I shall never forget that moment.  It was very still, and in the college garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls deliciously admiring things.  It was a cruel instant for me.  I, too, in my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the prize, but without telling him.  Must I confess it?  I had never dared mention the subject for fear he, too, would compete.  I knew that if he did he was sure to win.  O petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now!

“Rude old Buzzard,” he said in his bantering way, “you haven’t congratulated!”

I pulled myself together.

“Brindle,” I said—­I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname sounds now—­“you took my breath away.  Dear lad, I’m overjoyed.”

It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon.  I never saw him again.  Never even heard him read the brilliant poem “Sunset from the Mons Veneris” that was the beginning of his career, for the week before commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health.  I never came back to New York; and he remained there.  But I followed his career with the closest attention.  Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook.  And almost every week for twenty years he wrote to me—­those long, radiant letters, so full of verve and elan and ringing, ruthless wit.  There was always something very Gallic about his saltiness.  “Oh, to be born a Frenchman!” he writes.  “Why wasn’t I born a Frenchman instead of a dour, dingy Scotsman?  Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre!  Stead of which I have the mess of pottage—­stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage” (see p. 189).

He had his sombre moods, too.  It was characteristic of him, when in a pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of Arbroath.  “Oh, to have been born a Norseman!” he wrote once.  “Oh, for the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache of Ibsen!  That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy.  Tragedy springs from it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung.  I will never be a tragedian.  Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!”

All the world knows how he died....

PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK

(In six volumes)

The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length finished.  After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by those small bickerings over minutiae so dear to all scrupulous writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments on the functions of the historian.

There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has been singularly neglected by modern historians.  My old friend, Professor Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is particularly open to criticism on this ground.  I cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of preliminary calm—­what Hobbes calls “the unprejudicated mind.”  But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe.  Sismondi, I think, has observed this.