only that he might catch a fever with a chill addition if he lay
carelessly in some miasmatic swamp on some hunting expedition, or that,
in time of cholera, he might have, like other men, to struggle with the
enemy. But he tossed off most things lightly, and had that vitality
which is of heredity, not built up with a single generation, though
sometimes lost in one. Forest and farm-bred, college-bred,
city-fostered and broadened and hardened. A man of the world, with
experiences, and in his quality, no doubt, the logical, inevitable
result of such experiences--one with a conscience flexile and seeking,
but hard as rock when once satisfied. One who never, intentionally,
injured a human being, save for equity's sake. One who, of course,
wandered in looking for what was, to him, the right, but who, having
once determined, was ever steadfast. A man who had seen and known and
fed and felt and risked, but who seemed to me always as if his religion
were: "What shall I do? Nature says so-and-so, and the Power beyond
rules nature." Laws of organization for political purposes, begun
before Romulus and Remus, and varied by the dale-grouped Angles or the
Northmen's Thing, did not seem to much impress him. He recognized
their utility, wanted to improve them, made that his work, and
eventually observed most of them. This, it seemed to me, was his
honest make-up--a Berseker, a bare-sark descendant of the Vikings, in a
dress-coat. He had passions, and gratified them sometimes. He had
ambitions, and worked for them. He had a conscience, and was guided by
it.

It was always interesting to me to look at him in youthful fray, more
so, years afterward, in club or in convention, or anywhere, and try to
imagine him the country small boy. Keen, hard, alert in all the ways
of a great city, it was difficult to conceive him in his early youth,
well as I knew it; difficult to reflect that his dreams at night were