e didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously
human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of
corresponding, "The German March Through Brussels," was probably written
almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks, he was the
fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no
facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any
facility that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy
and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every
phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of,
the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases, paragraphs,
pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again. He worked
upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile
turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description
from which there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair
of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a
turning. Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one
those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each
omission he would ask himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not,
he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with
the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean
labor there remained for the reader one of those swiftly flashed,
ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and
romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned.

But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of holiday, R. H. D.
emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one hundred
and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about every
writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He
never was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he
has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that under the
circumstances they are the very best that he can do. Anyway, they can
stand in their present order until--after lunch.

A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had
denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never seen
him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect for his
own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of the best
Havana tobacco. At a time of his own delib