laid their offerings alike on Northern and Southern graves. When all is
said, the great Nation has but one heart.




WRITERS AND TALKERS

AS a class, literary men do not shine in conversation. The scintillating
and playful essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the most genial
and entertaining of companions, turns out to be a shy and untalkable
individual, who chills you with his reticence when you chance to
meet him. The poet whose fascinating volume you always drop into your
gripsack on your summer vacation--the poet whom you have so long desired
to know personally--is a moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman, who
fails to catch your name on introduction, and seems the avatar of the
commonplace. The witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy had
painted as a literary cannibal with a morbid appetite for tender young
poets--the writer of those caustic and scholarly reviews which you never
neglect to read--destroys the un-lifelike portrait you had drawn by
appearing before you as a personage of slender limb and deprecating
glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when
you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl
Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with
epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a
short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle
at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal
fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. Fresh from
witnessing his delightful comedy of manners, you meet him face to face
only to discover that his own manners are anything but delightful.