If I may be permitted to indulge in the recital of a personal experience, there is one incident I recall which will bring out this trait in a marked manner.  Once on a visit to him I accompanied him to the office of his paper.  While waiting for him to discharge certain duties there, and employing myself in looking over the exchanges, I chanced to light upon a leading article on the editorial page of one of the most prominent of the New York dailies.  It was devoted to the consideration of some recent utterances of a noted orator who, after the actual mission of his life had been accomplished, was employing the decline of it in the exploitation of every political and economic vagary which it had entered into the addled brains of men to evolve.  The article struck me as one of the most brilliant and entertaining of its kind I had ever read; it was not long indeed before it appeared that the same view of it was taken by many others throughout the country.  The peculiar wit of the comment, the keenness of the satire made so much of an impression upon me that I called Warner away from his work to look at it.  At my request he hastily glanced over it, but somewhat to my chagrin failed to evince any enthusiasm about it.  On our way home I again spoke of it and was a good deal nettled at the indifference towards it which he manifested.  It seemed to imply that my critical judgment was of little value; and however true might be his conclusion on that point, one does not enjoy having the fact thrust too forcibly upon the attention in the familiarity of conversation.  Resenting therefore the tone he had assumed, I took occasion not only to reiterate my previously expressed opinion somewhat more aggressively, but also went on to insinuate that he was himself distinctly lacking in any real appreciation of what was excellent.  He bore with me patiently for a while.  “Well, sonny,” he said at last, “since you seem to take the matter so much to heart, I will tell you in confidence that I wrote the piece myself.”  I found that this was not only true in the case just specified, but that while engaged in preparing articles for his own paper he occasionally prepared them for other journals.  No one besides himself and those immediately concerned, ever knew anything about the matter.  He never asserted any right to these pieces, he never sought to collect them, though some of them exhibited his happiest vein of humor.  Unclaimed, unidentified, they are swept into that wallet of oblivion in which time stows the best as well as the worst of newspaper production.

The next volume of Warner’s writings that made its appearance was entitled “Saunterings.”  It was the first and, though good of its kind, was by no means the best of a class of productions in which he was to exhibit signal excellence.  It will be observed that of the various works comprised in this collective edition, no small number consist of what by a wide extension of the phrase may be termed books of travel.  There are two or three which fall strictly under that designation.  Most of them, however, can be more properly called records of personal experience and adventure in different places and regions, with the comments on life and character to which they gave rise.