition was to teach medicine. The first article from his pen appeared in the American Journal of Medical Science. Other articles followed with quick regularity, but to none of these early writings, we believe, does Dr. Mitchell attach much importance. From 1858 until 1862, when he enlisted as an army surgeon, the doctor devoted his spare hours to the study of poisons, particularly snake poisons. Not long after the Civil War, by the way, one of the largest rattlesnakes ever sent to him died of cold. Dr. Mitchell had the skin preserved and tanned, and he sent it to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes with the suggestion that it might make a worthy binding for "Elsie Venner." "I thank you for it," Dr. Holmes wrote back, "especially because it makes an attractive binding, and I know that its bark is better than its bite." It would be interesting to pursue Dr. Mitchell's scientific achievements, but such a pursuit would be too long to agree with the purpose of this sketch.

However, his career as a war surgeon is worth looking at, for it had something to do with his subsequent advent as a writer of fiction. Dr. Mitchell and his associates made a deep study not only of the effects of certain wounds but also of the effects of environment. Much of the curious information thus derived was given to the world through the medical papers. It was undoubtedly the study followed during this period which formed the base of Dr. Mitchell's now universally recognized success as a neurologist. The universality of his fame as a specialist in nervous diseases has two substantial witnesses. One is the oration delivered at Edinburgh University in 1895, when he received the title of Doctor of Laws. In that oration he was spoken of as "the chief ornament to medical science in the new world." The other witness is the story of his visit some years ago to Dr. Charcot, one of the great French authorities on nervous diseases. Dr. Mitchell did not give his name; he merely said that he was from Philadelphia, and that there was something the matter with his nerves.

"Why," said Dr. Charcot, "you should never have come beyond Philadelphia for advice for such an ailment. You have a physician in your own city better qualified to manage your case than I am."

"Indeed," the visitor is said to have remarked; "and who may he be?"

"Dr. S. Weir Mitchell," replied Dr. Charcot; "and as I know him by correspondence I will venture to give you a letter to him. You should consult him upon your return home."

"No, thanks," said the American smiling, "I am Dr. S. Weir Mitchell."

Certainly a handsome compliment for Dr. Mitchell! And certainly a remarkable piece of professional modesty on the part of Dr. Charcot!

Perhaps it is well to say at this point that, in 1896, Harvard University also honored Dr. Mitchell with the title of Doctor of Laws; that he is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the Clinical Society of London, the London Medical Society, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Rome, and a corresponding member of many other foreign medical societies; and that he was once President of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons. In 1888 the University of Bologna conferred on him the title of Doctor of Medicine.

Dr. Mitchell's entrance into romantic literature was made anonymously and, it might be said, accidentally. Soon after the close of the Civil War, the story goes, he and some professional associates one day discussed all sides of the question whether the loss of the limbs involves the loss of the victim's individuality. As a result of that discussion Dr. Mitchell wrote the story of the fictitious case of one George Dedlow, who had suffered the loss of his arms and his legs. The story, which, as they who have read it know, is an intensely interesting complication of romance and science, came to the hands of the Rev. Dr. Furness, one of Dr. Mitchell's friends, who took the liberty of sending it to Edward Everett Hale, in Boston. Dr. Hale, who, at that time, was at the height of his literary power, saw that the story was rare material, and he submitted it forthwith to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. It was promptly accepted, and the first Dr. Mitchell knew of what had happened was when he received a proof of the story, together with a good-sized check and a note complimenting him on the freshness and attractiveness of his article. "The Case of George Dedlow," indeed, was described so realistically that, according to tradition, subscriptions were raised for the poor victim's support and comfort. The newspapers, too, started a discussion of the prodigy, and it was a long time before the public became persuaded that the tale was utter fiction, put together with extraordinary skill.

Dr. Mitchell's first book was "Children's Hours," a collection of fairy tales, illustrated by Dr. John Packard. The book was in no sense a great literary effort; it was intended to serve, and did serve, a charitable purpose. His first novel was "In War Times," published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885. Between that time and the publication of "Hugh Wynne" in 1897, the Philadelphian wrote a number of works, the most notable among which were a few dramatic poems. The poems delighted the critical; they were caviare to the general. Dr. Mitchell is not a poet of the "golden clime" of which Tennyson speaks; he has simply found in poetry the fittest vehicle for the expression of some attractive and stirring ideas. His verse reveals his fine sympathy with the true poets rather than his intimate association with them.

Unqualified success came to the veteran author with the publication in 1897 of "Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker," which will be remembered in years to come as one of the choicest of American novels. The writing of "Hugh Wynne," which was done at Bar Harbor in the summer of 1896, in less than two months, took years of preparation. It is said that he wrote to a woman "for the name and a full description of every article of apparel worn by a lady in America in the years before and about the time" of the Revolution. Moreover: "One will find on the shelves of his library at home," says a casual biographer, "great rows of books consulted in the preparation of the novel, and among them, as samples, will be noticed Keith's 'Provincial Councillors of Pennsylvania,' Watson's 'Annals,' Trumble's 'The Knightly Soldier,' Fiske's 'Critical Period of American History,' 'The True George Washington,' by Ford; Professor McMaster's 'History of the United States,' 'The Cannoneer,' by Buell, and scores of others, some of them very rare." We find it also said that every chapter of importance in the story was written at least twice, and that some chapters were written even three times, before the manuscript was sent to the publisher. Nothing which Dr. Mitchell has written since shows a power equal to the power of "Hugh Wynne." That novel, therefore, must be regarded as his supreme literary effort. "The Adventures of François" proved entertaining and nothing more; its early popularity was an echo of the immense popularity of the Revolutionary story. "Dr. North and His Friends" is not, as many suppose, an autobiography; but it may fairly be said that by means of Dr. North the author relates some of his most remarkable personal impressions and personal experiences.

Dr. Holmes was once a little disturbed, and much amused, at the same time, by a reference to his "medicated writings." The careful reader will note a strong pathological element in most of Dr. Mitchell's works; not enough, however, to warrant describing them as "medicated." The fact is, Dr. Mitchell has made good use of his rare scientific knowledge in the development of many of his characters. One of his intimate friends is reported to have said once that the doctor is constantly studying human characteristics, especially the characteristics of singular persons. "He picks out their brains in a very fine and delicate way," said the friend. "Thus he studies human nature, much in that same synthetical manner in which he dissects a physical malady."

Personally the author of "Hugh Wynne" is described as gentle, cordial, and, in convivial company, very entertaining. It has frequently been said of him that he appears to be what he is,—a scholar and a scientist.

Some years ago, when Dr. Mitchell was a guest in one of the semi-literary clubs in London, he and the circle around him fell into a discussion of problem novels, which finally resolved itself into a discussion of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," then in the heyday of its popularity. Dr. Mitchell took his ground on two points: he expressed admiration of Mr. Hardy as an artist, but utter dislike of the scheme of "Tess." A man who had meantime joined the circle entered quietly and unobtrusively into the conversation, admitting the force of some of Dr. Mitchell's general objections to problem novels, but maintaining the ethical and artistic merits of the plan of Judge Hardy's new book. The newcomer showed such an intimate knowledge of the construction of "Tess" that the American paid more than ordinary attention to him. At length, when the company was dispersing, Dr. Mitchell's host, with an innocent smile, proceeded to make the two debaters formally acquainted with each other.

"This is a friend of mine, Doctor," he said to his guest, "about whose work you know a great deal. Allow me to introduce to you Thomas Hardy, with whom you can hardly find any fault for defending poor Tess."

The acquaintance thus curiously begun has since ripened into a rich friendship.

Dr. Mitchell does most of his literary work at Bar Harbor, in the summer. There is no sign of the end of this pure labor of love; but the work which exists already is sufficient, in itself, to show that a man burdened with the gravest interests of medical science may give profitable and brilliant employment to his imagination.

ROBERT GRANT.

ROBERT GRANT

Robert Grant leads the American satirists. Many writers, unnamed paragraphers and critics of high degree, have pursued him relentlessly; but he will not surrender. Contrariwise, it is more likely that they will yet surrender to him. He has Napoleon's way of turning upon pursuers.

The satirist is not always clearly understood. For some of this misunderstanding the satirist himself is to blame. Mr. Grant, for example, has never yet explained what he meant by saying in "The Art of Living" that a satisfactory life demands an income of ten thousand a year. On the other hand, some of the misunderstanding is due to a lack of humor among his critics. And at the bottom of the misunderstanding is the natural inconsistency which prompted Mr. Aldrich to write in "Marjorie Daw"—"I have known a woman to satirize a man for years, and marry him after all."

An incident which took place not long ago illustrates Judge Grant's sincerity. The statement had been made in a periodical now defunct that "a sufficiency of money has made things pretty pleasant for our literary philosopher." Although averse, unlike many professional writers, to taking advantage of opportunities for controversy, the Judge made this reply to the statement: "It is true that for some years I have had a comfortable income; but if I have been able to command the advantages of modern life at the rate of $10,000 a year, it is because I have earned the money by the sweat of my brow through literary and legal work, and not because my 'judicial seat' is 'padded' with inherited stocks and bonds.... It may interest those who have convinced themselves that my philosophy is founded on a patrimony, to know that from the time I left the Law School in 1879 the yearly income which I have received from vested property has been so small as barely to pay for the life insurance which I carry, and that I have acquired the money which I spend or save by my own exertions. It is true that I was brought up in comfort and given every opportunity to follow my tastes, but this is all I owe to family income."

The incident is worth recalling for the light which it throws on the novelist's economical position. The man who is competent to make ten thousand a year is welcome to his enjoyment of it.

Robert Grant first earned some celebrity as a writer while at Harvard, which he entered after his graduation from the Boston Latin School in 1869, when he was seventeen years old. His literary career began with his contributions to the college papers, notably The Lampoon. That his literary skill was recognized at Harvard is proved by his election to the office of class poet at graduation, in 1873. That summer, while abroad, he seems to have determined upon following his first taste, to use his own expression; for at the end of the summer he went back to Harvard for a three years' course in English and foreign literature, upon the completion of which he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Why he decided to choose another profession has never been divulged, but, anyhow, at the end of the summer of 1876, he entered the Harvard Law School. Three years afterward he was graduated from it, and forthwith he became a member of the Bar and an active practitioner.

Mr. Grant left Harvard with a budding reputation. In company with Mr. F. J. Stimson ("J. S. of Dale"), Barrett Wendell (now professor of English at Harvard), F. G. Attwood, whose untimely death has bereft our literature of one of its happiest decorators, and Mr. John T. Wheelwright, now a lawyer in Boston, he had polished The Lampoon considerably. Perhaps his most popular work at this time was "The Little Tin Gods on Wheels; or, Society in our Modern Athens," a burlesque after the Greek manner, which appeared in The Lampoon, with illustrations by Attwood. In fact, it was to be found in a book published by Sever, together with the young satirist's other promising works, "The Wall Flowers," "The Chaperons," and "Oxygen, a Mt. Desert Pastoral," squibs dealing with the foibles of fashionable society.

Thus favorably introduced to the reading public, he lost no time in striking the iron while it was hot, and in 1880 gave out his first novel, "The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl," which, by reason of its remarkable exposition of the character of the leading lady, as she may be called, and its popular attractiveness, won immediate success at home and abroad. Three years later his second book, "The Knave of Hearts," the autobiography of a ruthless young man, was published; and the same year appeared in The Century the articles which make up "An Average Man," and a satire on Wall Street entitled "The Lambs, a Tragedy." In 1883, too, it may be mentioned, Mr. Grant read at the Phi Beta Kappa reunion at Harvard a poem called "Yankee Doodle." In 1885 "A Romantic Young Lady," another skit on fashionable life, made its appearance; and that year he also served as the poet of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Boston Latin School.

The following year, 1886, he finished what, up to that time, was by far his most serious work, "Face to Face," which was published anonymously. In it Anglomania and the labor problem are touched on boldly and brilliantly, and even to-day the points of the book are fresh and sparkling. Later came "The Reflections of a Philosopher," "The Opinions of a Married Man," "Searchlight Letters," "The Art of Living," and, last of all, "Unleavened Bread." "He says," once remarked a man, "what you have thought and wanted to say yourself"; and a better compliment could hardly be paid his philosophy.

A writer who went to see Judge Grant some years ago said: "He has cultivated to a rare degree the faculty which is of the utmost importance to every literary man, namely, that of concentration. The greater part of his writing is done during the intervals of business in the morning hours at his office. There, the casual visitor is almost certain to find him, seated at his desk, with his manuscript spread out before him. He will drop his pen, upon the instant, to consider some point of legal technique, with which imagination has nothing whatever to do, listen attentively, take notes or give advice, as though this were the sole object of his existence; then, when the interruption ceases, he will turn back to his unwritten page, finishing that and another too, it may be, before the morning goes, if he is in the vein. This power of leaving off and beginning again quickly was not easily acquired. It is the result of long training in years of practical experience. But, like every true artist, Mr. Grant really carries his work with him wherever he goes. He is always recording and storing up impressions, taking mental notes, or working out details of construction, even when these matters seem to be the farthest from his thoughts; and he is accustomed to say that the actual writing of a story troubles him very little since, with him, when writing begins, the most difficult part of the task is already accomplished. But, in spite of his fluent pen, he has learned to look at his work objectively, and he is extremely self-critical, having destroyed more than once a tale half told, from conviction that it failed to do him justice."

In 1882 Mayor Green of Boston selected Mr. Grant as his private secretary, and in 1888 Mayor O'Brien of Boston appointed him a member of the board of water commissioners. This latter post he held until a few years ago, when he was appointed a Judge in the Probate Court of Suffolk County, sitting in Boston. There, almost every day, he may be seen by anyone visiting Boston, a medium-sized, delicate-looking man, with shrewd features, an eye sharp as a detective's, a somewhat brisk manner, and a faint but pleasant voice, to which the most learned counsel lend eager ears. Since his appointment to the Bench he has limited his literary activity to two hours a day, which short but productive period he has been wont to spend generally at the Athenæum Library on Beacon Street, a stone's throw from the Court House.

Judge Grant is very happy in his children, and this circumstance may account for his delightful books for boys, "Jack Hall" and "Jack in the Bush." He is a keen though perhaps not enthusiastic sportsman. Every few years he and his wife, who was Miss Galt, the eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Tillock Galt, the Canadian statesman, go bicycling in Europe.

This excursive disposition does not narrow his enjoyment of what is best in town life. It has been said of him: "He is not only an admirable talker with a nimble wit, apt at repartee, but he is also a genial sympathetic listener, thus combining very happily the qualities which make a man hail-fellow-well met wherever he goes; and no one meeting Mr. Grant for the first time can fail to recognize and delight in that quick sense of humor which is so characteristic of his writing."

A few years ago he was interviewed regarding his likes and dislikes. He said that his favorite prose authors were Thackeray and Balzac, his favorite poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, his favorite book, "Vanity Fair," his favorite play, "Hamlet," his favorite heroines in fiction, Becky Sharp and Eugénie Grandet, his favorite heroes in fiction, Santa Claus and Brer Rabbit; and he admires truth most in men and loving sympathy in women.

His strength as a writer lies in an unsurpassed ability to detect and delineate shams, and this ability shines brilliantly in the character of Selma White, the heroine of "Unleavened Bread." The book is a protest against superficiality; the character of Selma White is a monument of vanity. We have all met Selmas, rampant women—there are men like them, of course—who flatter themselves that they are born to grace every resting-place and brush aside difficulties that would have staggered Napoleon or Catherine de Medici. The author has contradicted the opinion that Selma is a shaft aimed at women's clubs. "It is simply that modern women's clubs are the best medium for that kind of women," he says "that I depicted Selma as a prime mover in some of them. But she exists outside of women's clubs probably more plentifully than in them."

It has been said that Judge Grant is timid about forcing his way into public attention. The reply quoted from early in this article was an exception to an apparently firmly established rule. At the time when comment on his ten-thousand-a-year proposition was severest Judge Grant wrote to a friend for advice, and he was very easily persuaded to give no heed to his critics. At the same time, if what he had thought of saying would have blown the fog away, it would have been better for him then to have settled the question decisively. But, he was content for the nonce to have his retiring disposition approved; and a philosopher of this type rather invites than forbids attack. But, after all, even his harshest critics praise his rare skill in the exposition of character, his remarkable fertility of wit, and his complete mastery of the technique of literature. Nor is it to be gainsaid that his career has illustrated the wisdom of his lines in "The Lambs":

Success is Labor's prize
Work is the mother of fame.
And who on a boom shall rise
To the height of an honest name?
The bee by industry reapeth
The stores which enrich the hives.
All that is thrifty creepeth,
For toil is the law of lives,
And he who reaps without sowing,
A bitter harvest reaps;
The law of gradual growing
Is the law that never sleeps.

F. MARION CRAWFORD.

F. MARION CRAWFORD

Since 1893, when he made his first tour through the country as a lecturer, F. Marion Crawford has become a somewhat familiar figure to many Americans, who have noted his athletic form, his handsome face, his melodious voice, his polished deportment. He is easily the best known of the American authors who make their homes abroad.

In Major Pond's "Reminiscences," by the way, they who have heard Mr. Crawford read from his novels or recite his description of Pope Leo XIII, will find a very interesting account of the author's experiences during his American tours.

Mr. Crawford is a cosmopolite of the first rank. He was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, August 2, 1854. His father was Thomas Crawford, the famous sculptor, who, born in the west of Ireland and reared in America, had, some years before, been sent to Rome to master his profession. He had finished studying with the great Thorwaldsen, and had made a reputation of his own, when he met and married Miss Louisa Ward, who was visiting Rome with Dr. Samuel G. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe. Marion was the youngest of four children. One of his sisters, Mrs. Fraser, has made no small name for herself as a writer.

At the age of two, Marion was sent to live for awhile with kinsfolk in Bordentown, N. J. "Among the earliest things that I remember," he said once to an interviewer, "is my great delight in watching the coming and going of the trains as they shot across the farm near the old house."

His father died in 1857, and then Marion was taken back to Italy, where he spent his early days.

"Most of my boyhood," he said, to an interviewer, when he was in this country on his first lecture tour, "was spent under the direction of a French governess. Not only did I learn her language from her, but all of my studies, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, were taught me in French, and I learned to write it with great readiness, as a mere boy, because it was the language of my daily tasks. The consequence is that to this day I write French with the ease of English. There have been times when I know that I have lost some of my facility in speaking French through long absence from the country, but the acquirement of writing is always with me, which shows the value of early impressions in that direction."

When twelve years old Marion was sent to St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., where he remained for two years. Readers familiar with his portraits will remember that in most of them he is represented as smoking. This inveterate habit he acquired during his first year's residence at St. Paul's.

The age of fifteen found the migrant youth back in Rome again, where he took up the study of Greek and mathematics. Later he studied with a private tutor at Hatfield Broadoak, in Essex, England, and from this school he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he passed four terms. There he perfected himself in German, Swedish and Spanish. He found German of good use when, later, he studied at Karlsruhe and at Heidelberg. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Rome to study at the University of Rome. There one of the professors interested him in Buddhism and the other Oriental mysteries. This professor, who recognized the young pupil's aptitude in languages, advised him to go to India and study Sanscrit, and then returning, he could readily obtain a professorship. The advice appealed to young Crawford, and he borrowed a hundred pounds and sailed for Bombay. There he occasionally wrote articles for one of the newspapers, but his employment was uncertain, and two pounds represented all his worldly possessions when the editor of the Bombay Gazette informed him that the editor of the Allahabad Indian Herald was in need of a "good man." Would he take the position? "Would a duck swim?" said Mr. Crawford; and off he went to Allahabad, a thousand miles away. There he learned that the "good man" was supposed to fill the posts of reporter, managing editor and editorial writer, with now and then a turn at type-setting. Thus none of the sixteen hours of the working day would be wasted. But Mr. Crawford couldn't afford to grumble. Instead he buckled down to what he describes as the hardest eighteen months' work of his life.

In 1880, at the age of twenty-six, with no valuable possessions except his experience, he returned to Rome, and thence, early in 1881, he set out for America. The old steamship in which he took passage broke down in mid-ocean, and Mr. Crawford's great physical strength and nervous energy were in constant demand. As the only cabin passenger on board, he had the honor of alternating on deck with the captain and the mates. At Bermuda, where the ship put in for repairs, he narrowly escaped drowning. Finally, at the end of two months, the ship reached New York. In this country he made his home at times with his uncle, Samuel Ward, the Horace of "Dr. Claudius," and at times with his aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. He had not been long in the country before he entered Harvard College, where he took a special course in Sanscrit under Prof. Charles Lanman.