worked side by side with him, will think but little now of his success as journalist and author.  The people who may have tried, as they read his almost aggressively brilliant articles, to divine something of the personality behind them, can scarcely have contrived to picture him accurately.  They will not imagine the silent, undemonstrative person, invariably kind and ready unasked to do a colleague’s work in addition to his own, who dwells in the memory of the friends of Mr Steevens.  They will not understand how entirely natural it seemed to these friends that when the long day’s work was ended in Ladysmith he should have gone habitually, until this illness struck him down, to labour among the sick and wounded for their amusement, and in order to give them the courage which is as necessary to the soldier facing disease as it is to his colleague who has to storm a difficult position.  Those who loved him will presently find some consolation in considering the greatness of his achievement, but nothing that can now be said will mitigate their grief at his untimely loss.”

Another writer says:—­

“What Mr Kipling has done for fiction Mr Steevens did for fact.  He was a priest of the Imperialist idea, and the glory of the Empire was ever uppermost in his writings.  That alone would not have brought him the position he held, for it was part of the age he lived in.  But he was endowed with a curious faculty, an extraordinary gift for recording his impressions.  In a scientific age his style may be described as cinematographic.  He was able to put vividly before his readers, in a series of smooth-running little pictures, events exactly as he saw them with his own intense eyes.  It has been said that on occasion his work contained passages a purist would not have passed.  But Mr Steevens wrote for the people, and he knew it.  Deliberately and by consummate skill he wrote in the words of his average reader; and had he desired to offer his work for the consideration of a more select class, there is little doubt that he would have displayed the same felicity.  His mission was not of that order.  He set himself the more difficult task of entertaining the many; and the same thoroughness which made him captain of the school, Balliol scholar, and the best note-writer on the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ in its brightest days, taught him, aided by natural gifts, to write ’With Kitchener to Khartum’ and his marvellous impressions of travel.”

* * * * *

This record must close.  Innumerable have been the tributes to this brave youth’s power for capturing the human heart and the human mind.  The statesman and the working man—­one of these has written very curtly and simply, “He served us best of all”—­each has felt something of the intimate spirit of his work.

Lord Roberts cabled from Capetown in the following words:—­

     “Deeply regret death of your talented correspondent, Steevens. 
     ROBERTS.”